My father stopped speaking to me when I dropped out of medical school to care for my sick boyfriend. Five years later he drove over to take me home — and the moment he walked into our front room he stopped mid-sentence and said this can’t be real.

Everything I had learned in two and a half years at Wexley was in use every single day, and I learned more in that flat than I did in any rotation. I learned what a family actually needs at three in the morning, which is not information. I learned how a system talks to a person who is frightened and how badly it does it.

I learned, in a corridor in the November, that when you tell a consultant you are a former medical student he will explain things to you properly, and that this is a monstrous thing to discover, because it means everybody else is not being told properly.

That corridor is the reason for everything that came after.

I should say what the five years actually consisted of, because “and then I became a nurse practitioner” is a sentence that covers about six thousand hours.