Do you remember me mentioning an autobiographical book written by a surgical colleague last year, that mentioned a traumatic weekend we both spent doing a locum at a small regional hospital?
Steph, the surgeon I’m working with today, has just mentioned it, referencing the hideous on call weekend she just spent. Apparently she keeps in touch with the book’s author, who has given up medicine, and now lives in Paris making expensive dog shampoo. The word is, they’re turning the book into a TV series, recycling all the old Shortland St actors to star in it.
This news has left me feeling quite discombobulated. I’ve just Googled “teenagers who died in car crash in Featherston” and news articles about it fill the entire first page. It turns out that the tenth anniversary is at the end of this month. I wasn’t writing this blog that far back, but I mentioned it briefly in a scheduling email at the time, which I posted on here back in 2020.
https://accordingtokirsty.com/index.php/2020/04/05/old-scheduling-email-feb-2016/
As you can see, I made light of it at the time, but it was certainly a harrowing experience. Steph thinks the events of that weekend was actually the beginning of the end for the author’s career as a surgeon, not because she did anything wrong but because the events were so traumatic.
And now I’m faced with seeing those same events dramatised on screen, with no opportunity to put forward my version of how things unfolded. What if I come out looking like a useless boob? Well, in the book, I barely get any mention at all, so I’m guessing that’s the best I can hope for. Of course she’ll be the heroine of her own story but I still feel sick about it. There’s no sense that we were colleagues thrown together into an impossible situation.
You know what I think? I think it’s time I seriously got to work on my own book.