Patients of a Saint

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

The doctor's practice, first introduced in No White Coat and again in Love on my List, is expanding. He finds himself buckling under the strain of an increased workload and the demands of his exuberant twins.

His wife, Sylvia, persuades him to take a much-needed break and he realises that it is time to find an assistant. This proves to be a difficult task, but once he has found the right man, the doctor has more time to devote to individual patients and to his family.

Into this busy environment arrives the doctor's alluring cousin Caroline. On a study visit from the US, she invites herself to stay for six months - a situation which causes much chaos and hilarity.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 180

Sample

“You don’t look at all well, Doctor!”

It was this remark repeated many times and with variants ranging from ‘You look proper peaky’ to ‘Reckon you could do with one of your own bottles’ that led me, after almost eight years of General Practice to turn firmly in my tracks and take stock of the situation. Who was I and what was I doing? What did I want and where was I going? One more sneaking question: was it a sign of advancing age that led me to ask these semi-philosophical and utterly sober questions? Reluctant to believe that this was in fact the case, I cast round in my mind for one of the customary light-hearted and flippant answers I kept for problems of this sort but to my dismay I found, like Mother Hubbard, that the cupboard was completely bare. It was painfully obvious that the stocktaking, if it was to be done, would have to be carried out on a more serious level.


The first two questions were not difficult to answer. I was an ordinary sort of chap to whom the age of forty no longer seemed like the end of the world but was still sufficiently far away to joke about, I was married to a girl who after a spate of six years was still to me the loveliest thing that ever drew breath, and I had a pair of normal, revolting-wonderful five-year-old children.

What was I doing?


I was responsible for the health of over three thousand seven hundred individuals who were registered with me under the National Health Service and I was attempting (and at times it was no more than an attempt) single-handed, day and night to cope with their needs. On paper it looked ridiculous; in practice it was more so and accounted for the loss of weight, pallor and irritability that the patients, with their usual perspicacity and diagnostic skill, had begun to comment upon.


What did I want?

To my surprise I was no longer able to answer this question. My brain had become a kind of deadly merry-go-round in which how to see more patients in less time, how to cut the corners on my visiting list and how to avoid leaving my bed in the night on the greatest number of occasions seemed to be the monotonously recurring factors. Peu à peu, as they say, and virtually without noticing it my professional life had been reduced to a blur. As for where I was going, I no longer knew or cared. I was too tired.


One dreary Monday which as far as work was concerned had started at five in the morning and at nine in the evening had not yet finished, I came out of the surgery and took a long look at myself in the mirror above the morning-room mantelpiece.

I had just stuck out my tongue to its maximum extent and was examining what appeared to be a perfectly normal larynx and at the same time feeling tenderly for any enlarged cervical glands, when Sylvia came in.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said.

“I’m overworking!”

The bombshell fell in silence. I replaced my tongue and looked round prepared to justify my shattering statement. Sylvia was writing names in two new, shiny black pairs of Wellington boots with a Biro as if she hadn’t heard.


“I said I’m overworking!”

“I heard you.”

“Mrs Theobald says I look pale.”

No comment.

I pulled at the waistband of my trousers. If I took a deep breath I could just get my hand in between the material and my shirt.

“And I seem to have lost weight lately,” I said pathetically.

The pathos fluttered away and disappeared in the lack of response.

“Sylvia,” I said, buttoning my jacket and assuming the role of lord and master, “I don’t know if I’m imagining things but I appear to be talking to you tonight through an impenetrable curtain. Are you with me or are you not?”

“There’s nothing the matter with me,” she said.

“Well, what’s the matter with me?”

“You’d better ask Mrs Theobald.”

“Sylvia, I’m tired and if I don’t go and give Mrs Calthorpe her injection soon she’ll be climbing up the wall. Stop niggling me and tell me what it’s all about.”

“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you. When I married you you were a reasonably good-looking, cheerful, happy, well-adjusted General Practitioner. Look at you now!”

“I just looked,” I said.

“I don’t mean your tongue. I mean you.” She looked me up and down. “Sunken-cheeked, shabby, long-haired, shiny suited, paunchy, harassed, bad-tempered.”

