Last week I was teaching medical students. Teaching students is a bit like Botox: for a long time after you are left with a look of permanent comic surprise.

Like Botox, teaching gives you an ego boost at the time, but makes you philosophical about the future and aware of your own mortality (even more so when you consider the possibility that your most hapless student might well be the doctor looking after you in your last illness).

I’ll give you an example: in my last session of teaching women’s health, I asked one of the boys to give me three common causes of menorrhagia. He started strong with ‘fibroids’. This was followed by a painfully long pause, then suddenly a look of immense relief spread over his face as he thought of a second answer. ‘Rape’, he said proudly.

To be fair, I probably shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was. This is the same student who, when asked where fertilisation takes place, said the Eustachian tube rather than the Fallopian tube, which made me feel equal pity for the medical profession and his future wife.

Not that neurology went much better. He forgot that Parkinson’s disease is characterised by bradykinesia so didn’t give the poor patient a chance to initiate movement before he began shouting. And when asked where on the foot vibration sense should be tested, he thought for a moment and then said: ‘On a bunion”.

I can laugh because I have deliberately chosen to blank out how terribly bad I was as a medical student. Or indeed a house officer. We’ve all done it: stuck a catheter in a patient’s bum and then phoned our registrar to say: ‘they are in acute renal failure because no urine has come out’, or confirmed someone is dead and then go back three times to check because you’re sure they moved.

It’s helpful being reminded of such things. It stops me getting complacent because every now and then I have to wonder: where am I on this damned learning curve anyway?