Sometimes patients stalk you in the corridors and follow you to your car. They camp outside your room and refuse to see anybody else. They ask for a month’s worth of benzodiazepines every two weeks. They try to set you up with their nephew. They give you pamphlets about Jesus and say that they will pray for you. At some point they don’t return; they no longer need you – either because they are cured or because they are dead.

An old man told me once that the most efficient way to commit suicide would be to step in front of a train. Because his knees couldn’t handle a climb to the top of any building, he said, and pills were unreliable. A train would kill you and it would be quick, and as long as you did it properly there wouldn’t be anything left of you to burden the health system with. I don’t want to deal with cancer again, he said, but it would be an adventure to go by train. There were cannonball lesions on his CXR and tumour markers in his blood. On bad days I imagine that I can hear him shuffling around outside my room waiting to see me.

I discharged teenager from casualty one morning. He came back with bronchospasm after having collapsed at the gate. He had absent brain reflexes but still I put a tube down his throat and needles in his arms. And then I told his mother that her son was dead. Now he sits on the bed next to every young asthmatic I see, with his blue lips and dead eyes; two ET tubes protruding from his mouth because I’d placed the first one in his oesophagus. He looks at me accusingly and his mother stands by his side and shakes her head and cries.

One night I spent my call sitting next to a child who was green and bloated from herbal intoxication. We’d been monitoring her all day and on my watch she seemed to be on the mend. I dozed off with my head against her crib but was jolted awake by the alarmed oximeter and her final gasp. I did resus for far too long and the nursing staff pulled me back – enough is enough, somebody said, go and wash your face. Whenever I doze off in a hospital my mind often drifts towards her crib. I wake up unsettled and anticipating the worst.

Sometimes dead patients haunt you but it’s not the fact of death that wears you down. What kills you is the nauseating urgency of life as it rushes at you in chaos. There’s far too much to preserve. Who do you think you are, if you have the audacity to try?

Medicine is the kind of career that eats away at your nerve endings, enabling you to repeatedly stick needles into a cachectic groaning woman and feel nothing much. Useful. But then when you finally step outside the job you do it in a bubble, where emotions rarely happen, people hardly matter and nothing ever lasts. So any time you find a source that makes you feel anything at all it’s a good idea to grab as much as you can, preferably intravenously, as often as possible. No?