The Apron and Napoleon's Hat

9781483523392

1

I never really wanted to be a Doctor. In fact my Vocational Eureka moment did not strike me until the age of 32. It was not until that splendidly unexpected moment that I realized my years of practicing Medicine were merely a stop-gap measure between my uninspired youth and a future career that I now have absolutely no doubt I should have chosen from the beginning. Up until that point I was never consciously aware that I had made the wrong choice. I was good at my job, exceptionally so in certain specialties, and even enjoyed it occasionally. But my subconscious knew it all along. This manifested itself in the sort of fragmented and highly unorthodox career path in Medicine that only the hopelessly unambitious could take.

A waste of time? Absolutely not. Those 14 years have provided me with some of the most unforgettable, rewarding, terrifying, exciting and boring moments of my life.

Does anyone really know what they want to do for the rest of their lives at the age of 16? Perhaps, but certainly not me. I had absolutely no idea whatsoever. An Architect maybe? A Lawyer? A Doctor? Of course it had to be a lucrative job, and I had thought about all three on various occasions, but those few seconds of inspiration passed each time without leading to any sort of motivation or ambition. I’m sure most of the more academically oriented students in my year had some idea, but myself and most of my circle of friends did not.

And I had 10 minutes to make a decision.

I was in my Year 12 Mathematics 1S class when I was handed the form. It was the form on which we had to list our top 5 University Course preferences for the following year, and we had 10 minutes to think about it. We were given absolutely no warning whatsoever. We were not told the week before In 1 weeks’ time you will have to make the most important decision of your life, so start thinking about it. The school I attended was more concerned with sporting prowess and immaculate grooming of the grounds than academic merit. A large percentage of the students in my year were completely stupid, but had family businesses to fall back on, or would pursue careers as real estate agents. My brother was always going to take over the running of our family farm, so I needed to find an alternative. The school did not even have a Career Guidance Counsellor.

Those students who did have a specific career in mind would choose their final year subjects carefully. Those considering Medicine usually took the classic subjects of Mathematics 1&2, Chemistry, Physics and English. I chose Math’s 1S, Geography, Chemistry, English and Medieval History. Useful if I wanted to be an expert on the science and geography behind beach erosion in 12th Century Cornwall, but not for much else. I was good at those subjects, hence I chose them.

We used to think the S in Mathematics 1S stood for stupid because it was the subject that you took if you were not good enough at Math’s to take the much more detailed double subjects of Mathematics 1 and 2. Although I realized the importance of the subject, I found it almost impossibly dull so I always chose to sit at the back of my classroom with my equally bored friend so we would have the option of talking and paying very little attention to the tasks at hand. We were intelligent enough to pass the various topics in the subject without too much difficulty, so once we thought we had mastered a particular theory or equation we would talk, or stab each other with lead pencils and compasses, the scars of which I bear to this day.

But the current topic of Probabilities had the both of us completely baffled. Like Mathematics itself, you either got it or you didn’t. We had no time for talking or stabbing or farting. It was nearing the final exams and the both of us were conscientious enough to realise that we had to master this particular mathematical theory if we were to have a chance of achieving a respectable final mark, which we both knew we were capable of if we put our minds to work.

What is the probability of occurrence of an even number in a single throw of dice, when the dice is biased so that an even number is twice as likely to occur as an odd number?

No fucking idea.

What is the probability that I will fail the test on this crappy subject tomorrow?

At least 50 percent.

I seriously considered cheating. I had cheated once before in a similar moment of academic desperation. It was during Year 8, my first year of secondary school, and the subject was Latin, which was a subject I considered to be about as useful as a cat flap in an elephant house. The only other subject that came close to Latin in terms of irrelevance to me was Divinity, to which I gave an equal lack of effort. Ironically one of the few professions in which Latin might hold some relevance today other than for historical scholars, is Medicine. After one entire year of exposure to the subject, all I remember now is Mons Vesuvius est eruptus.

