 I am Dr. Teller and every day I take a little scuba dive into the delirium aquarium of the public hospital that I work at in Johannesburg. In my fourth year of medical school I was tasked with taking blood from a patient who had a heart attack or something similar and I managed to poke and prod the guy so much that I fainted next to his bedside and came to kind of dangling from his bed and when I really came to I was in the casualty bay being resuscitated by my own colleagues. At that stage my colleague asked if I wouldn't perhaps consider another career which looking back perhaps I should have. South Africans medical program is structured in six years. You start off in your first year a small fish in a big pond. You go through to fourth year where you start interacting with patients and are unleashed unto them and by sixth year you're a slightly bigger fish in a slightly smaller pond. You graduate and now you're a doctor. Mercedes wants to sell you a car. Banks want to give you a bank loan. The future looks very bright and you are now the dogotellers of the country so to speak. Dogotellers Zulu for doctor. No one tells you at that stage though how lonely it can be standing in an eight hour surgery for example. How much blood is actually involved in doing medicine and how harsh it can be hammering away at people's bones drilling into their heads. It's very gruesome and certainly very visceral on a day-to-day basis. You soon realize as a medical doctor that you don't really need to be that smart nor do you need to be that patient or kind but you certainly need to have endurance, stamina, no affinity to sleep whatsoever, a mildly neurotic personality and probably some narcissistic or sadomasochistic tendencies within you. That is most certainly evidenced in your first 36 hour call if not before then where you are likely to be spat on, coughed on, passed on, bled on and I started wearing Wellington boots to my calls after the first one where my socks were soaked with who knows what. You are faced as I've said with very visceral scenarios and an example here is this baby who was suffering from hydrocephalus who four hours after I took this photo actually died not because I didn't resuscitate him but because there was no oxygen cylinder available in the hospital for me to do so. This gentleman had had pins put into his leg about eight months before I took the picture and I removed the pins along with about five maggots and that's what you can see just next to the pin in the photograph. When you go to get some nice reprieve from the chaos of the hospital what greets you is certainly not the nice grey anatomy well-lit room with a hunky doctor on the top bunk but this rather dishevelled room with unwashed sheets in it and then you're called to see a baby who's four months old with multi-drug resistant TB who has to spend six months in an isolation cubicle. The scope of things that we see as young doctors in this country or doctors in general is very very heart wrenching. Fetuses abandoned in casualty with no one to claim them, removing butternuts from men's bottoms as they fell on them and all range of things that are both comical and also incredibly devastating. As dog a teller so to speak in the country so one asks how do you cope? How do you get through every day trying to be patient trying to be the kind doctor that everyone expects you to be? I had an idea one day as I took blood from a patient with leukemia for the umpteenth time and he told me the next day was his 18th birthday and he'd be spending it in hospital so I baked him a cupcake and I baked cupcakes for the whole ward including the staff and the nurses and for that day everything was just that little bit better. I started letting patients use my cell phone to call friends and family when because they were distressed. I let kids play with my stethoscope. I wore brightly colored scrubs to work. I tried to make every interaction just a little bit better and not to face patients with impatience so to speak that comes with being so overworked and understaffed and underresourced. I developed what I'd like to call my felicity suit. Felicity meaning a state of happiness and it's really a coat of armor that is love, joy and happiness that I try to wear every day to keep up this positive energy that I that I try to to maintain within the hospital. Some of the qualities of my felicity suit are certainly durable fibers to face that constant barrage of pain and despair that I encounter in the hospitals. A blubber like emotional coating certainly helps and it needs to be body fluid splash proof included as well as some blissful ignorance which isn't what you'd expect from your doctor but it's certainly necessary and a determination for happiness. A more practical quality is non-sweet underarm patches after your 36th hour in the same outfit. My felicity suit is perhaps not what one needs. You need more of a coat of armor facing South African casualty situations but it's something I found that has improved my quality of life and perhaps those individuals who I've interacted with day in and day out and at 2am in the morning. Design is not perfect but I'm working on it. Thank you.