Undoctored, page 1
To Mike Schachter, for my GSOH.
And to my friends and family, who will once again learn quite major things about me by reading them in a book.
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Disclaimer
– Flashback –
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
– Flashback –
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
– Flashback –
Chapter 5
– Flashback –
Chapter 6
– Flashback –
Chapter 7
– Flashback –
Chapter 8
– Flashback –
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
– Flashback –
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
– Flashback –
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
– Flashback –
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
– Flashback –
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
– Flashback –
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
– Flashback –
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Credits
Copyright
Disclaimer
Colleagues and friends have been anonymised in this book by replacing their names with members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an organisation which I’m pretty sure has no lawyers. Anonymising my family would have been harder, so I haven’t bothered.
– FLASHBACK –
Formaldehyde
You know what it’s like when you’re cutting up a dead body. No, of course you don’t. It’s a perverse and horrific thing that should only ever be experienced by coroners and gangland criminals. Unless of course you’re one of the 9,000 eighteen-year-olds who sign up to medical school in the UK every year. For them, it’s just what you do each Friday morning.
‘Wear your worst shirt and trousers,’ advised a friendly second year before our first dissection.* ‘Underwear too. Put on the same stuff every week, then burn it at the end of the year.’ I imagined this was because they’d be getting sprayed with skull-water or stained by lung fragments, but it was actually around 2 per cent less disgusting than that – it was the stench.
The smell of the dissection room permeates deep into every single fibre of cotton or polyester and never, ever leaves. It hits you afresh whenever you’re within 100 metres of the place: a smell I’ve never experienced since and one that isn’t likely to trouble the parfumiers at Jo Malone any time soon. It’s a weird blend of time-expired flesh and throat-grabbing, nose-scorching, eye-cooking industrial vinegar.
Two hundred of us paraded in, all pretending that what we were about to do was absolutely normal. Nervousness was overcompensated for by bullishness and laddishness. I called on behaviour I’d learned at countless hundred West Ham matches: just pretend to be one of them. Except, in this case, everyone there was pretending.*
‘Find yourselves a cadaver,’ bellowed our lecturer, like he was running the bingo night on a cruise ship.* We each huddled around one of the dozen zip-locked corpsebags.
‘Do you mind if I join you?’ I stuttered to my cadavermates, as if I was making up a four for bridge rather than getting ready to carve up someone’s granddad like a Christmas turkey. Refusing to acknowledge our natural anxiety, we tried to outdo one another with how totally fine and comfortable we all felt. But despite our forced nonchalance, this was all palpably weird and disturbing. The scariest thing most of us had ever done at that point in our lives was mess around with a ouija board or competitively masturbate onto a biscuit.* And here we were, about to slice up a human being.
This sudden responsibility, a parachute-free plunge into the adult world, was quite the change for a voice-barely-broken, balls-barely-dropped teenager – like accidentally shifting the car into reverse when you’re doing seventy on the M1.
Time to unzip the bag then.
First the face: waxy, yellowish, almost, but not quite, inhuman. Immediately some rugby jock called Thor quipped that he looked like Bruce Willis’s nan and the rest of us laughed, desperate for some, any, emotional release. Then came the chest, unusually hairy. ‘We’ve got a Wookiee!’ another fresher whispered. Again we laughed, before wondering aloud whether chest hair keeps growing after death.* The abdomen was next, wrinkled like his organs were vacuum-packed inside. Then as the zip continued down and the PVC was peeled back, we all gasped. This man had an absolutely enormous penis.
Part of me felt like it was my turn to chip in with some light-hearted quip, just to show how totally unbothered I was by this immersive horror-movie experience. I couldn’t – not yet, anyway. But nor did I object to the banter; showing compassion or respect would be opening myself up to ridicule. Week one and we were learning to fold and pack away our most human feelings.
There’s really no reason to hack up a human in your first year, or indeed at all. There are better alternatives; models, 3D visualisations, even prosections, where you’re shown a single autopsy by an expert rather than just barging in yourself like Teen Zorro. But instead, with freshers’ week hangovers still pulsating behind our eyes, we were tossed in at the deep end with a scalpel and a licence to deal in dark humour. And let’s not forget, we were teenagers, and there’s no way a cock of that magnitude was going to escape unremarked upon.
‘Does that grow after death too?’ snorted one of my colleagues.* Another student gave it a flick and christened the dead guy Thundersword.* The ridiculousness of the male obsession with cock size engorges substantially when faced with a corpse. Of course, in reality, this gentleman’s generous penis should be of no more interest or relevance than the corpse two tables down with big feet or long thumbs. Anyway, genitals were not the order of the day – our anatomy lecturer announced we were going to focus on the lungs. His instructions were quite simple: take one scalpel, take one corpse; make a nice straight line all the way down the breast bone, then turn it into an upside down T shape with a couple of slashes under the ribs. It won’t bleed, he reminded us – our patients are dead, their hearts long past any pumping.
