Doctors & Nurses

by Lucy Ellmann

  Jen had also proved invaluable to the ward sister, Urma Thurb, to whom she brought secret nips of WHISKY, and Take a Break magazine hot off the press. They ate lunch together, Urma Thurb pecking at a blueberry yoghurt while Jen chomped through some of the many cheese sandwiches she kept in her voluminous handbag. Jen had formed a rather profound ATTACHMENT to Urma Thurb, in fact. HAPPY DAYS, until Urma Thurb went and married TONY, the hospital ODD-JOB MAN, and started spending more and more time at home, making CUSTARD by CANDLELIGHT, or whatever it is wifelets DO.

  Jen was left high and dry! She was always getting involved this way with women she admired and subsequently HATED. Abandoned by Urma Thurb, Jen wandered through the X-ray department during her spare time, hoping to soak up some leaked radiation, or sat alone in the salmonella-rife canteen, slouched over egg dishes. She charted and chased the spread of MRSA infections through the hospital, in an effort to CATCH one and get a bit of SYMPATHY and a few days off. She failed. Her only triumph was when she managed to persuade a gullible surgeon to take out her perfectly healthy APPENDIX, a painful ordeal that Jen appreciated in complex ways. She played with the wound afterwards, inserting various dirty objects and substances to make it worse. But it healed.

  When Urma Thurb switched officially to part-time work, Jen resorted to hanging around the sperm-donor unit, sucking the cocks of junior doctors to help them augment their tiny incomes. (They, and Urma Thurb, were responsible for the somewhat ambivalent REFERENCES that now lurked, damp but intact, in a commodious compartment of her cargo pants.)

  Oh, Jen had once been the life and soul of the PARTY! During all-night sessions in the nurses’ digs in her student days, Jen had taken on a quarter or fifth of those present, in her mouth, her cunt, or her ass. She’d been rammed up against the back of a motorway CAR-WASH once, by three or four smiling lorry drivers she never saw again. She’d been fucked by a whole QUEUE of guys in the park! She had even entered upon a tricky, sort of ICKY, affair with an ageing OSTEOPATH who’d daily screwed her senseless, beaten her with an ornate Tibetan hammer, and told her when to go to the LOO. She’d plunged her whole face into many a fleshy VULVA too.

  Aeroplanes

  A door was suddenly flung open halfway down the corridor (five). A woman came rushing out in tears and nearly crashed into JEN. Another candidate for the nurse’s job? What had they DONE to her in there? Jen was about to turn on her heels, her sore HEELS, and quietly retreat, back to the WOMB if necessary. But a man was already bellowing, ‘NEXT!’ Always there is duty.

  Conscious of her blunt and bloated form, the dark thicket of hair obscuring the CLIFF FACE of her forehead, her tiny mouth, unintentionally smug, puckered between ballooning cheeks, Jen advanced down the corridor (seven) to the open doorway. But there was no firing squad in there after all, just a guy up a ladder, painting the ceiling! Must be the wrong room. Jen was about to waddle back out into the corridor (eight), when the man on the ladder said, without looking at Jen, ‘Never mind her, silly woman. All I said was that she should lose some weight! Obesity is the biggest strain on NHS resources. Have a seat. Hope you don’t mind if I just finish this before the paint dries. Everything looks better with a nice new coat of white paint, don’t you think? Now, what seems to be the problem?’

  So he was the DOCTOR. And he seemed to think Jen was a PATIENT! Eager to correct this mistake (who wants to be a patient?), Jen stumbled towards what looked like a chair, hidden under a dustsheet. Her stumble was nothing to do with OBESITY or varicose veins or sciatica or lumbago or rickets or torn ligaments or even OSGOOD-SCHLATTER disease. Jen stumbled because she had recognised the man on the ladder! He was the HERO OF THE HOUR on a plane trip she’d taken a few years before!

  AEROPLANES HAVE RUINED THE WORLD. They are the source of all human misery. Not just because of their primarily MILITARY purpose, nor the pollution and the solid blocks of frozen SHIT they rain down on us, nor how horrifically they crash, when they do. Nor is it the lethal trolleys full of lethal FOOD that catapult over everybody during thunderstorms. Nor the reclining seats, that recline your stupid head right into the lap of the jerk sitting behind you. Nor is it because of the CHEESY SNAX they give you whether you like cheese or not. Nor the TB you catch from the so-called VENTILATION system, nor the VD you get from the Mile High Club, nor the DVT that gets YOU if you forget to put on your deep-vein-thrombosis SOCKS.

