Recently, I had a day where I actually felt like I was practising medicine.

Not that day-to-day general practice isn’t medicine, it’s just that the days are often filled with scripts and mental health, and I’m actually taken aback when I need to use my clinical skills.

This day was a classic. In fact, it felt like it could’ve been the 1800s.

It started with a diagnosis of gonorrhoea (to be fair, the patient’s history helped; her former partner had called to give her the bad news), and after triple-checking that I had the dose right, I found myself administering IM ceftriaxone, satisfied that I had provided an exact cure.