Benjamin Daniels - Further Confessions of a GP

‘Bloody hell! What more do these people want from me?’

‘Apparently Mrs Alexander is stuck in the lounge because you carried her downstairs but forgot to take her back up to her bedroom again before you left. You’ll have to pop back in on your way home tonight. They keep asking me when Dr Bailey is coming back…’

That was over three years ago now. Despite my disastrous first day, when Dr Bailey decided he wasn’t going to return, the surgery offered to keep me on as his permanent replacement. Initially, I was reluctant to give up my nomadic locum lifestyle, but with advancing years, I craved some stability and decided to stay. I soon found this quirky little GP surgery and its patients growing on me, and I’ve been here ever since.

When Sarah walked in she looked familiar, but I couldn’t work out why. It was only my first week at the new surgery, so she hadn’t been to see me previously as a patient. I was going to suggest that we might somehow know each other, but before I had the chance, she launched into a long monologue relating her constipation and dodgy bowel symptoms in some detail. Suddenly, I remembered where we had met before. She was the sister of a girl that my friend Pete had gone out with about 15 years ago. We had met a few times, and I can clearly recall that I once went to a party at her house and made a very drunken and unsuccessful attempt to chat her up. After being very unsubtly rebuffed, I’d decided to drown my sorrows by drinking some more and ended up vomiting into her empty bathtub. As if that wasn’t bad enough, for some reason I then concluded that despite the bath vomit I was still in with a good shot with Sarah after all, and made another doomed attempt to chat her up. A good memory is a must for a career in medicine, but at times like this I really wish my powers of recollection weren’t quite so efficient.

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.

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.’

I instantly regretted the informality of my response, but I often find myself slightly less reserved during the early hours of the morning. It’s as if patient-doctor etiquette has a vaguely different set of rules at night. Either that or I simply become increasingly inappropriate the more sleep deprived I become.

‘I reckon my nickname trumps yours,’ Kenny declared triumphantly.

‘I suppose, but you’ll have to change yours when you stop taking crack. I’ll always have a big nose.’

‘True,’ he nodded. ‘But I reckon I’ll always be Crackhead Kenny,’ he added ruefully

I wanted to ask Kenny why he was in prison, but it was none of my business really, so instead I stuck with the more conventional question of why he was in hospital.

‘Well, I fell over and these clowns are covering their arses, so they wanted me in here for a check over.’

I looked over to the prison officer for some sort of response but his face remained expressionless. I wondered exactly what it would take to prise any sort of emotion out of him.