Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor (2 page)

“I’m coming—” Kitty started to rise.

“Finish your breakfast.” There was no time to waste on politeness or explanations. He had to get out there now, and even if she was a nurse, there was nothing Kitty could do. As he crossed the hall, O’Reilly’s stomach grumbled. Couldn’t be helped, but Lord, that soupçon of black pudding had been delicious. He grabbed his bag from the surgery and charged down the hall. Lady Macbeth, his white cat, leapt for the stairs, scrabbled between the bars of the banister, arched her back, fluffed her tail, and spat.

He raced through the back garden yelling, “Stay, Arthur,” when the big black Labrador stuck his muzzle out of his kennel.

In moments O’Reilly was in the long-nosed Rover, roaring along the main Belfast to Bangor Road. He barely noticed a cyclist taking refuge in the ditch. Up the gravelled drive, past the oddly shaped topiary in front of Ballybucklebo House, round its Virginia-creeper-covered gable end. The gate was open to an adjoining paddock, where he saw a saddled bay horse, reins dangling, cropping the grass. Two men squatted beside a figure lying near a two-bar jump.

The old Rover jounced across the field, shuddered to a halt, and O’Reilly, bag in hand, dismounted close to the marquis and his butler/valet Thompson. Both were coatless, their jackets covering the prone Myrna even though the sun was splitting the heavens. Fingal felt its early-morning heat and heard the burbling of wood pigeons from a nearby coppice and the
Kek-kek-kek
of a cock pheasant.

“Fingal,” John O’Neill said. “Thank you so much for coming so quickly. Thompson and I have done as you told us.”

“Good.” He knelt. “Myrna, please don’t turn your head, but can you hear me?”

Until he was satisfied that she hadn’t hurt her spine it was critical that Myrna not move.

“I can hear you perfectly clearly, Fingal, thank you.”

“Where are you sore?”

“I’m sure I’ll have a bruise like a soup plate on my backside, but it’s my right thigh. I distinctly heard the bone snap. It’s aching now to beat Bannagher and I can feel the muscles all knotted up.” He was impressed by how calm she sounded describing what was, almost certainly, the muscle spasms associated with fractures of the femoral shaft. “And no, I didn’t land on my head.” He noticed that her John Bull top hat was still firmly in place. “I was getting ready for next week’s gymkhana. Bloody horse has never refused before and I should be putting him at the jump again, but clearly I’m not fit to do that.”

“Lie still, Myrna,” O’Reilly said.

“I wonder, Thompson, if you’d be good enough to catch Bramble?” said the marquis. “Take him back to the stables.” He spoke to his sister. “I don’t want you fretting about your horse. Don’t worry, Myrna. I’ll get him over that damned jump once I know you’re settled.”

“Thank you, John.”

O’Reilly ran through the routine assessment of a patient who had fallen. When he examined her lower limbs, he had already satisfied himself that she had suffered no head or spinal cord injury at least as far down as the first lumbar vertebra, and if she was feeling pain in her thigh and could sense the spasms, it was probable that the second and third were unaffected too. The fuller neurological assessment could wait until she was in the hands of the orthopaedic specialists at the Musgrave and Clark Clinic, the private hospital associated with the Royal Victoria Hospital. Right now, he had no concerns about moving Myrna once her leg had been splinted.

O’Reilly glanced at his watch. “I’ve sent for an ambulance,” he said. “Should be at the hall soon. Could you meet them, John? Bring them round here.”

“Of course.” The marquis left.

“I need to have a look at the leg, Myrna,” O’Reilly said, not relishing what he had to do.

“Go ahead, Doctor.” She smiled, then winced.

O’Reilly looked at her right riding boot. The toes were pointing to the side at an unnatural angle and the whole leg seemed to be about an inch shorter than the left. He took a deep breath and gently laid both hands on her jodhpurs at the top of her right thigh. When he approached mid-thigh he heard Myrna sucking in her breath. “Sorry,” he said.

“That bloody well hurt.” He saw how pale she was and a drop of blood where she had bitten her lip.

O’Reilly was certain Myrna had fractured the shaft of her right femur. “Your diagnosis is correct, I’m afraid,” he said. “It is broken. We’ll have to get you to the Clinic and have it set. In fact, I think I hear the ambulance arriving now. I’ll give you something for the pain.”