  No. The worst thing about aeroplanes is that, BECAUSE of them, you are expected to attend every goddamn wedding, funeral, baby shower, circumcision and retirement do on the PLANET, depending on where your friends and relatives have decided to live, die, quit or get married. BECAUSE OF AEROPLANES you have to drag your sorry ass to every dumb party these people put on! Or they come to YOU. If you’re really unlucky, the American PRESIDENT flies in clutching a plastic turkey on a tray. Aeroplanes show no mercy.

  It is OBSCENE, is it not, to be sucked across an entire CONTINENT without seeing a single flower or a bird (FUCK Lake Tahoe FUCK the Alps), just so that you can GET somewhere and VISIT somebody and eat and eat until you EXPLODE, the shit backed up in there for MILES because you never feel at ease in your relative’s BATHROOM.

  Jen was on her way home from the HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATION of some DISTANT COUSIN in California. There she was, sprawled across three seats, minding her own business, watching a Bruce Willis movie and wearing her deep-vein-thrombosis socks, when a stewardess ran shrieking down the aisle, warning people that there was a woman at the front of the plane who had a GUN and was threatening to shoot all the CHILDREN.

  Great. So, along with the radiation exposure and economy-class AIR and Bruce Willis (you can’t hear a THING that guy SAYS on a plane, he mumbles so), Jen was now expected to allow herself to be MURDERED. And all because her distant cousin hadn’t managed to screw up high school.

  Jen grabbed the first kid that came along, to use as a HUMAN SHIELD. If the gun-woman came her way, she was hoping to DISTRACT her with the KID, thereby gaining crucial time for her own cumbrous getaway. Jen held on to that kid for an HOUR (his mother had no idea what had HAPPENED to him!) but there was still no sign of the gun-woman, no slaughtering of innocents, no loss of CABIN PRESSURE. Not even any cheesy snax! Like all emergency situations, there were longueurs.

  Jen finally abandoned her kid shield (now either asleep or unconscious from being squeezed so hard) and wandered up to the front to see what was going on. A crowd had gathered in the galley amongst all the lethal trolleys and secret stashes of barbiturates for the stewardesses. At the centre of it was a DOCTOR who, it seemed, had SINGLE-HANDEDLY wrestled the gun-toting woman to the floor, snatched her weapon (a fake revolver she’d got in Disneyland), tied her up, sedated her, and even listened to her HARD-LUCK STORY until she conked out. He was the HERO OF THE HOUR: he had risked his life to save the plane!!!

  Intrigued, Jen pressed through the throng, pushing a few people OVER to get a glimpse of the daring doc. He had blond hair and grey eyes and a cleft chin and trim waist and hips! He was also nicely SILHOUETTED against a porthole, as he patiently answered a lot of damn fool questions (these were not MEDICAL people) about the woman and her motives and her MOTHER (she apparently thought she’d SPOTTED her mother outside the plane somewhere over Greenland, and had wanted to shoot all the children to PROTECT them from her mother). The doctor was sharing several theories he’d just formulated about the woman, mothers, Disneyland (HE’D been there too!), the effects of high altitudes on the human psyche, and other two-bit notions until everybody was SICK of the woman and her fucking childhood, even a bit sick of the DOCTOR. Civilians are so FICKLE.

  As people began to drift back to their seats and Bruce Willis, Jen was able to get closer to the doctor, JEN, who was suffering GUT ACHE, so keen was she to get the Hero of the Hour into one of the aeroplane LOOS. She had always been susceptible to GLORY and, in particular, doctors in EMERGENCY SITUATIONS. Sure enough, the obliging doc was soon in the loo, clutching at Jen’s enormous ass with the compulsive gestures of a hero in the thr
oes of passion in very cramped conditions. It was all over in a JIFFY, too soon to catch a disease or each other’s name.

  The Job Interview

  Jen didn’t see the dishy doc again during the flight, so she hadn’t incurred the usual REBUFF (few were not immediately ashamed of having fucked her), and was therefore able to consider the encounter a TRIUMPH, requiring frequent RE-ENACTMENTS (no KNOWING how much masturbation it takes to keep a vessel like Jen afloat). And now here he was in a RURAL BACKWATER, held aloft on a cloud of whiteness – his white coat, his white paint – as he restored his ceiling to its original and much-deserved PALLOR. He, all unknowing and immersed in his paint job, did not even glance at Jen. SHE, plopping into a chair, had no interest in being HIRED any more, only DESIRED.

  ‘So – what seems to be the problem?’ he asked again.

  The art of flirtation has taken many a knock. There wasn’t much left of it in Jen besides sweat, the odd LEER, and smalltalk bordering on the INSANE. But she did her best.

