Further Confessions of a GP

With Sarah not appearing to remember me, it was tempting to ignore our previous acquaintance and continue the consultation in the normal way. However, I couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t remember me at some point and so I really needed to find an appropriate moment to mention that I wasn’t the anonymous doctor she thought I was. I was just considering how best to broach the subject when my hand was forced

‘Doctor, do you think you should have a look at them?’

‘Sorry?’ I had been miles away and completely missed the last couple of things Sarah had been telling me.

‘My piles, Doctor. I think you might need to take a look.’

Now was the time, I really needed to come clean.

‘Sarah, I could have a look at your piles, but I think you need to know that we have in fact met before.’

Sarah looked at me puzzled. ‘But I thought you were the new doctor?’

‘Yes, I am, but I think we actually met some years ago. You’ve a sister called Jeanette and she was going out with my friend Pete for a bit.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ she said. Her face lit up, clearly remembering Pete, but then she frowned as she looked me up and down, still having no clue at all as to where I fitted in.

This was getting really painful. I waited a bit, hoping that Sarah would remember me without further prompting, but unable to bear the awkwardness any longer I started to fill in the gaps.

‘I used to live with Pete and we met a few times…’

Suddenly, Sarah threw her hand over her mouth as the penny finally dropped.

‘Oh my god. You’re that bloke who tried to… and then you vomited in my… and then you tried again to…’

By this point Sarah was clearly remembering me with some horror. If she was trying to conceal her overwhelming feeling of disgust, she was doing an extremely poor job.

‘And they let you become a doctor?’ she added finally, with a combination of surprise and dismay.

‘Er, yeah… I mean, well, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’

Thankfully, drunken vomiting in inappropriate places and failed attempts at seduction are not considered exclusion criteria for graduating from medical school. If they were I think there would be a massive world shortage of doctors and absolutely no orthopaedic surgeons whatsoever.

When I was simply the anonymous new doctor, Sarah had been only too happy to describe to me her bowel movements in bewildering detail and had no qualms about presenting to me the haemorrhoids protruding from her backside. Now that I had been exposed as the drunken idiot who once tried to chat her up after vomiting in her bathtub, she seemed less enamoured with the idea.

‘Maybe it would be better if I waited for Dr Bailey to come back. I mean, I’ve known him for years. You know, as like a doctor rather than someone who… well, you know.’

By this point, I already knew that Dr Bailey wasn’t coming back, but before I had the chance to explain that, Sarah was out the door. In fact, her getaway was almost as quick as the one she’d made 15 years ago when we last met.

Crackhead Kenny I

It was 4 a.m. and I had just given myself a little hit of coffee and chocolate in an attempt to help drag myself through those last few painful hours of an A&E night shift. The caffeine was giving me palpitations and an odd buzzing sensation, but not successfully eradicating the overwhelming hazy blur of exhaustion. It had only been an hour since I had necked two cans of Red Bull, but I just needed one more coffee to help me muster the energy to see my next patient.

Despite having one wrist handcuffed to a prison officer and the other hand chained to the metal frame of the trolley, Kenny was, metaphorically, bouncing off the ceiling. The prison officer’s grey and expressionless face was in stark contrast to his prisoner’s, whose beaming grin and intense shining eyes were almost mesmerising. It was apparent that the drugs market within our local prison could provide stimulants considerably stronger than my vending-machine coffee and out-of-date Twix bar.

Kenny reached out his cuffed hand, but I paused. There is something about someone being handcuffed that makes me automatically think he must be horrendously dangerous. If I took his hand would he somehow be able to slip out of his cuffs and take me hostage? Being taken hostage by a drug-crazed prisoner is a scenario I would handle particularly badly. Looking Kenny up and down, I realised that my sleep deprivation was making me paranoid. Kenny really didn’t look very dangerous. He was scruffy and scrawny, but his missing teeth didn’t inhibit his childlike smile. I reached out my hand and he gave me a warm and enthusiastic handshake.

‘I’m Kenny, but all my friends call me Crackhead Kenny.’

‘I’m Dr Ben, but all my friends call me Big Nose Benny.’