A Soft Start

I woke up at 4am on my first day of work, a combination of nerves and the long tail of jetlag. The day wasn’t to start until 7am and I resolved to arrive at 6:45, a deliberate choice — early enough to impress, too early to be mistaken for indifference. The registrar’s room was deserted. Computer screens slept, chairs were tucked in with the primness of a classroom, the air faintly metallic from overnight air-con. It felt like the antechamber to a new life, and I sat there mentally rehearsing my introduction. When no one arrived at 7:00, I began to question whether I had found the right room. By 7:10, the questioning grew increasingly existential. And by 7:20, the silence had begun to feel accusatory.

At 7:30, the door finally swung open. A registrar strolled in balancing a cardboard tray of coffees. Unhurried, without apology. He slid one toward me. “Didn’t know how you take it, so I got you a flat white.” 

I blurted out something about being there since 6:45 to “prepare the list.” His face tensed in remorse, realizing the cultural miscommunication. “Oh, mate, I’m sorry. That was a soft seven.”

The phrase felt absurd and subversive, like someone telling me that gravity only applies on weekdays. Until then, every start in medicine had been sharp: the early alarm shrilly announcing the start of the day, the operating list that scrolled endlessly into the night, the pager that demanded obedience. There was nothing soft about it. Yet here, the first lesson was not how to hold a retractor or interpret an MRI, but how to accept coffee at half-past seven.

This is not to say that those first days were easy. Within the ward, everything I thought I knew had been scrambled, re-named, or repackaged in metric. Bloodwork wasn’t bloodwork — it was “bloods,” plural, as if the patient contained a buffet of samples, which I as the most junior doctor on the team had to collect myself. A CBC had expanded into a “full blood examination,” a phrase that made me picture some medieval ritual. For the first week, I nearly committed half the ward for anemia before the nursing manager gently explained that Australians place their decimals differently. And it is not anemia, it’s anaemia.

Even the rooms had been rechristened. The operating room was the theatre. I reveled at the pretension, imagining curtains parting as surgeons arrived for their grand stage debut. The uniform had changed as well: scrub caps replaced by paper bandanas, pants tied along the side, tops with Maoist collars. I quickly found myself integrating into the performance, blurting out lines like, “Has the consultant gone to theatre?” with the charming upward inflection of Aussie English.

And then there were the patients, who understood the rules of the place far better than I did, making me question what authority I had over their care at all. One man, scheduled for an urgent cardiac procedure, slipped out of the ward in the morning without a word. We scoured the hospital in panic only to discover him outside, mid-cigarette, with the remnants of bacon and eggs still clinging to his plate. He was unapologetic. “Wasn’t gonna skip brekkie, doc.” 

I braced to be reamed out by the cardiothoracic surgeon, only to be met with a chuckle and a shrug. “People, right?”

The other staff, too, conspired to soften my edges. Nurses corrected my vocabulary with affectionate amusement. Consultants asked after my weekend plans, as though free time was a thing one could actually cherish. Coffee breaks appeared with clockwork regularity, three of them, each one a sanctioned pause that felt borderline criminal to my American instincts. I tried at first to sip dutifully, like an anthropologist partaking in ritual, but soon I understood: the coffee wasn’t about caffeine. It was punctuation. A reminder that a life could be written with commas, not just run-on sentences intermittently interrupted by periods.

Still, I stumbled. I tripped over acronyms, botched handovers, scribbled notes in the wrong places. My sentences were too American, my need to please too loud. I worried that I would always be too much or not enough. Yet, no one seemed especially concerned. My mistakes were corrected with a pat on the shoulder, a congenial smirk, another coffee slid across the table.

Looking back, I realize I arrived armored, trained in a system where hardness was seen as a sign of virtue — where being early was a show of loyalty, and exhaustion a badge of worth. Those first few mornings walking up to the hospital were filled with dread and anxiety, the remnant memories of my previous life clinging on by increasingly frayed threads. But little by little, the armor cracked. Not in some dramatic shedding, but in tiny, almost imperceptible ways: another coffee accepted, a self-deprecating laugh, a pause taken when none was strictly necessary. When I think of that first month, I don’t remember the chaos of lists or the panic of conversions. I remember the registrar handing me a flat white, the phrase “soft seven” curling into the air like steam. It turns out not everything has to begin with a jolt. Some things, the best things, begin softly.