  ‘Well, you see, doctor, it’s my ASS.’

  He turned, astounded, took in her gargantuan form and, whether from chagrin at his previous speech on obesity, or just dread of having to examine THAT ASS, he swayed, hollered, lost his balance and fell – into Jen’s LAP, along with his pot of white paint. From there he slid awkwardly to the floor. The paint swirling between her legs looked like CREAM: Jen was tempted to lick it up, but duty called. She reached down to wrench the squirming doctor back into an upright position.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked as she yanked.

  ‘Are YOU?’ he quirked. Doctors quirk a LOT. Nobody knows exactly what quirking IS, or why they do it; it’s just a medical fact.

  Jen began dabbing at his hair with a dustsheet. He was about to do the same to JEN when Francine, the evil receptionist (every GP has one), came in carrying a tray of tea and biscuits. Good medical practice revolves around plenty of hot drinks, accompanied by BICKIES and CHOCKIES (donated by duped, grateful or bamboozled patients), and CIGGIES. When not providing such delicacies, Francine busied herself dissuading people from making APPOINTMENTS – unless they were actually DYING (in which case they were unlikely to attend). She was FAMOUS for the sheer number of weeping mothers she’d managed to turn away, along with their feverish infants. Now she made herself useful by formally introducing Jen to the doctor.

  He recovered as best he could from his fall and the revelation that Jen was not another boring PATIENT (she looked sick enough!) but instead the only candidate for the nursing job. Jen was dismayed by something else. She didn’t like his NAME: Roger Lewis. A name full of anticlimax, full of COLLAPSE, the sexual explicitness of the ROGER so quickly refuted by the loose, limp LEWIS, which sounds like ‘less’. UNHAPPY NAME, an injunction to FUCK LESS!

  Anita LOOS is a name with some VITALITY. Roger Lewis sounds like something WINDING DOWN, dwindling to nothing! Like goldfish shit, it TRAILS disappointingly: Lewissssssss. A name that contains its own HECKLE, its own hiss. A name empty of promise, hope or joy! No good can come of a name like ROGER LEWIS. No PHILANTHROPIST ever came with a name like that, no CASANOVA. (Also, Jen had a little problem with her R’s, which meant that, without supreme EFFORT on her part, there would be two W’s in his name whenever she pronounced it, which is far too many. Woger Lewis: wimpy, weasly, woebegone words!)

  Paint had by now curdled in every crevice of her cargo pants. But Jen was used to feeling sodden, and at least this time she would leave a puddle of PAINT in her chair when she got up, not SWEAT. It even occurred to her that Dr Lewis might feel he HAD to give her the job now, out of shame at having soaked her! The thought was cheering. But she was still disconcerted by his failure to RECOGNISE her. Perhaps he never would!?

  His aloofness chilled her, but the tea warmed her. Then the coffee. Then more TEA. And still the hot drinks kept coming, along with the doctor’s probing QUESTIONS, as he delineated one onerous nursy task after another in excruciating detail. What’s a girl to DO when a fellow drones on so? A SNORE erupted from Jen, which drew the interview at last to a close.

  Rising from his swivel seat, Dr Lewis gave Jen a poke on the shoulder and asked, ‘How would you like to see the flat that comes with the job?’

  A little annoyed at first at being woken from such a pleasant snooze, Jen followed Dr Lewis out into the corridor (eleven) and waited while he unlocked a door and trotted down some steep steps to switch the lights on. Jen was not all that keen on the idea of living ON THE PREMISES. She’d assumed she’d have to rent some revolting BEDSIT with FARM CHILDREN picking their noses outside her window all day, but at least she’d have privacy in which to EAT amply, away from the stern gaze of COLLEAGUES. She didn’t want Woger and Fwancine to hear her evewy FART late into the night! (Also, living on the premises is always an invitation to your employer to work you like a DOG.)

  When he called her, she tremulously tiptoed down the stairs. She expected to find a fully equipped TORTURE CHAMBER down there. Who wants to live in a BASEMENT? Jen was prepared for ropes, chains, a hanging CAGE, she was prepared to be MURDERED. But it turned out to be a small, plain, one-bedroom flat, the kind of place in which an abstemious single woman might eat a soft-boiled egg and consider herself LUCKY, the radio on softly in the background and her underpants drying over a sink full of TEA LEAVES.

  Dr Lewis led Jen into the gloomy bathroom where he proudly pointed out the jacuzzi. ‘One of the perks of the job,’ he quirked. ‘Besides working with me, that is!’

  Jen WAS impressed with the jacuzzi – unlike most baths it looked big enough to accommodate her! She looked up at Dr Lewis hungrily (she’d only had about a dozen biscuits) and asked, ‘Does this mean you’re offering me the job?’

