Trainee doctors are masters of black comedy. There’s the one about the paediatric registrar who crashed his car twice in the past month: “maybe tonight’s the trifecta”. Or the emergency trainee who smacks his lips as he sinks a fork into the dinner he’s eating for breakfast two days after he scraped it into a tupperware container before his kids had finished singing ‘happy birthday’. Their macabre jokes waft down hospital hallways with the beeping and the whirring of blood pressure monitor and breathing machines. They’ll compose longing limericks about the catheter bag filled with a patient’s urine. Their bladder hasn’t been emptied for over 12 hours. They might hold a mock multidisciplinary team meeting to diagnose a senior consultant with psychopathic, grandiose or narcissistic personality traits. Because it’s more comforting to believe your supervisor is mentally unhinged than accept a perfectly sane superior just threw a patient’s chart […]