Every week I climbed the dark stairs to my group meeting in the Royal Infirmary. We were social work students on medical placements throughout the city, 1980s versions of the white-coated almoners who used to distribute alms among the deserving poor. I was 27: not fresh-faced exactly, but still not stale-faced; open-hearted like a patient lying on the operating-table; open-minded in the way of fools and children.

I had been placed in the Breast Cancer ward that was called Copeland in Longmore Hospital. Everyone had to Cope. The women Longed for More and the Nurses complained that the Social Workers made them cry.

I gave my case presentation to the group, speaking with more cleverness than wisdom of the social and personal meanings of breast cancer; describing with more pathos than insight the mother who locked herself in her bedroom to take off her wig, leaving her young children with their fears of what lay on the other side of the door. I didn’t talk about one woman’s horror at the discharge caused by Tamoxifen, who confided in me that many years ago her daughter had suddenly turned against her father, and she didn’t know why, but she could guess and so could I.

I met my friend Pauline at this time. I always remember her driving along the road, at the end of a hard, hot day on the wards, waving an ice-lolly out of the car window. Once I ran to her flat, sobbing that someone else was crying in my body. She didn’t bat an eyelid but gave me tea and love. Another time I told her I’d seen a snake glistening on the wall at night, and when I looked closely, I saw it was two slugs, end to end. This time Pauline was worried: she was never one for metaphors. But I understood that my ill-advised relationship with another student was not the glamorous, dangerous thing I had imagined, but simply the joining of two slug-like aspects of our personalities: his need to indulge himself and my low, low self-esteem.

I’m not sure how the healing, prescribing and treating worked, but somehow I came out at the other end, with my Certificate of Qualification in Social Work, and my lifelong friend, Pauline.