What medicine's all about

It may have been obvious to her at the time, but somehow I did not quite like to admit to Sylvia that she was my very first—patient, that is. I had just finished my preclinical training at Cambridge and had come down to London to walk the wards at Bart's.

Sylvia, on the other hand, was much more experienced. She had myasthenia gravis and was barely older than me but was already a veteran of the intensive care unit, and by now a pale, frail, frightened shadow of her former self, with a tracheostomy. Weighing less than 40 kg, just …