“Well!” I said. But she hadn’t finished. She stood up, waving a Wellington boot at me threateningly.

“And that’s not all! You’ve a wife and two perfectly adequate children but no one would think so. You’ve scarcely spoken to us for weeks and as for your sense of humour I think you buried it with old Mr Thomas six months ago.”


“The winter’s always my busiest time,” I said in mitigation.

“Nonsense! It might have been in the old days but now it’s exactly the same all year round. If I’d wanted to be married to a miserable, humourless, overworked hack I would have looked for one in the first place.”

“It’s not even as if we have anything to show for it,” I said.

“That’s beside the point. And if you’d let me finish…”

“I thought you had.”

“Well I haven’t. I was about to say that I’ve been telling you all this for months and you’ve taken no notice whatsoever, but immediately Mrs Theobald, or whatever her name is, happens to say you look pale you start getting anxious and sticking your tongue out in front of the mirror. I would simply like to remind you, while I seem to have your attention, that you don’t happen to be married to the National Health Service, nor to Mrs Theobald.”

Sylvia sat down with a thump and left me standing like a naughty schoolboy in the middle of the room.

“Do you remember how we used to laugh?” I said, sitting beside her.

She put down the Wellington and looked at me.

“When people said funny things.” She wasn’t angry any more.

“Miss Jackson who wanted a sediment because she couldn’t sleep.”

“And Mrs Gibbs who told you the gland doctor said she had something wrong with her obituary…”

“And when I asked old Miss Parker to show me her teeth and she whipped them out and put them on my desk…” I thought for a moment. “I just don’t seem to see the funny side any more.”


“You haven’t time.”

“I know.”

“Well, we’ll have to do something.”

“What?”

“Well, to begin with…” Sylvia said, and then the telephone rang. It was the Reverend Barker ten miles away in Essex with pains in his chest, and I hadn’t time to hear how we were to begin.

With the passing of years, my practice had gradually become more widespread. It had started off neatly and conveniently in a rough circle whose radius extended a mile or two only from my surgery which was attached to the house. As time went by and my patients either outgrew their houses or for some reason or other decided to move, they would ask me, having become accustomed to my ways, whether I would continue to look after them in the district to which they were going. If it was not an unreasonable distance I usually said yes. Those who cared enough about me to ask me to remain their family doctor were usually those people to whom over the years I had become quite attached – in the beginning I was most flattered that they preferred my attentions rather than welcoming a change of medical practitioner. Now, however, things had developed so rapidly that the extent of my practice could no longer be clearly defined and, as in the case of the Reverend Barker, I found myself, usually at the most inconvenient moments, doing visits ten and even fifteen miles away.

The Reverend Barker was, as he put it, ‘living on tick’; only it wasn’t a washing-machine or a television he was borrowing, but his life. When I first started in practice he had a small living in the district. He had a wife and five children, but I rarely saw them, although they were on my list, because they were both considerate and healthy. One hot Saturday afternoon about three years earlier, little Christine Barker had knocked on our door with a polite message from her mother that they hated to bother me but her father had been mowing the lawn when suddenly he had a severe pain in his chest, felt ill and was now lying on the sofa. Would it be too much trouble…? But already my geiger counter was ticking furiously. “I shan’t be long,” I remember saying to Sylvia. “Reverend Barker’s had a coronary.” It wasn’t a spot diagnosis without having seen the patient; nor yet a shot, blindly, in the dark. Neither could it in any sense be called intuition. It was just that after a certain number of years in General Practice events began to form a pattern, the higgledy-piggledy train of apparently unconnected happenings to take shape. It wasn’t just the polite little picture Christine Barker had painted; it was the whole set-up I was taking into account and it was one I had seen, unfortunately, too many times. A hitherto healthy male, age between forty and fifty, harassed and overworked, sudden physical exertion, severe pain in the chest region… I could have been wrong but I didn’t think I would be. I wasn’t. A few weeks later, when the Reverend was convalescing and I was paying him a routine visit, he said to me:


“Let us discuss things, Doctor.”

He was sitting up in bed and I was putting away my sphygmomanometer.

“Certainly,” I said. “What things?”

“The prognosis. I did not get to meet my Maker this time. I should like to know, in your opinion, how long it will be before I have the pleasure of doing so.”

