A lot of them had gone abroad - doctors did in those days. So the long promised reunion party for the millennium would have to be called a conference. That way it could be tax deductible for anyone coming from the US.
The conference part need not be too strictly adhered to, a meeting and discussion about the state of medicine generally would do it - as just a formula. Then they could get down to looking at each other, examining hair loss, weight gain, and career profile.
It would be fascinating to see whether the real college Romeos had continued along that path, if the seriously ambitious had got their consultancies or their tenure in universities.
There's always somebody who acts as a kind of clearing house and in this case it was Nora, who knew everyone's address and kept them in touch with each other. Not because she had a sad, lonely life and this was some kind of therapy for her. On the contrary, she was as busy a doctor as any of them; it was just that she liked the linking-up bit.
She was in charge of finding the so-called conference centre and hotel accommodation for them all during the great reunion weekend. She knew who was married and who would be bringing children and who had a partner or would be saying with relations.
Nora kept them all in touch. They wondered whether the two couples who had married while still in medical school had stood the test of time, whether the quiet ones who had never gone to the pub had loosened up a bit and if those who had perhaps gone to the pub rather too much had cut down.
It would all become clear at the millennium. Over the years, as they sent each other Christmas cards and sometimes those general, universal-style letters, they made jokes about hoping they would recognise each other when they met in the year 2000. Everyone would be 60-something. An awesome thought.
But plans change and their celebration has to be a little earlier - like a year earlier. Nora, so used to telling bad news to others in a surgery or by a hospital bed, has now heard her own, bad diagnosis.
She sort of knew it was coming, but still, the day it was confirmed it was a shock. The kind man who told her had been a colleague and friend from the very early days when they had all started pre-med together.
"I'll miss the millennium party," Nora said. That was her immediate reaction to being told she had six months to live. Nothing about leaving the husband she had loved for years or about not seeing her children grow up and marry, or not knowing her grandchildren.
Not a word about it being unfair that someone who had taken good care of herself and others should have to leave life so early. Just a ludicrous sentence of regret about a gathering of people who were by now, realistically, only strangers united in a common memory of having trained together. So the doctor who was holding her hand and who knows how grief and shock takes people in different ways heard himself saying it was ridiculous to be doctrinaire about some old date and the party could just as easily be held this year as next.
Nora protested, it had always been arranged for the millennium, she said - people had made plans: she had the file, she knew. "Give me the file," said the other doctor.
It's easier nowadays to get in touch with 50 people all over the world - almost everyone has email, a fax or a phone. He told the story simply. Wouldn't it be better to say a cheerful farewell to Nora now than to have a sad wake for her later?
He didn't need to reassure them she would be able for it, they knew that. And apart from one or two who have had difficulty rescheduling real and genuine conferences where they were speaking, everyone is coming. Accommodation has been arranged, the cocktails-cum-conference meeting and group photograph slotted in from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., a dinner booked that night. There will be a lunch the next day following a bus-tour of Dublin to show the emigrants what it's like now.
In a light-hearted but sincere letter to them all, Nora explained she was sorry to change everyone's arrangements but that since her own had been changed so drastically, she really appreciated them fitting in so easily.
She has had wonderful letters. One from a woman who said the earlier date was wonderful for her, she had decided to end a 20-year-old rift with her family - it seemed unimportant now compared with Nora's news. Her family had been ecstatic and were welcoming her home warmly.
One from a doctor, now a recovering alcoholic, who said he had been told there were only so many bottles of whiskey a man could drink in his lifetime and he had drunk all his. He had decided to see the virtue in this pronouncement and thought he had got to the finishing-post, drink-wise, before everyone else - as if it were some kind of race. Let it be the same with the millennium, he said - they were just forward-looking people so they were celebrating it early. That's all.
Every day the letters come in. Because they are all doctors, they give no false hopes, no miracle cures and no "Prayers Never Known to Fail".
Instead, they give solidarity, an affirmation that a life looking after the sick was a good life and a sympathetic but practical reference to the irritating fact that we are not immortal. Nora's family, having now accepted the shock that she will not see much of l999, is delighted this early millennium is happening. Happy she will not miss what she has been planning for so long, but particularly pleased that professional men and women all over the world should regard friendship as much, much more important than sticking rigidly to a particular date.