There are differences between celebrity 'IT girls' and the average doctor, but I often wish there were not. Their privileged lives are so much easier than that of a junior doctor. I'm serious! On a heavy night on call we would all love to change places with either of the Hilton sisters or even a lesser known but equally troubled Hollywood waif.
We sit in the canteen at 3am, wondering why the paparazzi aren't jostling to get a shot from beyond the hot food counter. We wonder why we worked day and night through medical school, only to find that we now work for an organisation where the sandwiches don't come out of the food machine, no matter how hard or how often you kick it. There is of course an art to kicking health service food machines (not covered in any depth at any UK medical school). These machines are specifically designed to starve all doctors to the bone. "Keep them hungry - Keep them Keen!" By the time you do coax the sorry excuse for food out, the machine has gobbled up all your change and then....the arrest bleep goes off. It wouldn't be a surprise if all doctors ended their on-calls as skeletons and Sir Bob Geldof started chivvying up humanitarian aid for them.
Being on call is about the very fabric of the hospital conspiring against you. It's about accidentally dropping your bleep down the loo and thanking god that the toilet was unused. It's about fishing the hated thing out, drying it under the hand-dryer and then trying to present a plausible and less laughable explanation to the switchboard operator. It's about tripping over the urine bag at a cardiac arrest. It's about looking over the operating theatre at the most wonderful dark haired surgeon you have ever seen, your eyes meeting, your eyelash catching on your contact lens. It's about that contact lens flying aerodynamically into the patients open abdomen. (It's true there is a patient out there, going about his business with a contact lens in his stomach - either that or the theatre suction actually worked.)
It's about being exhausted because millions of patients all need or want a little piece of your soul to survive the night. It's about coming out to find your car has been clamped because it was parked one inch over the line. It's about tolerating full on heating in the summer and freezing through the winter. It's about on-call rooms that are visited by rats.
Now I'm not referring to senior managers when I say rats. I mean the actual long tailed rodents. There are of course many sub-types of such rodent depending on which side of the vodka bottle (remember the advert?) you are looking through. It also depends on how many hours you've been on-call for and how good your imagination is. It's about cutting pictures of the Chief Executive out of the hospital magazine, placing that picture on the back of the doctors mess door and aiming spare cannula's at it - much like a dartboard. Whoever gets him right between the eyes gets a free dinner from the hospital canteen! We call this stress relief and it is the reason we appear serene when it comes to patient care.
So when on call for long periods, junior doctors really do have a lot in common with those party girls from LA. It's the simple life we live. We can do thin, we can do catwalks and we do community service but get paid for it. The career advice shouldn't be get three A's at A Level then head off to medical school. It should be instead get skimpy short skirts, do your lippy and be a chick. Head off to the US and be a socialite.
Indeed we must all agree that the next time one of these celebrity size zero's is awarded community service for a minor misdemeanour, it should be 23 days in a UK hospital, then we can trade places with her quite happily, knowing that she will be made to pay for her crime. The only downside may be that the GMC would have something to say about the videos, sure to appear on the internet, featuring our celebrity guests performing PR examinations. While the cream of British healthcare goes state-side to show them how debauchery should be done.