I had neglected the subject throughout the year to such an extent that I arrived at the final exam woefully underprepared. My equally inept friend decided to use the time-honoured method of writing key phrases and vocabulary on his thigh just above the lower hemline of his shorts. I had a much better idea. I crammed as much of the subject as I possibly could in miniscule writing on an A4 sized piece of paper, carefully arranged so that I could retrieve relevant information with nothing more than a quick glance. It took several hours, and I probably learned enough to pass the exam just from going through the whole laborious process. But I was not going to let the effort go to waste. At exam time, as soon as I sat down I quickly, and as I thought at the time, discreetly, took the cheat sheet from my school bag and placed it under my exam paper. I was suddenly struck with paranoia. Had I followed my friends lead I could have looked at my thigh without having to divert my gaze from the exam page and proceeded on my merry way without raising any suspicion. However I now realized that every time I wanted to answer a question, I would have to lift the exam paper up to search for the answer on my sheet, and any observant teacher would soon suspect me. I stared at the exam paper, not knowing the answer to the first question but unable to bring myself to lift my paper in order to find it on my cheat sheet. I sat there for at least 5 minutes before somewhat less discreetly deciding to remove the cheat sheet and hide under my bum on the seat of the chair. Of course it made what seemed to me like a deafening crunch of paper during the process. My teacher finally relieved me of my dilemma when he calmly walked up and pulled the damned sheet out from under my bum without saying a word. He was much more observant than I had given him credit for. He calmly told me to go and get a Saturday Detention and that I would be receiving an E minus as my final grade. The Saturday detention I didn’t mind, but for a 3 A’s, 4 B’s and a C type of student the E minus was humiliating.

My school had a hierarchy of punishment;

1. Friday detention – That meant staying back at school for 2 hours on a Friday afternoon after all the other students had gone home, and having to undertake silent supervised study. On one occasion I got another Friday for talking during a Friday.

2. Gating – this was for Boarding House Students such as myself, and meant not being allowed out of the boarding house on the weekend.

3. Saturday detention – That meant having to come into school on a Saturday for 6 hours of silent supervised study.

4. The cane.

5.Suspension.

6. Expulsion.

As I was the sort of person who always got caught whenever I did something wrong, I received all punishments on multiple occasions except expulsion, and I was lucky to have avoided that.The only other time I semi cheated was in year 10 when our Science teacher stupidly decided that he trusted his students so much that we could mark the test paper of the student sitting next to us and he would trust our results. Of course my fellow student and I decided to award ourselves an A plus. Our more canny fellow students decided that in order to avoid arousing suspicion they would award each other A minuses at best, mostly B’s. So our greed not only aroused suspicion, it broke the trust from our teacher and he rewarded us with Friday detentions.

Although I received multiple Fridays, this was the most memorable as that week was the all-time record for the number of Fridays given to students. Every Friday morning School muster was held whereby all the students from year 8 to year 12 would gather in the great hall for an address by our Bastard Headmaster. He was not particularly happy that this record had been broken, and he proceeded to list every single one of the reasons provided by teachers for handing out their detentions. There were approximately 30, all mundane except for one – swearing, talking in class, fighting, spitting, answering back, truancy etc., and then finally perverting the course of justice. That was myself and my partner in crime and I was so proud.

The only other Saturday I got was for spitting from a balcony, aiming specifically for a teacher I despised, having been spurred on by a friend of mine. This teacher had given me a Friday a few weeks before for swearing. The timing was perfect. He looked up just as the spittle was in mid-air. I never thought it would come close, but it hit him on the forehead. When I attempted a hasty retreat he chased me and I gave in when I was cornered at the end of a corridor.

