Greetings from Geraldine

As a further 11th of the Newnham medics, I'd like to ask you to picture the moment that myself and my 10 fellow masochists first announced that we were going to be doctors; some of us as young girls wearing an oversized white coat and a plastic stethoscope round our necks, but some as supposedly informed teenagers (though quite possibly equally as likely to be wearing the plastic stethoscope). At this moment, we proudly proclaimed to friends, teachers or parents, 'I am going to be a doctor, because I am going to help people and cure diseases', to which the reply often was, 'That's a lot of work you know.'

Of course, we nodded along and declared that we didn't mind, and that we would just work really, really hard and become the best doctors ever, saving people with our life-giving hands and encyclopaedic knowledge of medicine.

A similar thing happened when we decided to study in Cambridge: more mentions of how much work there would be, met with assurances that we wouldn't mind at all.

And now we are finally here, and suddenly all that hard work we promised to do seems scarily real and difficult, we are haunted by the little facts that we haven't learnt that may some day cost a patient their life, and the people we were presented with as our very first patients are already dead.

I think that more than a few people sat in the lecture theatre at 9 o' clock on a Monday morning are wondering why, years and years ago, when reaching into the toy box, they couldn't have picked up a paintbrush or a book, instead of that fateful plastic stethoscope.
But then, this is just the beginning...