For the past four years I’ve been breaking every rule of appropriate, normal behaviour. I’ve poked, probed, inserted, stabbed and cut people in their most intimate body parts. I’ve examined dissected bodies and riffled through a bucket of human hearts. I’ve been baptised in every bodily fluid known; dodged spurting blood, spilt oozing pus and been caught out by the force of amniotic fluid erupting from a caesarean section.

Studying medicine at the age of 47, I realised in my first semester that this was not going to be like my previous experiences. Feelings of fear and ineptitude have been my almost constant companions as I was thrown into challenging situations.

At first just asking a patient about her depression seemed paralysingly inappropriate. Who was I to stumble into the private world of a stranger, when I would normally simply smile and mind my own business as we passed in the street?

She kindly tolerated my nervous questioning, becoming the first of many of my........

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