REMEMBER how your grandmother used to rattle on about always wearing decent underwear in case you were hit by a bus? Well, she was right, if a little unoriginal: why just a bus when there are so many other creative ways to find yourself being serenaded by a siren?

As one of hundreds of junior doctors manning the emergency departments of this state, and more than a little wet behind my newly stethoscoped ears, I am flabbergasted by the human capacity for injury creation, by our ability to find new and exciting ways to self-destruct.

A broken roof tile here, a wobbly ladder there, add a dash of bravado and a spoonful of bad luck, and you'll be looking up at me from your hospital bed before you know it. Don't mind the absent stare as I scratch my head: I'm just scrolling desperately through a list of half-remembered mnemonics for something that fits. ("Your knee bone connected to your thigh bone …")

Med school isn't wholly without purpose. Heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia: I've got them down. It's just that I seem to have missed the lecture on how to remove a child's finger from an ironing board, or the one about "Five Things Not To Put In Your Mouth And What To Do About Them".

And while smoking, cholesterol and blood pressure became my shopping list of risk factors for ending up on the wrong side of an intubator, the buck's night was somehow overlooked.

So, day after day, I find myself looking up a nostril, then down at a tray with all manner of plastic tubing and angulated metallic implements, wondering what's up there and how I'm going to get it out. It is not unlike being presented with three pipe cleaners, some Blu-Tack and a couple of coloured Paddle Pop sticks and being asked to construct a Faberge egg.

But nothing makes my heart sink more than the disappointment - nay, horror - that slides over my patients' faces as they realise I'm not the work experience girl but their Real Life Doctor. Don't think I can't see through your subtle-as-a-sledgehammer question: "Have you been doing this long?"

So next time you come begging for an egg-beaterectomy or suffering from a severe case of hyper-Red-Bullism, please don't look at me like I'm the idiot. After all, I'm not the one with a hole in my knickers and a Lego man up my nose.