The ambulance driver and attendant were efficient, waited patiently until the quarter grain of morphine he had given her took effect before they applied a Thomas traction splint to immobilise the break, realign the ends of the broken bone, and reduce muscle spasm and further soft tissue injury. Introduced by the Welsh surgeon Hugh Owen Thomas in 1916, this type of splint had reduced the mortality rate for femoral shaft fractures from 80 to 8 percent.

The ambulance driver tied a label to her hacking jacket collar. The red “M” indicated she’d been given morphine.

She said drowsily, “Thank you, Doctor O’Reilly,” as they loaded her into the primrose yellow Northern Ireland Hospitals Authority ambulance. It drove off, slowly at first, across the irregular ground in the field. The injury, now the splint had been applied, was hardly life-threatening, so there were no accompanying flashing lights or screaming sirens.

“She’ll be grand, John,” O’Reilly said to the marquis. “As good as new. Broken bones are pretty routine stuff today.” Not, he thought, like in my student and junior doctor days. Fingal decided not to worry the marquis by talking about potential complications like nonunion of the bones or deep venous thrombosis in an immobilised limb.

“I appreciate your coming out, Fingal, and your reassurance,” the marquis said, “and I’m sure she will be fine. Myrna’s a tough old bird.” He nodded toward the house. “I suppose it’s a bit early for a Jameson, but if you’d like a cuppa?”

“Much too early for whiskey,” said Fingal, “and as I hadn’t even finished my breakfast. I’ll be trotting on, thank you, John.” He opened the car’s door and chucked his bag inside.

“Understood,” said the marquis, stooping to retrieve his and Thompson’s coats, “but now you’re home from abroad you and Mrs. O’Reilly must come round soon. Have a bite.”

“We’d like that,” O’Reilly said, thinking how much he liked the “we,” “but it’s home James, and don’t spare the horses for me now.”

On the drive back to Number One, O’Reilly let his thoughts roam. He’d phone and arrange for Myrna MacNeill to be looked after by Sir Donald Cromie, one of O’Reilly’s classmates and close friends from their student days in Dublin. Cromie’d studied under Mister Jimmy Withers, the first orthopaedic surgeon in Northern Ireland. Fingal’s other great friend, Charlie Greer, was now a consultant neurosurgeon at the Royal Victoria.

It had been an interesting road Fingal O’Reilly had travelled to get here; G.P. in Dublin, junior doctor in the Rotunda Maternity Hospital there, then assistant to Doctor Flanagan here in Ballybucklebo before the war. He’d been briefly married when he was a naval surgeon on a British battleship, and then after the war the widowed principal in his present practice. He frowned. The first years here had been lonely ones without her, but Fingal was single no more and he knew his first wife Deirdre would fully approve of Kitty, and that thought drove away his frown and brought a smile to the dark eyes he’d inherited from his father.

He could recall in detail his interview for that very first job, and his first-ever case as a newly qualified doctor. That had been a patient with a fracture too, but unlike today, in 1936 the outlook was not as good.

It took no effort to see himself twenty-seven, one week qualified, standing in Aungier Place in Dublin’s Liberties slums ready to go into the building that housed the dispensary practice presided over by one Doctor Phelim Corrigan.

2

God and the Doctor We Alike Adore

Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly,
Doctor
Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, looked up past the two-storey whitewashed building on Aungier Place. The sky, what little of it was visible above the tenement buildings on the narrow street, was the eggshell blue of midsummer. He inhaled. The air was noisome with the smells of the city—exhaust fumes, draught horse dung, the oily tang of the River Liffey mud at low tide, and the stink of slaughter from the butchers’ shops in the Liberties. Dirty Dublin hadn’t got that nickname without good reason.

He straightened his new Trinity College medical graduate’s tie. It was only seven days since July 1, 1936, when he’d graduated, finally qualifying for the career he’d had his heart set on since age thirteen. Now it was time to put his skills to use earning his living. He swallowed, fiddled with the tie, and strode through the open front door into an unfurnished hall, its walls distempered and unadorned, the floor covered in worn linoleum.

On his right, a door lay open and a hum of conversation spilled from what must be a waiting room. A woman in nurse’s uniform approached from down the hall. “Excuse me,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I’m Doctor O’Reilly. I’ve an appointment with Doctor Corrigan at eleven.” He noticed blue eyes behind rimless glasses. Her hair was hidden under the nurse’s headdress that encircled her forehead and fell to her shoulders. She looked about thirty.

“Pleased to meet you. Edith O’Donaghugh. I’m one of the midwives attached to the dispensary.” She pointed to a closed door. “He’s in there with a patient. You go into the waiting room. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

“Thank you.” The room was filled with a series of narrow backless benches arranged in rows, the front four occupied. Fingal decided to stand at the front of the room.

