Gradually I got things sorted out; relieved those who had waited of their burdens, dovetailed my own methods with the new treatments Faraday had meted out and pacified the chronics. As I did so I became more aware than before what an intuitive thing was general practice.
Now that the number of patients on my list had increased considerably, it was a practical impossibility to carry out a complete and exhaustive physical examination for every sniffle and itch that presented itself in the surgery; particularly when I had twenty to thirty patients to deal with in an hour and a half. This intuition, or possibly sixth sense, was an attribute not easily defined, but one indispensable to any Health Service practitioner to whom the only way to a comfortable living was a list with too many patients on it.
In treating most conditions the methods were clear-cut. A full examination was either patently necessary or not. It was in dealing with the small proportion of borderline cases that this – clairvoyance almost – was of supreme importance. Sometimes it was something in the way the patient described his symptoms to me that made me stop my pen on its way to prescribing a panacea and indicate the examination couch; very often there was nothing at all that I was conscious of that made me prescribe pastilles to suck for six sore throats and refer the seventh for a laryngoscopy to an ear, nose and throat surgeon, whose findings sometimes confirmed my suspicions.
This intuition had always stood me in good stead when the telephone rang in the middle of the night. That, however, was before I was married.
We had been home from our honeymoon for only a few weeks when the phone rang at two o’clock one morning. Sylvia, unused to this rude awakening, screamed and clutched my back. Tearing myself out of her grasp, I picked up the receiver.
“Is that the doctor?”
Grunt.
“This is Mr Meadows.”
Silence.
“Can you come over straight away, Doctor? My wife’s feeling queer.”
“Tell me her symptoms.”
“She can’t breathe properly and she’s got palpitations. She thinks she’s going to die.”
Pause.
“What did you say, Doctor?”
“I didn’t say anything; I was thinking. Mr Meadows of Nuttall Drive?”
“That’s right.”
“Has she any pains anywhere?”
There was a whispered consultation at the other end of the phone.
“No, no pains anywhere, Doctor.”
I thought of Mrs Meadows – a strapping woman, menopausal, and often nervous about herself. This in itself did not mean there was nothing wrong with her, but the symptoms her husband had described did not add up to anything.
“Mr Meadows,” I said; “you tell your wife that there’s nothing the matter with her. She’s not dying and the palpitations will soon pass. Give her a warm drink of milk and one of her pink sleeping tablets. If you’re worried about her in the morning give me a ring.”
When I was back again under the covers Sylvia said: “How do you know there’s nothing the matter with her?”
“It just doesn’t sound like anything.”
“You mean you just don’t want to get out of bed.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I used to think doctors were selfless.”
“Go to sleep,” I said, “and let me worry about the patients.”
There was silence for a few moments. Normally I would have been fast asleep again, but I was wide awake thinking about Mrs Meadows lying breathless on her bed when Sylvia said:
“Suppose she dies and you didn’t go.”
It was a statement rather than a question. I didn’t reply and tried to settle to sleep.
Ten minutes later I was groping for my trousers.
“I’m glad you’re going,” Sylvia said, and snuggled under the bedclothes.
When I got back it was nearly three o’clock. The light was on in the kitchen and my first thought was that I had surprised burglars. I closed the front door quietly, picked up my number five iron from my golf bag in the hall and crept towards the intruder. I flung open the kitchen door and found Bridget, fully dressed, her hair in curlers, making toast.
“Holymitherogod!” she gasped, crossing herself. “What do you be doing, Doctor?”
Her eyes were glued to my person, and I suppose I must have presented an odd spectacle with my pyjama legs peeping from beneath my trousers, a ferocious look on my face and a golf club in my hand.
“Never mind me,” I said. “What do you be doing making toast at this hour? Do you know what time it is?”
“I heerd yourself get up,” she said, the toast starting to catch, “and thought you’d be wanting your breakfast.”
I switched off the gas, sent Bridget back to bed and crept upstairs, the horrid smell of burnt toast in my nostrils.
