GP

Hail,

Boring administrative entry below.

I had the second job interview the other day.

I did the interview to get into GP training. I applied to GP training to specialise in addiction medicine. I want to specialise in Addiction Medicine because I love it, and it's fascinating, and so Sarah doesn't have to work.

On that note, we got the letter from the lawyers today. The lawyers have a website, with a short video clip of a woman talking. The woman says something like "Hi, I'm Lara Laura, Lawyer. For too long, amoral multinational companies have built their vast profits on mutilated, maimed and murdered bodies of innocent people. If you have suffered ..." and so on. It's a bit startling.

We fill in the forms and then we wait. Apparently this is an open and shut legal case, which means it may well be finalised within three years. We shall see.

Anyhow - the interview. It was the second interview, because I didn't get in on the first round - I am unsure why, but not wanting to do the thing they're interviewing you for is quite a disadvantage. I don’t actually want to be a GP – I think this is what they call family medicine over in the US. It may have been that my inability to adequately conceal this was behind my less than stellar performance in the first interview.

Still, it does hurt to fail. You do lie in bed the next few weeks wondering if they have found out what no-one else knew but you always expected – that you’re crap. I am older now, and twenty years ago I would have been swarmed by those thoughts, and dragged under, whereas now they are much fewer, and I am able to see them as not particularly realistic, but they are there.

This time things went better. The questions were about how you would handle a heart attack in a small country GP surgery, how to handle the “he’s got gonorrhoea, they’re both your patients, he doesn’t want to tell her or for you to tell her” and an unusual one that started “tell us about one of your wrong diagnoses and the consequences of that.”

It went reasonably well, and later that day they rang up and offered me the job - the job being ninety km away, doing stuff I’ve forgotten, for a minimum of twenty two hours a week, and a considerable pay cut.

Simultaneously thrilled and un-nerved. It is alarming - I don't know if I have what it takes to be a good GP, I don't know if I don't whether I will know that I do not - if you follow. I don't want to be one of those "crap at medicine and crap at detecting your own crapness" doctors. But if it all works out, in three to five years time, it’s a specialist qualification, and Sarah able to not work at all.

We shall see. More soonish - possibly about one of my patients and night terrors. Thanks for listening,

John