Book Review: Austin Duffy - The Night Interns

Like many another mother, my dear Ma would have loved her only son to train as a doctor. Reading Austin Duffy’s gripping The Night Interns fills me with relief that I was too stupid and lazy to acquiesce to her demands. Never mind the potential for that big house in the suburbs with the two-car garage - and, you know, helping people - that might come later, the lot of a junior doctor is tantamount to imprisonment with very hard labour. In fact, one only need note that the epigraph is taken from Dante's Divine Comedy, the one where he has to go through hell and purgatory before he gets to paradise, to see what Duffy is getting at.

The pandemic gave the rest of us an inkling of just how hard health care professionals work but we really don't know the half of it. Sleep, it would appear, is something these surgical interns can only dream about in this unnamed Irish hospital as they float, half-conscious, between days of work and nights on-call. Even the respite of getting a bite to eat from the delivery man is under constant treat of disruption from the beepers going off. There are unsurprising suicides, deaths due to slight errors - "we didn't know anything" - and the political landscape of the hospital to be negotiated as senior staff vehemently guard their patches. Do those in positions of authority abuse those beneath them as an act of revenge for the way they came up, or is there some unwritten rule that says students should be exposed to this unbelievable pressure so they're better able to handle life and death decisions later on?

The three interns are thrown from department to department, each one someone's personal fiefdom and each one with its own procedures and rules, which they appear to have been largely left to negotiate on their own. As anyone who's ever worked the night shift in any profession will tell you, the hours haze together and all you're really thinking about, if you're capable of thinking at all, is the clock on the wall and the bed back in the gaff, and that's without having to worry about getting a line into someone's arm without doing any lasting damage. It might be worse being a patient, like poor Theresa, passed from pillar to post with her beeping IV machine, but not much. Duffy, an oncologist in The Mater who knows of what he writes and has the terminology to prove it, puts any notions of hospitals as welcoming halls of safety to the test.

By the time the nameless narrator, and his friends - although friends is the wrong word - the confident Lynda and the nervous Stuart, finish their rotation, there is some acceptance that what they’re doing is worthwhile. The reader, on the other hand, emerges exhausted, thanks to Duffy's relentless, chapter-less, cascade of incident, grateful they only had to read about it, although you should probably hold off on doing so until after that procedure.