I took my things off and got into bed without putting the light on, and making less noise than a mouse. I did not want to wake Sylvia. When I had settled myself on my pillows she said: “Well?”
“You might have told me you were awake.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“‘Well’ what, anyway?”
“What about Mrs Meadows?”
“Nothing the matter with her. They were both sitting in the kitchen drinking tea and eating Marie biscuits. They were most surprised to see me. Perhaps in future you’ll allow me to deal with patients in my own way.”
Sylvia put her arms round me and warmed my freezing body.
“Sorry, Sweetie,” she whispered.
I grunted ungratefully, but after a few moments responded to her embrace and slept like a log until the unsavoury-looking Bridget placed a cup of stone-cold, beer-like tea by my bed and hurled the newspapers on to my chest.
Before I was married the aftermath of a night call had been entirely my own affair. I was short with the patients in my morning surgery, never talking when a grunt would do, rude to my housekeeper who neither cared nor noticed, and I frequently forgot to shave. Now the lack of sleep resulted in my first row with my wife, and I discovered that as far as marriage was concerned I had much to learn.
It started badly and with my socks. They were the lovat-green ones I always wore with my tweed suit, and they had a hole in them.
“Mrs Little always used to mend my socks,” I said as I hurled them across the dressing-table where Sylvia was doing her face.
“You’ve plenty more in the drawer.” She was dabbing at herself with a tissue.
“Not green ones.”
“Wear grey ones, then. Nobody looks at your socks.”
“That’s not the point. Why can’t you mend them?”
“Nobody should have holes in their socks when they’ve only been married a month. Anyway, with answering the phone and feeding you every five minutes during the day and looking after that stupid Bridget I haven’t exactly had much time.”
“You married me,” I said nastily; “you knew what it was all about, so don’t grumble.”
“Who’s grumbling?” She brushed her hair.
“You are.”
“I’m not, Sweetie. I’m merely explaining why I haven’t mended your green socks.”
The battle of the socks was followed by a frigid silence at the breakfast table and a contest of wills as the telephone rang and, on principle, neither of us would get up to answer it.
“It’s the duty of the doctor’s wife to protect him from the patients,” I growled after the incessant peal had gone on for about three minutes and was giving me a headache. “If I answer it I shall only be rude.”
“Then they’ll see you in your true light,” Sylvia said, and went on eating her toast. “I don’t get appreciated, so I don’t see why I should answer the phone because you’re too lazy to get up.”
The ringing stopped and we waited expectantly for it to start again. Nothing happened. An hour later, when the calls for the day appeared to be non-existent we discovered that Bridget, fed up with the noise, had bravely taken the receiver off and la
id it neatly by the side of the telephone.
Having begun badly, the day did not improve. My plaster scissors were not on my dressings trolley when I needed them but in the kitchen where Sylvia had been cutting Turkish towelling to make rollers, and I had asked a mother to bring her child for vaccination to the surgery and had forgotten to get the vaccine.
By lunch-time the atmosphere had not improved. We ate almost in silence, and feeling at my lowest ebb I decided to sleep for half an hour before I did the afternoon visits. This, however, was not to be.
I was just finishing my pudding when through the window I saw Ted Jenkins, a long-distance lorry driver, stop his ten-ton truck outside the house and hurl himself down the garden path.
“It’s the missus, Doc,” he rasped as I opened the front door. “I jus’ come in for me dinner and she’s sitting in the kitchen bleeding to death. It’s all over the place.” His face was ashen.
“All right, Ted,” I said, “I’ll come straight away. Where does the blood seem to be coming from?”
“Looks like one o’ them veryclose veins,” he said. “She said she knocked it on the dustbin. I bin meanin’ to git a noo one on account of the jagged me’al only I never got round to it, see, what wiv’ the twelve an’ a tanner a week on the telly…”
He saw me make for my car.
“’Op in the lorry, Doc,” he said; “I’ll take yer.”