Although this was a new experience for all of us, as a lifelong vegetarian, I felt particularly ill-prepared. Everyone else around the table had been practising for this moment their entire lives by cutting into steaks and chicken breasts. The nearest I’d come was a nice taut mozzarella. I reached for a scalpel, keen not only to prove my suitability for medicine but hopefully to show some kind of instinctive proficiency with a blade. As I stood there, the scalpel’s point millimetres from the skin, I learned as much about my own physiology as I did this guy’s anatomy. My sympathetic nervous system went into overdrive: the quickening of my pulse, the prickling secretion of sweat glands and a tremor in my muscles that showed clearly in the wobble of the blade. Then there was the sudden and wholly unexpected wave of famishing hunger that happens to be an unfortunate side effect of inhaling formaldehyde.
When it finally made contact, the scalpel slid through the skin like it was cutting wrapping paper. I guess it makes sense – you never see surgeons in hospital dramas sawing away at skin like they’re doing woodwork. I pulled the scalpel down the breastbone, keeping the line as straight as I could, which was difficult with my hand still trembling like a leaf in a wind tunnel. As promised, there was no bleeding. This made the subject seem even less of a real human being, which I have to say felt like a positive: it steadied my hand and made it easier to chef him up. I reached the bottom of the sternum and swung a hard left round under the ribs. It was feeling easier – I could be cutting through PlayDoh or … Jesus! Suddenly, he started bleeding. Heavily. Everywhere. The bloke was alive!
Everyone gasped. Thor screamed. I was half-expecting the patient to sit bolt upright on the gurney like Frankenstein’s monster and demand an apology for our disrespectful remarks about his dick, when I noticed that, in actual fact, he wasn’t bleeding at all. I was. I’d accidentally sliced through my own thumb. I sheepishly handed over scalpel duties to the student on my left and instinctively stuffed my bleeding thumb into my mouth like the child I felt and, of course, still was. And this is how I can confirm that while the smell of formaldehyde may be an appetite stimulant, the taste of it very much isn’t.
* * *
* ‘DISS-ection’, as our anatomy lecturer taught us on day one: ‘Diss as in piss, not dice as in lice.’
* ‘What?! You’re a football fan?! This is the most explosive revelation in the entire book!’ said my friend Justin.
* Sixty-three, septic knee.
* Much like when dunking in a mug of tea, I find the Rich Tea takes longest to disintegrate.
* It doesn’t. Nor do your fingernails or toenails. Death involves every single cell of your body permanently signing off. It’s pretty final like that. Instead, what people have probably noticed is that the skin around the nails and hair dries up, retracts and retreats, making it look like you need a postmortem mani-pedi.
* Now a consultant in respiratory medicine.
* Now a consultant radiologist.
Chapter 1
I wasn’t sleeping well.
I’d always slept very well as a doctor. I didn’t sleep much and I slept in some odd places – hunched over the steering wheel of my car, curled up next to a filing cabinet, leaning against a storeroom wall like a horse – but I slept well. I guess my brain knew that napping opportunities were rare, so it was always able to press the shut-down button at a second’s notice, until awoken by the next bleep or buzzer.
Ever since leaving medicine a few months earlier, I found myself routinely waking up at 3 a.m. from the exact same nightmare. Standing in that labour ward operating theatre. My eyes fogging over as I realise the baby I’ve been racing to save is dead, his tiny hands still and perfect. Trying and failing to place the stitches that might stop this woman from bleeding to death. The same brain that won’t remember my online banking login details was quite happy to reconstruct and restage the most harrowing day of my life in microscopic detail. The moment the anaesthetist turns off the incongruously jolly radio station. The blood clotting in my shoes. Feeling my voice crack as I ask the scrub nurse for stitch after stitch after stitch after swab after swab after swab. The moment my consultant removes the patient’s uterus and makes this blood-soaked nightmare her only experience of childbirth. The moment when I ask the ITU doctor if she’s going to be OK and he won’t answer me.
And then I’d jolt awake, covered in a cold lick of sweat, my heart pounding through every wet pore. The comedown would last for hours. In my worst moments, I was afraid to go to sleep because of what I knew was going to play out.
Waking up in emotional agony, covered in an emulsion of tears and perspiration isn’t exactly attractive to a new partner, and me and J were still in the ‘trying hard to impress’ stage.* Obviously I couldn’t tell him about what I was going through in case he realised he’d taken on a defective model. Handily, it was easy enough to pretend everything was alright because our relationship was being conducted remotely. I was living with my parents – every thirty-year-old’s dream, but the only option in between the catastrophe of my breakup with H and saving up for the deposit on a rented flat. J lived in Glasgow; we’d met on the internet at a time where it was less embarrassing to say you’d found your partner in prison or at an STI clinic, then sealed the deal when I braved the Megabus a few months later. For some reason, he didn’t want to abandon his promising job as a junior TV producer and move 400 miles south to live with an itinerant former doctor who he’d met three times. But the distance meant that it was fairly easy to pretend I was fine and sane and normal – besides, I’d been pretending one way or another for most of my life.
