Bedside Stories: Confessons of a Junior Doctor

Michael Foxton

Guardian Books, 2003, £7.99, 164 pages

ISBN 1 843 54032 0

Rating: ****

Every junior doctor has his or her own collection of hilarious, dark, and tragic anecdotes, and every doctor despairs about ward politics, working hours, and other stresses of the NHS. Under his pseudonym, Michael Foxton has entertained and enlightened with his take on this in his column in the Guardian, which charted his first three or so years as a junior doctor. This has now been brought together in Bedside Stories: Confessions of a Junior Doctor.

The book begins with Foxton's first day as a medical house officer in a teaching hospital in London. When someone has a cardiac arrest, Foxton happens to be the doctor nearest to the call at the time, but for fear of being the first to arrive he embarrassingly admits to hiding in the toilet until more doctors came.

The frustrations of being a dogsbody for chasing up results and the exhaustion of working one night in four take their toll. Eventually Foxton feels that medicine has come to dominate his life: "I can't look at my girlfriend's forearms without thinking how easy and satisfying it would be to gently slip a cannula into her ... When we kiss, I'm feeling up her spine and assessing the best place to insert a lumbar puncture needle."

He moves on to a surgery job at a rural district general where boredom kicks in. He describes two sorts of penis that have come to dominate his days-the ones he has to catheterise and the ones who do the surgery. And while we are in that region, Foxton also tells the comical story of a "patient with a parsnip up his arse." Casualty follows surgery, and Foxton eventually finds his niche in psychiatry, where the disillusionment lifts.

Certain themes come up throughout the book, and one is Foxton's view of a public with a negative impression of doctors. Two poignant examples highlight his dismay. One is the litigious relatives of a patient who come into hospital armed with a camcorder demanding to know what is going on. Another is of a patient with a painful ankle who refuses to let him go to a paediatric crash call because she has been waiting in casualty for eight hours. The baby died.

Most of the issues examined have been discussed in the doctors' mess for many years, but Foxton successfully brings these into the public domain with an often dark but entertaining prose. This book is essential reading for all medical students and anyone considering a career in medicine. It also allows patients and allied health professionals peek into the mind of a real junior doctor—but they might not like what they find.