An Irish Country Doctor (8 page)

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"Come into the surgery." O'Reilly opened the door. Barry followed them inside and watched as O'Reilly lifted instruments from a cabinet, dumped them into a steel sterilizer, and switched it on. "Won't be a minute." 

"Get on with it. I'm a busy man." Councillor Bishop planted his ample behind in the swivel chair.

"And how's Mrs. Bishop?" O'Reilly enquired.

"Look, would you get a move on?"

"Certainly." O'Reilly pushed the trolley towards the councillor. Its wheels squealed. The sterilizer bubbled, wisps of steam jetting from under its lid. He went to a cabinet, brought out a cloth-wrapped pack, and placed it on the trolley. "Open that, please, Doctor Laverty."

Barry peeled off the outer layer. Inside lay green sterile towels, sterile swabs, sponge forceps, stainless-steel gallipots, a kidney basin, and a pair of surgical gloves. He heard water running as O'Reilly washed his hands. Barry knew what was going to happen and what would be needed. Antiseptic, the instruments from the sterilizer, and some local anaesthetic, at least--O'Reilly would use a local, wouldn't he? He wouldn't just stick a scalpel into the abscess? He heard the snap, snap as O'Reilly donned the gloves. "Dettol and Xylocaine are on the bottom of the trolley," he said. Barry retrieved the local anaesthetic and a bottle of brown disinfectant, relieved that O'Reilly was not going to incise the abscess without deadening the pain. He poured some Dettol into a gallipot on the trolley, then set the bottle on the trolley's lower shelf. "Thank you." O'Reilly stuffed a couple of swabs between the jaws of the sponge forceps. "Now, Councillor, if you'd hold your finger over this basin."

"Just hurry up."

The ringing of the sterilizer's bell to indicate that the instruments were now ready almost muffled Councillor Bishop's "Yeeeowee!" 

Yes, indeed, Barry thought, Dettol does bite. He retrieved the now sterile forceps, scalpel, and hypodermic, carried them over, and set them on O'Reilly's trolley. "Local?"

 "Of course," said O'Reilly, lifting the hypodermic. Councillor Bishop made little whiffling noises as he puffed short breaths through pursed lips and stared wide-eyed at the needle. "I'm going to freeze your finger," said O'Reilly. He stabbed the bottle's rubber stopper and filled the syringe's barrel. "This'll sting," said O'Reilly, pushing the needle into the skin of the web between the index and middle finger. 

"Wheee, arr, wowee!" howled the councillor. 

"Sorry," said O'Reilly. "Other side." He injected Xylocaine at the outside of the first knuckle.

"Whooeee, oowww!" The councillor writhed in his chair.

"I know you're in a rush, but we'll have to wait for that nerve block to work."

"All right," whimpered Councillor Bishop. "Take your time." 

"How long has the finger been bothering you?" O'Reilly asked.

"Two, three days."

"Pity you didn't come in sooner . . ." O'Reilly looked directly into Barry's eyes. "The surgery's always open in the mornings." 

"I will next time, Doctor. Honest to God, I will."

Barry noticed the merest upward tilt of O'Reilly's mouth, the tiniest twinkle in his eyes, as he said, "Do." He picked up the scalpel. "Right," he said. "You won't feel a thing." He sliced into the flesh, Barry watched blood and yellow pus ooze out, as the swollen tissues shrank.

"Better an empty house than a bad tenant," O'Reilly remarked. "Oh, dear," he said, "the councillor seems to have fainted." Barry looked at the little round man, who lay crumpled in the chair.

"Nasty man," said O'Reilly, as he swabbed the mess away. Then he used two clean gauze squares to dress the wound. "Thinks he's the bee's knees because he owns half the property in the village." He pointed to his rolltop desk. "There's a bottle of smelling salts in there. Get them, will you? We don't want to be here all night." 

Barry went to the desk, aware that he had seen Doctor O'Reilly perform minor surgery with all the skill of one of the senior surgeons at the Royal. And somehow he had let Councillor Bishop know that while patients might have certain expectations of their physician, courtesy was a two-way street. Get the upper hand? Barry thought Councillor Bishop hadn't, in local parlance, come within a beagle's gowl.