I was gated and caned many times. In fact I received both punishments at once after being caught smoking in the Boarding House 3 times in one day, a record I’m fairly certain still stands to this day. For some reason our School was reasonably tolerant of smokers, particularly as some other Private Schools in the city would expel you if they found you in possession of a box of matches. But it was very rare to get caught. We had secret rooms in the old outbuildings and huge grounds with an almost infinite number of hiding spots so that capture was almost impossible. So my effort prompted some action from the Housemaster of the Boarding House. The following morning at House Muster he asked all the smokers to meet him in his office, promising that we would not be punished, except for me of course, but that the issue needs to be further discussed, and I trust all smokers to be honest enough to admit to their problem and attend. He was a fair and likeable man, so all the smokers except for two turned up to his office as asked. He quite reasonably asked us to take him to all the smoking areas we used and for all of us to pick up every discarded cigarette butt that we could find. At the first and most popular location we took him to we found the two dishonest ones happily puffing away. They too were gated and caned for smoking and dishonesty.

I was also suspended twice and very nearly expelled, as I will explain soon. In fact my whole family was a glutton for punishment, except my elder sister who was probably the naughtiest but was one of those who never got caught. My twin sister was suspended for missing dancing classes and my brother was suspended for getting caught smoking by one of the teachers in the city centre on a Saturday whilst he was supposed to be gated.

So I wisely decided not to cheat on my Probabilities test and miraculously passed.

2

Now it was decision time. My friend made the decision for me.

Why don’t you put down Medicine first?

Why

Cos you’ll probably get in if you try and you can make shit loads of money

OK.

My choices of preferences were:

1. Medicine.

2. Arts, with a view towards this getting me into Law School.

3. Architecture.

4. Physiotherapy.

5. Journalism.

So there it was. I handed back the form. I had chosen my Career path. Within 10 minutes I had chosen my career path, my future and my life. Now I had to have a little think about it and try and justify my decision to myself. Why the fuck I chose physiotherapy and Journalism I don’t know, but maybe my decision on Architecture came from my misguided belief that I had an artistic streak.

The pros for medicine were as follows.

I remembered that my parents had a photograph of me taken when I was about three, wearing a white surgical coat with a fake stethoscope around my neck and sporting fake horn rimmed spectacles, a doctor’s bag and something that looked like a chef’s hat on my head. I looked kind of angry but I guess I must have told them I wanted to be a Doctor.

I was very good at the board game Operation.

I loved inspecting the Galahs that myself and my brother had shot on the farm in order to determine what the fatal injury might have been, even amateurishly dissecting them to inspect the damage to vital organs.

I was a semi-hypochondriac. I used to suffer frequent nose-bleeds as a child and our local doctor was at a loss to find a cause. I relished being excused from school so my concerned mother could take me to attend an appointment with the local General Practitioner whose practice was 30 miles away, and who would stick stainless steel forceps and nasoscopes up my nostrils, take blood samples, check my blood pressure and eventually provide an air of genuine bewilderment and finally resignation as to the pathology behind my ailment. He called it Chronic Inflammation of the Nasal Passages. How exotic. I was so proud. My mother thought it was leukaemia, but it was actually caused by frequent nose picking and I was never going to reveal my secret.

I used to want glasses. My neighbour gave me her pair without the lenses when she required new ones and I would proudly place them on and admire myself in the mirror.

I used to want Braces or a retainer. I would uncurl a paperclip and try and mould it to the shape of my teeth and then smile at myself in the mirror, sometimes with my glasses on as well.

When my god-father broke his wrist, I asked if he could give me the plaster cast once it had been removed. I walked around the house for several days pretending to have suffered a broken arm.

The cons for medicine were as follows.

I did have an artistic side as well, hence my decision to add Architecture to my preference list, although it was my brother who had the most natural talent. Every year our Primary School held an event called The Flower Show whereby pupils would submit carefully arranged posies of flowers, both from the garden and the wild, and various other handicrafts and hand knitted items of clothing. I won the event for two years in succession. My mother was extremely proud, probably because she most likely did most of the work in order to ensure my victory. I’m sure dad probably thought I was gay.

I would have to work my balls off in order to achieve the desired final grades and I despised studying.

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