“All right. Just let me get my case.”
High up in the cockpit of the lorry I shut my eyes as Ted Jenkins manoeuvred the heavy vehicle round the narrow bends and over the unmade roads as though it was a dodgem car.
It was hardly surprising that Ted had been alarmed at what he saw in the kitchen when he had come home for his dinner. There was blood everywhere, pooling on the floor and making a gory spectacle of poor Mrs Jenkins who, pale with shock, was clutching her leg and muttering to the effect that she was losing her “life’s blood.”
She had indeed ruptured a varicose vein, but the situation was not as bad as it looked. Raising the bleeding leg high in the air I got the shaking Ted, who looked nearly as pale as his wife, to hold it there until the vein emptied and the bleeding stopped. While he did this I reassured them both that the patient was nowhere near dying and that blood always looked more than it actually was. To prove it I took some rags from under the sink and mopped some of it up. By the time the leg had stopped bleeding and I had cleared up most of the mess, Ted and his wife were looking a little better.
I strapped the leg, sent Mrs Jenkins up to lie on her bed and told Ted to make her some tea.
When she had gone, Ted, his hands still shaking as he lit the gas, said, “Fanks, Doc. I fought she was a gonner. Didn’t half gimme a turn. Don’t want to lose ’er yet, Doc. Not the old trouble an’ strife.”
I had to smile at Ted’s concern over his “missus.” It was common knowledge that he had a girl in every long-distance port of call and that when he was at home he and Mrs Jenkins did nothing but brawl, to the varied disgust or amusement of the neighbours.
“’Course I don’t say she don’t drive me clean round the bend at times with ’er nag, nag, nag, but I wouldn’t want nuffink to ’appen to ’er. We bin married twenty-five years, Christmas.”
“I don’t know how she’s put up with you for so long,” I said, trying to unstick the strapping from where it had wound itself round my case.
“Ah!” Ted said. “You gotta know ’ow to treat ’em.”
“I suppose you have,” I agreed, thinking of my morning words with Sylvia.
“They’re all of a piece, wimmin,” Ted said from the depths of his vast experience. “You gotta show appreshiashun.” He warmed the teapot expertly and enlarged upon his theme. “It’s like this, see. She gives you a steak an’ kidney pud, fer yer tea. Hard as nails. Well, it’s no good you saying you can’t get yer bloomin’ teef into it, ’cos she’ll blow ’er top about not never knowing when you’re comin’ in, and stoppin’ away nights, and Gawd knows what. You gotta swaller it, see. Tell ’er, ‘That’s a nice piece o’ pastry, Marj,’ an’ nex’ time she’ll try ’arder ’cos she likes yer to say it’s nice, see.”
“I see,” I said. “That’s how it’s done, is it?”
He turned off the gas with a plop.
“Can’t tell me nuffink abaht wimmin,” he said, “not Ted Jenkins. Cuppa?”
“No thanks, Ted,” I said; “I must be off. Give your wife her tea and tell her to come and see me in the surgery tomorrow. Then you’d better run me home.”
Back in my own house I was already feeling less sleepy and I decided to finish the rest of my visits straight away. All the afternoon Ted Jenkins’ words kept sounding in my head: “You gotta show appreshiashun!” I wondered if perhaps he was right.
As I came down the garden path after removing the stitches from little Jenny Hicks’ abdominal wound following her appendicectomy, I notice a large new, shiny black Allard parked outside the house next door, its snub nose looking disdainfully down the street. Out of it, carrying his case, stepped the smarmy Doctor Archibald Compton. I would have ignored him completely had it not been for the fact that people at the house he was going into were my patients. I asked him what he thought he was doing. He said he had been called to see a young lady who was staying with them. Sceptical, I resolved to investigate, and left him, raising his ridiculous bowler hat.