By the Dawn's Early Light

A telephone rang. Barry fumbled for the receiver. The night sister must want him up on one of the wards. His hand, the one he had cut on Mr. Kennedy's gate, smacked into an unfamiliar bedside table. "Ow." The pain brought him to full wakefulness, and he remembered he wasn't in his room in the junior staff quarters of the Royal. He was in the attic in O'Reilly's home. The door opened and a beam of light from the landing spilled into his room. A large figure stood in the doorway.

"Up," said O'Reilly, "and be quiet. Don't disturb Kinky." 

"Right." Barry knuckled his eyes, got out of bed, dressed, and crept downstairs to find O'Reilly, black bag in hand, waiting in the hall. "Come on." He headed for the kitchen. Barry followed out through the back garden, which was illuminated only by the dim lays of a distant streetlight. Arthur Guinness stuck his head out of his doghouse. "I'm not going shooting," O'Reilly said.

'Umph," said Arthur, eyeing Barry's trouser leg. The dog must have decided that love at this hour was too much trouble. He retreated into his kennel, muttering something in Labradorese.

Barry climbed into the Rover. "What time is it?"

"Half one," said O'Reilly, backing into the lane.

Barry yawned.

"Mrs. Fotheringham called. Says her husband's sick, but I doubt it." He headed for the road. "Major Basil Fotheringham's had every illness known to man, and a few that only the Martians have dreamed of. He always takes a turn for the worse after midnight, and as far as I can tell, he's fit as a bloody flea. It's all in his mind." He turned left at the traffic light.

"So why are we going out into the Ballybucklebo Hills at this hour of the morning?"

"Do you know about the houseman and the surgeon?" O'Reilly asked, turning the car's lights to full beam.

"No."

"Surgeon comes in to make rounds in the morning. 'How is every one?' says he. 'Grand,' says the houseman, 'except the one you were certain was neurotic, sir.' 'Oh,' says the great man, 'gone home has he?' 'Not exactly, sir. He died last night.' Once in a while even the worst bloody malingerer does actually get sick." 

"Point taken."

"Good. Now be quiet. It's not far, but I've to remember how to get there."

Barry sat back and watched the yellow headlights probe the blackness ahead. Now that Ballybucklebo lay behind, the dark enveloped them as tightly as a shroud. He peered up and saw the Summer Triangle: Altair, Vega, and Deneb high in the northwest, each star set in a jet sky, backlit by the silver smudge of the Milky Way. His dad had been a keen amateur astronomer, probably because he'd been a navigating officer in the war. He'd taught Barry about the constellations.

Barry's dad and mum would be seeing different stars now, he thought. The Southern Cross would sparkle over their heads. Their last letter from Melbourne, where his dad was on a two-year contract as a consulting engineer, had been full of their enthusiasm for Australia, and had hinted that there were all kinds of opportunities for doctors there. Barry watched a meteor blaze through Orion, and knew he was quite at home with the northern stars.  The car braked in a driveway, and Barry came back to earth. "When we get in there I want you to agree with everything I say, understand?" said O'Reilly. 

Barry hesitated. "But doctors don't always agree. Sometimes a second opinion--"

"Humour me, son."

"Humour you?" 

"Just open the gate."

Barry climbed out and opened a gate, waited for O'Reilly to drive through, closed the gate, and crunched along a gravel driveway to a two-storey house. An imitation coach lamp burned in the  redbrick porch. "Agree with everything I say. Humour me." What if O'Reilly made a mistake? Barry looked ahead. There O'Reilly stood, dark against the light from an open door, talking to a woman wearing a dressing gown.

"Mrs. Fotheringham, my assistant, Doctor Laverty," he said when Barry arrived.

"How do you do?" she said, in a poor imitation of the accent of an English landed lady. "So good of you both to come. Poor Basil's not well. Not well at all. Not at all." Barry heard the harsh tones of Ulster beneath her affected gentility. That, he thought, is what I'd call the buttermilk coming through the cream. He followed as she led them through a hall, expensively wallpapered and hung with framed prints of hunting scenes, up a deeply carpeted staircase, and into a large bedroom. Prawn pink velvet curtains covered the window and clashed with the pale orange tulle drapings of a four-poster bed. 'The doctors have come, dear," Mrs. Fotheringham said, as she stepped up to the bed and smoothed the brow of the man who lay there.

