day zero, nearly

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life

Well, at least as much as every new day is anyway. Today I drove up the M6 to move into hospital accommodation outside of a hospital near Manchester. I have a small and uninspiring room with a shared kitchen and bathroom, all of which are decorated mostly with police warnings about the high incidence of crime in the area. It’s not quite luxurious, but it is cheap, clean, comfortable and convenient for now.

Tomorrow I turn up to my hospital for a final few days of lectures and hanging around on the ward to prepare me for Wednesday 5^th August, my first proper day as a junior doctor. I’m glad of this apparently gradual introduction to actual work. It seems quite manageable, but despite this I can’t quite shake a fairly powerful sense of dread. Part of this is the feeling I get daily when reading about Jeremy Hunt’s nefarious schemes and the government’s absolute refusal to address the concerns of many, but I’m sure I’ll rant about all of that it here at some point. 

I’m suspicious of change at the best of times so a large part of my dread is from a bit of underlying stress in starting a new job in a new city. Most immediately unsettling however is the fact that the annual new doctor changeover day “Black Wednesday” is associated with a 6% increase in patient mortality. We are fairly closely supervised by seniors to begin with so things aren't supposed to go far wrong, but even so when new doctors joke about trying not to get ill in August, we're actually deadly serious.

But despite all of this I really am looking forward to the challenge, dread and all. I chose medicine for a reason and it’s taken an inefficient length of education to get here so I am very eager to finally do some (hopefully meaningful and useful) work contribute a little to something important.

Helping people, doing good, saving lives, changing the world, etc etc etc. It’s not easy being a hero you know. (Really I’m just looking forward to my first proper pay packet.)