He betrayed no more emotion than if he were discussing an invitation to the Church Bazaar.


“You mustn’t worry about things like that,” I said. “You’ll be fine in a few weeks. Of course you’ll have to take things more easily…”

“I’m not in the slightest bit worried,” he said, “you must know that. It’s simply that I have to make plans. I have six dependants. If you would entrust me with them I would prefer to have facts rather than placation. I must make my arrangements and I have seen enough of my parishioners with this complaint to know that I may have to leave this world a little sooner than I anticipated.”

“I wish more of my patients had your courage, Reverend,” I said.

He looked surprised. “It’s not courage,” he said, “it’s faith and its available to all.”

Since the Reverend Barker was one of the few patients who were able to look it in the face with equanimity, I decided it would be best to tell him the truth. His coronary thrombosis had been a severe one and it was likely that, in the not too distant future, he would have another. I advised him to cut down on his activities and painted the prognosis, which was not very bright, as lightly as I could.

It was like advising a fish to stop swimming. The Reverend Barker was quite incapable of cutting down on his activities; if anything, he increased his efforts to safeguard the future of his family. When he was offered, a year or so later, a large and important living in Essex, he had no hesitation in accepting it. When he outlined the duties it brought with it in addition to the extra salary, I said:

“You know it will probably kill you.” But he replied:

“It is a call from God.”

And now it seemed that his coronary circulation had let him down again; I was surprised that it hadn’t happened before.


It took me about twenty minutes to get to the Barkers’ house in Essex, but there was no panic when I arrived. The house was larger than the one they had had previously but there were no more concessions to comfort. The Reverend Barker never grumbled, nor complained, nor even mentioned it to me but I knew that there simply wasn’t the money, for all his hard work, for there to be.

Mrs Barker told me that her husband had gone to bed early complaining of fatigue. Just before she rang me, he had had an attack of pain similar to his previous one.

She led the way up the uncarpeted stairs to the large bedroom which said more volubly than any words that here there was not a spare penny for anything other than the barest essentials of existence.

The Reverend Barker was too ill to talk. I did what was necessary then went downstairs with his wife.

“Another attack?” she said.

“I’m afraid it is.”

“Will he be all right?”

“I think he will this time,” I said. “Although it’s difficult to be absolutely sure.”

I told her to ring me if she was worried during the night, and that if I hadn’t heard from her before I would see her husband again in the morning.

“I’m sorry,” I said at the door by way of comfort.

Mrs Barker smiled. “The Lord will provide,” she said. And as I went down the garden path, stumbling, for there was no light, I realised that she was comforting me.

I dealt with Mrs Calthorpe on my way back, and with two other visits which had come in during the evening Surgery.

When I got home Sylvia was in bed, reading. While I undressed I told her about the Reverend Barker. She always took a personal interest in the patients, and I liked to keep her up to date so that when I was out she could deal with the telephone calls and assess, in the light of her knowledge, their urgency.


“Is he still so complacent about it all?” Sylvia asked.

“About what?”

“Dying.”

“He was too ill. His wife was, though.”

“Aren’t they lucky. It gives me the heeby-jeebies.”

“Perhaps you should go to church more often.”

“When do you suggest? Sunday mornings are getting almost as busy as Mondays. Which brings me to what we were talking about earlier on.”

I yawned and got into bed, checking up that my torch and jersey, in case of night calls, were in situ.

“Yes. I’m curious to hear what plans you have buzzing round in that pretty little head of yours.”

I lay back on the pillow, luxuriating.

“Well, to begin with –” Sylvia said. There was a knocking, like a persistent mouse, at the door.

“Yes?”

The handle jiggled a few times, then the door opened slowly. A small head appeared, its hair sticking up in short, dark spikes, its face sleep-rumpled.

“Daddy?”

“Well?”

He padded over to the bed, uncertain of his welcome.

“Penny’s firsty!”

“So?”

He looked surprised. “She wants a grink.”

It was a curious thing about the twins. They ran errands for each other like Ike and Mike. If Penny was thirsty Peter was the courier. If Peter discovered a hole in his sheet, Penny would bear the terrible news. They were a sort . . .