Considerably less easy was being productive during the day when you’ve only slept for three hours at night. And I needed to be productive: I’d gone from a safe-but-underpaid career as a doctor to an unsafe-and-unpaid career as a writer-comedian. I was desperately willing comedy to work out. It was something I’d dabbled in over the years, both as a hobby and as an escape from the labour ward pressure-cooker, and I’d pretty much invested all of my hopes in it. Perhaps sucking me in the hardest was the fact that the stakes were so refreshingly low – there’s no formal inquiry when a joke dies. But when you’re a doctor, the jobs come to you: they knock on a clinic door or get pushed, screaming, into a labour ward. Writing jobs don’t do that – you have to go and get them, which is tricky when you’re living on a diet of Pro Plus and PTSD. But I needed to because otherwise … well, I didn’t know what happened otherwise. This was my best attempt at a Plan B and there wasn’t a Plan C. There was always the option of reversing back to Plan A, like so many quitter doctors before me. But the thought of revisiting medicine felt like returning to an abusive relationship.
No mealtime passed without a subtle hint from my parents that I should go back to medicine, usually something along the lines of, ‘Why don’t you go back to medicine?’ or ‘You’re not even that funny, Adam.’ I wasn’t sure whether this was because they were worried about me, worried about what people might think about me or worried about what people might think of them. The thought did occur to me that if they’d left me to it in the first place, I might have found a job I was actually capable of. But that was never an option – being a doctor was preordained: much like Jesus, a boy pressured into his dad’s line of work (miracles).
Medicine was revered in my household. It was the family trade – my dad was a mild-flavoured GP of forty years standing, with an enthusiasm for the job which didn’t extend to any other aspect of his life and couldn’t fathom why, if you had the A levels, you wouldn’t want to be a doctor too. There was an element of light snobbery – ‘My son the doctor’ could be referenced at book club and theatre club and lunch club.* Why even have a child if you can’t crow about their success? Plus, immigrant values take more than one generation to shake – our Polish DNA didn’t just demand that we worked, they had to be the hardest, toughest jobs, rising as fast and as far as we could to show the country we’d earned our place. ‘Light-hearted writer of goofs’ wasn’t an option on the forms my great-grandparents signed when they stepped off the boat, escaping Nazi persecution.
But career chat was slightly preferable to the other topic of conversation available – that I’d blown up my marriage to a woman (and a very nice woman at that) and was now in a relationship with a bloke (and a Scottish bloke at that). Everything in my life that had given me stability and them bragging rights – ‘My son the straight doctor who sleeps comfortably through the night’ – had been obliterated. Perhaps their little digs (‘Why don’t you put that in one of your skits?’) were their coping mechanism, even if they weren’t particularly helping me cope.
A couple of weeks into my stay, my dad announced he had a surprise for me. He announced it matter-of-factly, which led me to assume it wasn’t going to be a chocolate eclair or a Labradoodle. He directed me up to the loft, where the entire roofspace was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of cardboard boxes. He gestured to a couple of ridges of the mountain. ‘These ones are yours.’
It turned out that over the previous three decades, totally unbeknown to me, my dad had collected every single piece of paper and every single object and artefact that had any connection whatsoever to me or my siblings. The accumulated bric-à-brac of four unfiltered human lives – every school exercise book, every terrible childhood drawing, every birthday or Christmas card, every piece of saxophone sheet music, every medical textbook, every crummy creation in Fimo or fusilli – all carefully boxed, labelled and hidden away in the loft.
It was particularly touching and surprising that a quiet man who had never to my knowledge expressed any degree of emotion whatsoever* was secretly cataloguing every aspect of my existence. It must be said, he wasn’t the most discriminating curator. Even if I’d grown up to be Shakespeare or Dolly Parton, no museum archive in the world would have been interested in my entrance ticket to the Derwent Pencil Museum.*
‘Are you downsizing?’ I asked.
‘No’, he replied. ‘I’m just clearing out some of this crap.’ His tone was slightly peeved, as if this unsolicited and borderline certifiable collection of memorabilia was somehow my responsibility, like a toddler I’d dropped off at his house and failed to pick up.
I spent a full week wading through this shanty town of cardboard boxes. ‘It’s good you’re occupying yourself while you decide what to do with your life,’ said my mother, somehow forgetting the many times I had explained precisely what I was going to do with my life.
Several boxes were remnants of my time in medical school. As well as forests of long-forgotten lecture notes and metric tonnes of textbooks, there were also some more interesting relics.
My half-length white coat! As medical students, we were required to wear short versions of the classic white coat, so that senior doctors could identify us by sight and more easily humiliate us.
My first stethoscope! I tried it on for size and listened to my heart – the left ear wasn’t working. Maybe it never had; I wouldn’t have known back then.
My Evesham Micros Voyager 2000! A laptop with the weight, dimensions and processing power of a breeze block.
A poster for AI: Artificial Insemination! A piss-weak parody of a rightly forgotten Spielberg film, staged as the medical school’s annual Soirée.
A couple of pots of nail polish! Christ, I must have been annoying.
