Drawings of doctors: a patient's eye-view - gallery

'I made countless drawings about lying on consultants’ beds, being prodded by consultants’ fingers. These are the first encounters with that peculiar sense of intimate confidence in someone who forgets you almost as soon as you leave the room (“Next!”)' Photograph: Nick Wadley

'In the high-tech loneliness and calm of the MRI-scan tunnel, the primitive repertoire of shipyard sounds (clanking, whirring, knocking) comes as something of a shock' Photograph: Nick Wadley

'This is the moment when you learn surgery is inevitable. If the consultant is kindly, the impression he gives of personal concern coincides closely enough with your own urgent need for comfort to reignite those feelings of intimacy. These illusions recur throughout the hospital experience – intense bonds of dependence with doctors, nurses, physios, everyone, that feel mutual, but seldom are' Photograph: Nick Wadley

'Putting on the blue gown, you abandon your independent identity and become a patient. Everything else follows from that moment, observed by you as if through a state of trance: the label on your wrist; the anaesthetist’s visit; signing the consent form … ' Photograph: Nick Wadley

' … the trolley pushed by an anonymous porter down endless identical corridors; the cool, business-like mood through the swing-doors of the theatre, which continues around you as you slip away under the anaesthetic, almost unnoticed … ' Photograph: Nick Wadley

'The passage between waking in the recovery room and waking again in the ward is one continuous haze of drugged semi-consciousness. From this state spring the intense alliances with caring nurses, who know how much and what you need within reach at night, where you want pillows, tissues, pencil and paper, a spare bottle for urine – all matters of life and death. The nurse who understands is your close ally. Nowhere outside the theatre of man + doctor do such concentrated personal dramas have so short a run' Photograph: Nick Wadley

'Daily ward rounds are a processional display of deference to the surgeon. You may remember the question you wanted to ask this god. You probably won’t remember his answer' Photograph: Nick Wadley

'Drawing is a familiar, everyday activity for me – even lying at 10 degrees for three days. Making these drawings helped to keep at bay the solitude which they parody' Photograph: Nick Wadley

'This drawing was made in 2011 after five days in a coma, suspended between life and death, during my last, ghastly spell in hospital. It's clear from the artlessness of the marks on paper how much coordination between eye and brain and hand I still had to recover' Photograph: Nick Wadley

This is about the feeling of liberation from hospital – escaping into the real world again, relatively unscathed. I think the blue bird who appears in several drawings must be Jasia, who was and is always there Photograph: Nick Wadley