Bad Case of Loving You

“I thought you might have, I dunno, been into girls before or something,” he muttered.

Time to confess, before Nevins expired from embarrassment. “Yeah, I had a couple of girlfriends in high school.”

He looked at me hopefully. “Did you have sex with them?”

“Sure, as often as I could persuade them to let me. Then I worked out guys were much more my style.”

“I’ve been reading. You know, trying to, um, work things out, and it’s nothing like the books say,” he said, actually daring to look at me. I felt sorry for the poor bloke; Lin presumably had been researching their sex life, too.

I led him further away from the crowd. “What do you want to know?”

“How long does it take for a woman to, um, orgasm?” he whispered.

“Depends,” I said. “One girl was on a hair trigger, just touch her and she went off. Another girl took hours, used to make my jaw ache every time. And we had to be somewhere completely private. I could never grab a quick shag in the loos with her. Does that help?”

He looked relieved and nodded. “And, um, was she very loud?” he asked, going pink again.

“Some people are loud, men as well as women, some are silent. Some you can hardly tell it’s happened. Loud is good,”

I said cheerfully. “Means you’re doing all the right things. You are using contraception, aren’t you?” I said, partly just from the sadistic pleasure of making Nevins colour even more.

He nodded. “Yeah, Rosanna’s doing that. Triphasil. But we’re using condoms for the first cycle, just to be sure.”

I thought briefly about lecturing him on safe sex, but discarded the idea. Lin seemed to be in charge of things, including Nevins.

“If you really want to know any more detail, you probably need to ask someone who isn’t gay,” I said helpfully. “What about Dr. M? I think he’s been married.”

Nevins looked horrorstruck at the suggestion and I left him quietly whimpering at the thought and went back to join Lin.

Perhaps she would ask me new and exciting questions about what men like, questions that I actually knew the answer to.

I stayed close enough to Andrew to be able to ogle him unobtrusively, just for the entertainment value. He was sombre, everyone was, standing around in groups, talking quietly amongst themselves. No mobiles rang, no pagers buzzed, the young woman from the BMA meeting had swollen eyes from crying. I wondered what it felt like to leave your patients like this. I hadn’t really developed a feeling of attachment to any of the patients yet, and I guessed I wouldn’t until I was really working, perhaps on my long placement next term.

I ate my curry sandwich at about eleven, starving as always, and my eyes settled on Andrew. His key was safely on my key ring, the security code for the alarm system was in my pocket. We were lovers, I was eating his sandwiches, tonight he was going to take me somewhere…

A PCA from our ward came out of the hospital, distinctive in her hideous mint green uniform and pressure-bandaged legs, and I heard her say, “Excuse me, Dr. Maynard, there’s a problem with a medication chart on the ward. You’re needed.”

His eyes caught mine as he turned around to pat Dr.

Seagate’s shoulder. He looked completely exhausted.

He walked beside the PCA back into the hospital, the crowd of doctors between him and the door parting silently to let him through. It was the least militant picket line I’d ever heard of.

Chapter Thirty

There was an unfamiliar nurse waiting for me at the nurses’ station, a medication chart in her hand.

She was an agency nurse. Damn.

“I’m Dr. Maynard,” I said to her. I couldn’t raise a smile, not under the circumstances.

She held the chart out to me. “I think there’s been a prescribing mistake, doctor. Mrs. Silva has two opiates prescribed for her. I’ve withheld her ten a.m. dose of pethidine until you can clarify the chart.”

There was nothing I could do, so I took out a pen and wrote ‘cease’ across the orders for morphine and pethidine and blocked out the chart to reflect this. I wrote Mrs. Silva for the maximum legal dose of methadone, added as much oxycodone as I could prescribe, and handed the chart back to the nurse. “I’ll call pharmacy to arrange the methadone.

Please give Mrs. Silva a dose of oxycodone stat.”

The nurse narrowed her eyes at me a little after she had checked the changes to the chart. “Doctor,” she said. “This is a very high dose of opiates for Mrs. Silva. She’s already having trouble maintaining her airway and her respirations are suppressed.”

“Thank you for pointing out the obvious,” I said to her, my patience wearing thin. “If you noticed, Mrs. Silva is NFR. I have no intention of going against her family’s wishes and intubating her. And I have no intention of allowing her to die in pain. Dr. Jackson is the senior consulting physician if you would like to contact him. Excuse me.”