Major Fotheringham sagged against his pillows and made a mewling noise. Barry looked for any obvious evidence of fever or distress, but no sweat was visible on the patient's high forehead; there was nothing hectic about his watery blue eyes, nor any drip from a narrow nose that hooked over a clipped military moustache. "Right," said O'Reilly, "what seems to be the trouble this time?" 

"He is very poorly, Doctor," Mrs. Fotheringham said. "Surely you can see that?"

"Oh, indeed," said O'Reilly, making space among the ranks of salves and unguents on the glass top of an ornate dressing table and setting his bag among the bottles. "But it would help if Major Fotheringham could describe his symptoms."

"Poor dear," she said, "he can hardly speak, but I think it's his kidneys."

"Indeed," said O'Reilly, pulling his stethoscope from his bag.

"Kidneys, is it?"

"Oh, yes," she said, twitching at the front of her silk dressing gown. "Definitely. I think he needs a thorough examination." 

"I'd better take a look then," said O'Reilly. He stepped to the bed. "Put out your tongue, Basil."

Here we go again, Barry thought. O'Reilly had not made the remotest attempt to elicit any kind of history, and here he was barrelling ahead with the physical examination. Agree with everything I say. Well, we'll see.

"Mmm," said O'Reilly, pulling down the patient's lower eyelid and peering at the inside of the lid. "Mmm-mmm." He grasped one wrist and made a great show of consulting his watch. "Mmm." Barry watched Mrs. Fotheringham's narrow face as she stared intently at every move O'Reilly made, heard her little inhalations each time he muttered, "Mmm."

"Open your pyjamas please." O'Reilly laid his left hand palm down on the patient's hairless chest and thumped the back of his hand with the first two fingers of his right. "Mmm." He stuffed the earpieces of his stethoscope in his cauliflower ears and clapped the bell to the front of the chest. "Big breaths." Major Fotheringham gasped, in out, in out.

"Sit up, please."

Major Fotheringham obeyed. More thumpings; more stethoscope applications, this time to the back; more huffing and puffing; more mmms.

Mrs. Fotheringham's little eyes widened. "Is it serious, Doctor?" O'Reilly pulled his stethoscope from his ears and turned to her. "I beg your pardon?"

"Is it serious?"

"We'll see," said O'Reilly, turning back to Major Fotheringham. "Lie down." O'Reilly quickly and expertly completed a full examination of the belly. "Mmm, huh. I see."

"What is it, Doctor?" Mrs. Fotheringham's voice had the same expectancy that Barry had heard in children's voices when they wanted to be given a treat.

"You're right," O'Reilly said. "It could be his kidneys." And how in the world had he arrived at that diagnosis? Barry thought. No one had said anything about fever, chills, or difficulties or pain urinating, and nothing O'Reilly had done had come close to examining the organs in question.

"Told you so, dear," said Mrs. Fotheringham smugly, as she fluffed her husband's pillows. The major lay languidly, unspeaking as ever in the four-poster bed.

"Then again, it might not be," said O'Reilly, grabbing his bag. "I think a test's in order, don't you, Doctor Laverty?" Barry met O'Reilly's gaze, swallowed, and said, "I don't quite see--"

"Course you do." O'Reilly's eyes narrowed, his tone hardened.

"But-"

"In a case like this we can't be too careful. You'd agree, Mrs. Fotheringham?"

"Oh, indeed, Doctor." She smiled at O'Reilly. "Yes, indeed." 

"That's settled then." O'Reilly glared at Barry, who looked away. O'Reilly rummaged in his bag and produced a bottle that Barry recognized immediately. It would contain thin cardboard strips used to detect sugar or protein in a urine sample. What the hell was O'Reilly up to?

"I'll need your help, Mrs. Fotheringham." O'Reilly handed her several of the dipsticks.

"Yes, Doctor." Her eyes were bright, her smile barely concealed. "I want you to . . ." He looked at his watch. "It's two fifteen now . . . so start the test at three. Make Basil drink one pint of water." 

"A pint?" she echoed.

"The whole pint. At four give him another pint, but not until he's passed a specimen."

"Specimen?"