  ‘No one else applied!’ he burbled happily.

  This wasn’t entirely true. There had been a few other applicants but, after listening to Dr Lewis explain every damn thing over the phone for hours at a time, none of them had turned up for the interview! Anyway, he didn’t WANT them. There was something about Jen, something ENORMOUS, something unfathomable. Staring across the jacuzzi at Jen’s JACKSIE, Dr Lewis decided that one day he would indulge in vigorous sexual intercourse with this woman, making use of both the front bottom and the back!

  For the ANIMAL in Dr Lewis wanted to PEE in exultation at having found a new nurse – he planned to work her like a DOG. The animal in JEN wanted to grab Dr Lewis by the scruff of the neck, haul him off to a corner of her den and EAT him.

  There was a good deal of common ground between them.

  Jen’s Body

  Embryos are all HYALINE CARTILAGE, and Jen was no exception. Within a month of her conception she was a quarter of an inch long and her heart was beating. A month later, she had eyes but no eyelids. A week later she had inner ears.

  How can you just HATE all this? But she does.

  By the time she was born Jen had three hundred and fifteen bones. When she reached full skeletal maturity at the age of twenty, she had two hundred and six! (She didn’t LOSE any, they just joined together a bit over the years.) Only about half of the twenty-nine bones in Jen’s head are in her FACE. Her skull is a little dented from a tumble she took on a train as a baby.

  She’s got trapezoid, trapezium, scaphoid, lunate, pisiform, triquetral, capitate, hamate, metacarpal and phalanx bones in her hands, one finger slightly shorter than it should be (she got it caught in a car door at the age of eleven). Her sacrum’s connected to her ilium’s connected to her pubis’s connected to her acetabulum’s connected to the balls of her femurs, the longest bones in Jen’s body. Jen’s got an ISCHIUM in her ASS! Then there’s her patella and her tibia and her fibula and her FEET (her sore feet!), which have all the usual astragalus, metatarsal, calcaneum, navicular, cuneiform, cuboid, trochlea and phalanx bones.

  Padding the junctions, as Jen pads about, is more CARTILAGE. There’s not much room in Jen’s hands for MUSCLES, so ligaments pull her fingers around. Ligaments also hold her WOMB in place, her breasts (somewhat), and
the lenses of her EYES. She’s got sinews and tendons too. She’s got it all! There’s a tendon in Jen’s heart that makes it PUMP. Selfish heart! It pumps blood to ITSELF first.

  You could divide Jen up in various ways. Her body is maintained by a number of interrelated SYSTEMS: digestive, excretory, respiratory, reproductive, skeletal, integument (skin), muscular, endocrine, cardiovascular, and lymph-vascular. Also TISSUES, plenty of tissues. And MEMBRANES: synovial membranes and serous membranes and mucous membranes and villi and meninges and PERIOSTEUM.

  There are a lot of PROCESSES going on in her too: circulation and ovulation and acidosis and agglutination and dyscrasia and desquamation and catabolism and anabolism and homeostasis and haemolysis and miosis and osmosis and oxidation and filtration and dilation and salivation and depolarisation and ossification and supination and ptosis and proprioception and GOOSEBUMPS and perspiration and pigmentation and presbyacusis and a permanently runny nose and electrical stuff going on in her head and coagulation and KIDNEYS.

  Jen’s kidneys are full of tiny TUBES, so many tubes! Each of her kidneys has thousands of NEPHRONS, that contain a knot of CAPILLARIES called a GLOMERULUS, which sits inside a BOWMAN’S CAPSULE, shaped something like a HUNTING HAT (but without the feather). Jen’s blood is filtered through these capillaries at A LITRE A MINUTE, twelve hundred litres a DAY. She is tenacious of life!

  Jen’s liver weighs four pounds and produces BARRELLOADS of bile, stored by the BUSHEL in Jen’s gall bladder. Her bile is released into her small intestine through her Sphincter of Oddi. Enzymes and alkaline juices come out of her Crypts of Lieberkühn to neutralise her stomach acid. Her Islets of Langerhans produce insulin. She’s got six salivary glands and between them they squirt out about THIRTY PINTS of saliva a WEEK (MORE if she sees cake).

  Jen’s oesophagus is ten inches long; her duodenum too. Jen’s jejunum’s EIGHT FEET, her ilium’s twelve. Her colon’s about four and a half. There are ACRES of gut in Jen, thirty-five feet of it to be precise, held in place by mesenteries, like PUPPET STRINGS, attached to her peritoneum. (Her appendix is no more.)