LONDON - ONE-NIGHT STAND SYNDROME

You know that feeling when you've drunk so much you wake up and the pain is only matched by your nauseating shame as you realize there’s a warm, naked body beside you and you have no idea who it is? When you can feel their ass hair rubbing against your naked thighs, and yet as far as you know you’re not even on first-name terms with the stranger? Well, that is what it’s like for this man every morning, and not because he’s a player.

“This woman is not my wife. My wife is dead. Get her away from me!” he was shouting in the A&E waiting room, as a dowdy-looking woman desperately wrestled him into an embrace.

LONDON - CHEATING THE RECTAL EXAMINER

I stick my finger up someone’s bum as often as three times a day. It doesn’t get any better with time—it’s always someone else’s shit on my finger. With any problem below the lungs, it seems necessary to insert a gloved digit up the anal passage and have a poke around.

LONDON - FAT CHANCE

There comes a point in many lives when you realize that it’s time to diet. When you require medical equipment designed for elephants you’ve reached that stage. I once had to phone a zoological veterinary surgery to see if they had an MRI big enough for my 450-pound patient. They said no. Apparently both the legality and plausibility of hospital/zoo equipment-trading is a myth propagated by Scrubs and spread amongst doctors exasperated at how to penetrate layers of custardized junk-food. Anyway, they turned my hippo away from the zoo.

LONDON - WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DEATH

I haven’t cried for a patient in more than five years. I worry I’ve become a cold-hearted bitch who makes small children scream, jabs old ladies with needles, and remains unfazed in the face of relentless suffering.

LONDON - THAT'S NOT HOW YOU TAKE YOUR TEMPERATURE

In my experience, people will get weird shit lodged in every available orifice--and the urethra is no exception. Now, I don’t have a penis so perhaps it’s hard for me to understand, but the only time anyone has put anything up my urethra was during an STD screening and I was moments away from kicking the doctor in the head. Painful, humiliating, and categorically not erotic. But apparently this is exactly what gets some people off, though they normally regret it after.

LONDON - THE WORLD IS YOUR CURTAINS

While working as a GP I had a patient who would not stop complaining about her flaps—vaginal flaps that is, or labia minora to be precise. Miss Vagina Whiner first came to me saying she had lost all pleasure from sexual intercourse because she was so embarrassed by her saggy lips, which she believed drooped about her clitoris like the slobbery chops of an over-bred dog. I found it curious she had shaved prior to her appointment and wondered if this was to highlight the outlandish size of her flaps.

LONDON - JUST STAY DEAD

Summer’s coming so I’ll warn you now: try not to get seriously injured or ill in August. August is the month the medical students are released into the hospital as fully-fledged doctors. And to make matters worse, their first job is often on the crash team. In other words, they are your last bastions of hope, your final hand-hold on this mortal coil if you have the misfortune of going into cardiac arrest. If I were you I would just stay dead. I would want to be resuscitated about as much as I would want someone to mutilate my dead body.

LONDON - HEARING VOICES

I was having a moment of self-loathing on the train yesterday as I recalled a drunken misadventure, and without meaning to I groaned and hit myself in the head a few times with my book, saying, “Idiot, idiot, idiot.” Everyone turned and starred. I realized that must be what it’s like to be mad. The voice in your head becomes so overwhelming that it requires action.

LONDON - MUTANT PENIS REPORT

You'd think having two penises would make a man into walking double-ended sex goliath, a master of simultaneous ejaculation and duel penetration. But alas, apart from having the very cool party trick of being able to pee out of both--there is no joy in suffering from what is medically known as diphallia or penile duplication.

LONDON - DRINK YOUR WAY TO BLOODY PANTS

I had the most horrible experience of my career in the emergency room this week. I got to extract wads of bloody tissue from a homeless man’s anus after he plugged it to stop himself shitting on the streets. Every few minutes I had to make up an excuse, something like "I need more gloves," and run to retch while gasping for fresh air.