Sitting in my ancient little car, which had served me faithfully and which I had loved for many years, looking at the gleaming behind of the Allard, it occurred to me that if battle were to be done with Archibald Compton I must arm myself with efficient weapons. There was no doubt that my car was not only that of a nobody but was liable to fall to pieces at any time. I would have to consider in the very near future a model more worthy of a successful GP.
By four o’clock, my mood, engendered by the lack of sleep, had completely passed. I felt my old self again, and as I drove towards the house I looked forward to apologising to Sylvia for my churlishness, and perhaps taking some of Ted Jenkins’ advice.
As I opened the front door I heard the high-pitched busy melody of female voices all talking at once. I put my head round the morning-room door and stopped dead. There were three elegant young women with Sylvia; each of whom regarded me with their “doe-eyes” as if I were a piece of cheese. There was tea on the table and delicate-looking little cakes. Nobody offered me anything. Sylvia said: “No more calls, dear,” her voice heavy with meaning, and I gathered that I was “de trop.” They waited politely until I shut the door before they started their girlish squeaking again.
It was cold and deserted in the drawing-room, Bridget was in the kitchen, and I could not very well go and lie on my bed at four o’clock in the afternoon. Feeling fed up, I got into the car again and went down to “Della’s, Iced Cakes a Speciality,” for a cup of tea.
Three
By bed-time I was still annoyed at having had to go out for tea, and all my good resolutions had faded away.
“It must look very strange,” I said to Sylvia as we were getting undressed, “for all the patients to see me having tea at ‘Della’s, Iced Cakes a Speciality,’ when they know I’ve a perfectly good wife at home. I can’t think why you have to ask all those twittering females for tea.”
“Sweetie, they are my friends,” Sylvia said. “I must have some life of my own. You absolutely embarrassed the girls.”
“Embarrassed the girls!” I snorted. “Whose house is this? You forget this is a place of business.”
“How can I forget it?” Sylvia’s voice was rising. “The phone, the door; I haven’t had a decent bath since we’ve lived here because that nitwit of a maid can’t answer the phone. She won’t even hand out the prescriptions at the door; she just giggles and runs away. The only time I get out is when Miss Hornby comes, and that’s only two hours, twice a week; then you complain just because I have a few friends to tea. I don’t want to become an entire recluse, you know.”
I opened my mouth to say I knew i
t was all a mistake. She should never have given up modelling to marry me. That it was obviously no life for her and that she would never settle to it. Then I remembered Ted Jenkins and his philosophy of “appreshiashun.”
“I know,” I said, studiously straightening out my tie, “it’s been pretty rotten for you, darling. I do think you’ve managed marvellously so far, considering you’ve never either run a house or coped with a patient before. The patients all think you’re awfully sweet.”
Sylvia, one stocking on and one stocking off, looked at me incredulously.
I plunged on. “Seriously. They say how kind you sound on the telephone, and helpful when I’m out. They get short shrift from most doctors’ wives, I can tell you.”
She said nothing, regarding me as if I were a little mad. I decided to give the Jenkins technique one more chance, and after that tell her what I thought about her making me look an ass in my own home.
“And the meals,” I said. “If I’d known you were such a good cook I would have forced you to marry me long ago. To think of the times I put up with Mrs Little’s mince, shepherd’s pies and blancmange.” I hung my tie on the rack and looked surrep-titiously over my shoulder. She was coming towards me dangling her stocking.
“Do you really think I’m managing?”
“Superbly.”
“What about the girls to tea?”
“You’re entitled to some relaxation.”
“We should have given you a cup of tea. I was upset because you’d been shouting at me all day.”
“I’m sorry. I’m always irritable when I don’t get enough sleep. You mustn’t take any notice.”
“I made you go out in the night for nothing.”
“You couldn’t help it. I was overzealous myself in the beginning.”
Her arms were round my neck.
“Will I ever make a doctor’s wife?”
“You have, angel.”
“Kiss me,” she said softly. “But first tell me the incubation period for measles so that next time they ring up and ask I shan’t have to bother you.”
Love on My List Page 2
