I was hired to sit with a man the doctors said had five days left. One night I laid my teething baby on his chest — and his fingers moved. Then he whispered: don’t tell anyone I’m awake.

I noticed that my own chart had gaps in it that I had not left.

I noticed that a doctor who visits three times a week had never once asked me a question about the patient, which is not how any of the other ones behave.

They ask. Every single one of them asks. Has he been settled, is he taking fluids, has anything changed.

Not because they are warm. Because the carer is the only person in the building who has seen the patient for more than eleven minutes.

A doctor who does not ask the carer anything is a doctor who does not want to know what the carer has seen.

I knew that in week two. I have known that since my first placement, and I could have written it on a form in a sentence, and instead I wrote no change nineteen times in my own handwriting.

And I said nothing.

For four weeks. Twelve visits.

I am going to set out exactly what saying something would have cost, because I could have lost my job is too clean and it lets me off.

The agency has a whistleblowing line. It is on a poster in their office, which I have been to twice.