“It’s me feckin’ back, sir,” a man sitting in front of him said.

Fingal eyed the man, who was looking at him expectantly.

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you? You’re dressed like one.”

“No, I’m—Well, yes, I am a doctor.” I am a doctor, thought Fingal, and couldn’t help grinning.

“Meself? I’m a tugger. Pull round a two-wheel cart all day like a feckin’ oul’ horse,” the man said without rancour. “I ricked me back lifting heavy shite out of the cart two days ago. I seen Mister O’Leary, him w’at’s got the chemist’s shop on Thomas Street, and he made me up a lotion, charged me tuppence. He’s a good skin, O’Leary, but this lotion? Stung like a feckin’ wasp but done me bugger all good.” He curled his lip. “So I come to see Doc Corrigan. But you’ll do fine. I’m in a rush.”

Fingal smiled. “I don’t actually work here. I’ve come to see Doctor Corrigan too.”

The heavily pregnant woman beside the tugger laughed up at Fingal. “Big healt’y young fellah like yourself? You look well filled enough to me, but if you’re sick take yer place at the end of the queue.”

Rank apparently has no privileges here, Fingal thought.

“My granny from County Clare swears there’s nothing like a poultice made of bog onions for sprains.”

“Sure,” said the tugger, “and w’at would a oul’ culchie know about sprains?”

She sniffed, pulling her shawl round her. “Just because you Dublin Jackeens t’ink the place’s the centre of the feckin’ universe, dere’s no need to believe all country folks is stupid. My granny had a County Leitrim prayer too, for sprains.”

“Go on den, I’m all ears.”

Fingal heard the reverence in her voice as she crossed herself, bowed her head, closed her eyes, and intoned, “Our Lord was going over the mountains and his foal’s foot he sprained. Down he got and touched the sprain and said he, ‘Bone to bone, blood to blood, nerve to nerve, and every sinew in its proper place.’” She straightened and opened her eyes. “If it does you any good, and I hope it does, you’re welcome to it.”

“T’ank you, missus,” said the man, “and I’m sorry I called yer granny a culchie. It’s the oul’ back makes me grumpy.”

Fingal smiled. Dubliners. It would be good to be working with them in their own neighbourhoods.

“Doctor O’Reilly?”

He turned. “Doctor Corrigan is just finishing,” said Edith O’Donaghugh. “He says to go straight in as soon as his patients come out.”

“Thank you.” As he headed for the hallway, he heard her say to the pregnant woman, “Come on now, Mary, down to my room and we’ll have a look at you. And you just bide, Lorcan O’Lunney. You and your back’ll get their turn after Doctor Corrigan has finished with Doctor O’Reilly.”

The door to the surgery opened and a woman came out carrying a squalling infant in her shawl and holding the hand of a little girl of about eight. Fingal would have known her cornflower blue eyes anywhere. He bent and said to her, “Hello, Finnoula Curran, Finnoula of the fair shoulders. Nice to see you again.”

She smiled shyly at him. “I remember you comin’ to Francis Street. You’re the Big Fellah, Paddy’s doctor when he was in hospital.”

“The very one,” Fingal said with a smile. Not long ago, a feisty, one-armed ex-army sergeant named Paddy Keogh from here in the Liberties had called Fingal the “Big Fellah”—the same name given to Michael Collins, a hero of the war of independence fifteen years ago. The nickname had stuck and by it Fingal had become known around Francis Street. Fingal straightened and said to the woman, “It’s all right, Mrs. Curran. Finnoula and I are old friends. I hope she’s keeping well.”

“Finnoula’s grand, but Aidan’s teethin’. His bawlin’ has the whole family up at night. Doctor Corrigan’s given me a scrip’.”

Fingal guessed it would be for chloral hydrate, one grain to be taken by the noisy Aidan at the adults’ bedtime.

“I’m sure it’ll work,” he said, and leaving them, went through the door.

In a sparsely furnished room Doctor Phelim Corrigan sat on a tall stool behind a desk that could have come from a Dickensian counting house. He was a short, rotund man in, Fingal guessed, his middle fifties. His pinstripe-trousered legs dangled well above the floor, and the man wore a badly fitting brown toupee with its parting exactly centred on his head. Wire-rimmed spectacles blurring a pair of pale, watery eyes sat on a bulbous nose. “O’Reilly?” He didn’t get down or offer to shake hands.