LITMIR.BIZ

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‘TWISTED TESTICLE’ or ‘FOREIGN OBJECT IN ANUS’ to a full waiting room, the fallout might have been rather more noticeable.

      It’s not just doctors who can be so horrendously insensitive. I once heard of a young couple going to have the all-important 20-week ultrasound scan of their first pregnancy. The sonographer performing the scan apparently kept looking at the screen while ‘tut-tutting’ loudly and shaking her head. The understandably anxious parents-to-be asked what was wrong. However, the sonographer replied that she couldn’t possibly say, but that she would book them an appointment with the consultant for a few weeks’ time. The dad at this point, in his own words, ‘lost it a bit’ and demanded the sonographer tell them what she could see. Astonishingly, her response was, ‘Well, you know those funny people you sometimes see in the street? You know like those Oompa Loompa midgets in that Willy Wonka film. Well I think your baby might be one of those.’ The disgusted parents demanded to see the consultant straight away who quickly reassured them that the scan was in fact normal and also reassured them that the sonographer wouldn’t be doing any more baby scans!

       Maggie III

      Maggie phones me up quite often in the middle of the day when she finds herself alone and scared. I’m honoured that she confides in me, but I can’t deny that I find our conversations difficult. I can’t make everything fine with a prescription or a referral to a specialist. I spent so many years studying how to make people better that I still find it hard to accept that some patients are only going to get worse.

      ‘How are things?’

      It always seems an awkward question to ask someone who is dying. It’s not like she’s going to say, ‘Brilliant thanks, Doc’, but I’m yet to find a more appropriate way of opening a conversation with her, so I stick with it.

      ‘Actually, Dr Daniels, I think I’ve found a bit of peace with it all. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not happy about dying from cancer. Far from it. If truth be told, I would love to have a few more years to wander about the place, but in the big scheme of things I can’t really complain about the life I’ve had. There have been ups and downs, but mostly ups, and I did always say that I never really planned to get old. In fact, I’d have made the most appalling cantankerous geriatric, so all in all it’s probably for the best that I won’t be around to see that through!’

      ‘Well, that’s one way to look at it.’

      ‘I’m worried about my husband Tony, though. He’s not really handling things very well. He just can’t really accept that I’m on my way out. He keeps looking up things on the internet trying to find miracle cures. Now believe me, I’d fucking love a miracle cure, but I’m no idiot. These quacks are just after our money and I know that my cancer can’t just vanish with a few vitamin pills and an Indian head massage. I just want to spend this last time I have with people I love around me. I don’t want to be chasing miracles that don’t exist.’

      ‘Have you told Tony how you feel?’

      ‘I can’t bear to crush his hope. He needs hope to deal with this. It is his focus and at the moment it’s the only thing driving him on. The latest one is this bloody ridiculous essential oils diet. I have to drink these oils he’s bought on the internet and then mix them with organic celery and carrot juice. It’s not exactly what I’d choose as my last supper, I can tell you. When he’s out I get my daughter to sneak me in some fried chicken and doughnuts!’

      ‘I think you need to tell Tony how you feel. You need to be really honest with him.’

      ‘My husband’s not one of those sorts of men, Dr Daniels. He doesn’t really like to talk about his feelings. I’m sure he’d just clam up.’

      ‘Funnily enough, my wife might say the same about me, Maggie, but here we are talking about some quite intimate, personal things. Sometimes you just have to try and see what happens.’

      ‘I’ll give it a go over the weekend and give you a ring on Monday to let you know how it goes.’

       Maggie IV

      ‘Hello, I’m here to see Maggie.’

      ‘Come on in, Doctor. She’s just having a facial done, but go on through as the make-up girl is just finishing up.’

      It seemed odd to think of Maggie having a facial. I always considered her a robust Yorkshire lass and had never associated her with beauty regimes. As I entered the room, Maggie was getting the last of her blusher applied. I’m no expert on such matters, but it looked a bit overdone to me. Her cheeks were excessively rosy and her lips a dazzling ruby red. The young girl applying it looked up and gave me a smile. ‘The family are coming to visit soon so we want her to look nice, don’t we?’ She added those final dabs of blusher with genuine pride, although I did rather wonder if there might be good reason why she only applied make-up to the deceased rather than to the living.

      Despite the make-up girl’s best efforts, Maggie still had the yellow tinge all corpses seem to have. I’d come to complete the paperwork, and as the last doctor to see her alive I was supposed to do a final examination of her body. Maggie had been at the undertakers since Saturday afternoon and it was now Monday morning. If my examination revealed anything other than a diagnosis of death, something had gone very, very wrong.

      I nodded at the undertaker to confirm that it was definitely Maggie lying on the metal trolley in front of me. I left my stethoscope in my bag, but stuck on some gloves and had a prod between her ribs on the left side of her chest to make sure she didn’t have a pacemaker fitted. I knew Maggie’s medical history well enough to know she didn’t have one, but I checked just in case. We are always told that cremating a body with a pacemaker still inside can blow up the crematorium. I imagine this is in fact a bit of an exaggeration and it’s more likely that the grieving relatives don’t really want to find the remnants of charred batteries while spreading the deceased’s ashes over her favourite rose bushes in the back garden.

      I did mention to the undertaker that Maggie had had a silicone breast implant following her mastectomy some years before. There is no risk that the implants will blow up the crematorium, but they do leave a damaging sticky goo on the walls of the incinerator. Nowadays, most undertakers will remove them, which was an idea that tickled Maggie when she was alive. She told me she had suggested to her husband that he put her implant on the mantelpiece next to the urn containing her ashes, but apparently he hadn’t found it funny.

      I was going to miss Maggie. She had an amazing spirit that shone through and she always made me smile however gloomy our discussions. For all the amazing medical breakthroughs of modern years, once she received her diagnosis, all we ended up offering her were steroids and morphine. Both are cheap old-fashioned drugs that we’ve been using for decades. In their defence, the morphine gave her a pain-free death and the steroids probably gave her an extra couple of weeks. Maggie had promised me that she would try to open up to her husband, talk about her feelings and say goodbye to him. In the end, her condition deteriorated very quickly and just two days after she made me that promise she was gone.

      For those last few weeks I was Maggie’s confidant. I was someone outside the family to whom she could talk and on whom she could rely when she was in genuine need. It isn’t something ever taught at medical school. It can’t be measured or turned into a government target, but for those six weeks Maggie was my most important patient and although I was unable to cure her or prevent her death, nothing could make me feel more like a doctor than giving her my time.

      When I’d heard the news of her death, I’d phoned her husband Tony to offer my condolences. I’d suggested that once the funeral was dealt with, he might want to pop in and have a chat. He didn’t take me up on the offer, but a couple of weeks later he did leave an envelope for me at the reception. It was a photograph of Maggie looking young and carefree. Her head was tilted back and she was laughing at something. It really did capture her spirit beautifully. On the back it just said, ‘Thank you for

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