In the other part of my career (and still a huge part of my career) was the day that I found out that I'd passed my Royal College of Surgeons Fellowship in Edinburgh.
I was with one of my then, and still now, best friends, Craig Wales, who also passed on the same day.
This was a huge thing for me after graduating in 1994; I was given special dispensation to sit the second part of my Royal College of Surgeons exams in 1997 before I was old enough to fill the regulations and before I'd been qualified long enough.
I had letters from consultants which allowed me to pull the lever to sit the exam early, and I turned out to be one of the youngest people ever to pass the exam (with my friend and colleague Craig at the time) in those heady days.
The FDSRCS exams were the ones that had a 7% pass rate in the first part (I sat in Dublin), and there were 3 years of hospital experience which was logged, letters from consultants and demonstrations, work that you'd done and the experience you'd gained before you could sit the second part.
The second part was no less hellish than the first part, and if you managed to be successful in the Edinburgh exam (which is where I qualified), at the end of the exam period everyone was put in an anteroom, and your candidate numbers were called out if you'd passed,
When I was in the anteroom, I was candidate number 7, and they were called out in numerical order.
The first number for candidates that had passed in my sitting was number 7 (me). Six people were going home out the back door when the first number was called.
You made your way up to the library and stood outside waiting for other successful candidates to file in behind you, before you went to have sherry with the examiners, because you are now ‘one of them’.
The passage through fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons was (and) brutal, and it was designed exactly like that.
The oral examinations were truly terrible, but you knew this before you started; that's why it was such a huge prize.
It was one of the greatest things that I'd ever achieved when I got it, and I still think that's probably true.
Some years later I would be nominated for fellowship of the ITI, which I still retain to this day (in fact, I've been made a senior fellow of the ITI), and so with those two titles, I thought that I had done something great, something good, something which set me apart in the work that I'd done and the effort that I had put in.
A little while ago, I received another fellowship from somewhere else through the post, and recently I've seen another fellowship that's been unveiled by another organisation, and in fact there are fellowships everywhere.
It's pretty easy now for me to have 5, 6, 7 fellowships (as long as I pay the bills.
And so therefore, I now wonder if any of them are worthy of any attention (including the RCS Edinburgh). Certainly my colleagues don't understand what a fellowship is, so my patients have no chance.
The same is true now for consensus conferences - not the same as fellowships, but things that used to be extraordinary, where groups of experts got together and informed the rest of us on what the evidence said and what we should do and how we should act.
There are so many consensus conferences now that we actually need a conference to bring together the consensus conferences (We've actually had one fairly recently at the GCCG conference in America; look it up if you don't know it).
I think this stuff is what they call academic inflation; it used to be extraordinary to get a PhD, but now you need a ‘good PhD’.
I wonder where it will all end.
Maybe we need a Turbo Fellowship or a Wunder Fellowship, something which is better than a fellowship. Just so that people can tell how hard you've worked or what you've done.
Or maybe we should just go back to first names, and you gain the trust and respect by the way you act.
Blog Post Number - 4669
Back in the day, when I got diagnosed with my thyroid disease and I was trying to go and ride the Haute Route 5-day event in the Pyrenees, Alex supported me through that when no one could see. In the lead-up, he even pushed me up a hill.
He wrote a blog after that, which I've kept, and I'll never publish because I don't have guest bloggers here - sorry.
But I remember it, and I remember it well, and so what he said at the end of that was chapeau, and that is what cyclists say to each other out of respect, and when they are impressed.
So, chapeau, Alex.