O’Reilly’s florid cheeks positively glowed—and it wasn’t the horseradish. It was his genuine concern for the feelings of his patients, most of whom would have had to leave the village, such was their disgrace.
“I see what you mean.”
“Right. I asked him to stop, but he refused.” O’Reilly paused from his gustatory endeavours, laid his knife and fork aside for a moment, folded his arms on the tabletop, leant forward, and said, “But I stopped him anyway.”
“How?”
O’Reilly chuckled, in much the same way that I imagine Beëlzebub must chortle when a fresh sinner arrives on the griddle. I couldn’t prevent a small, involuntary shudder.
“Ah,” he said, “pride cometh … McWheezle showed up in the surgery one day.
“‘It’s a very private matter,’ says he.
“‘Oh?’ says I.
“‘Yes,’ says he. ‘I seem to have caught a cold on my gentiles.’
“Threw me for a moment, that. ‘Your gentiles?’ says I.
“He waved a limp hand toward his trouser front.
“‘Aha,’ says I. ‘A cold on your genitals.’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Let’s have a look.’”
O’Reilly’s chuckle moved from the Beëlzebubbian to the Satanic.
I knew what was coming next. I knew the story had done the rounds of every medical school in the world, and yet Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly was the most honest man I’ve ever met. If he said what I thought he was going to say had actually happened, I’d believe him.
“Mister McWheezle unzips. He has the biggest syphillitic chancre on his ‘gentiles’ that I’ve ever seen.
“‘It’s a bad cold right enough,’ says I, handing him a hanky. ‘See if you can blow it.’”
O’Reilly picked up his knife and fork. “Good thing we had penicillin. Poor old McW. was so terrified that I wrung a promise out of him there and then to leave the wee pregnant girls alone.” Fingal O’Reilly started to eat. “Tuck in,” he ordered.
I was still chuckling at his tale when I suddenly realized that I’d just filled my mouth with enough of Mrs. Kincaid’s horseradish sauce to start the second great fire of London.
O’Reilly must have noticed the tears pouring from my eyes. It’s hard to miss something with the flow rate of the Horseshoe Falls.
“Ah, come on now, Pat,” he said solicitously. “It’s a funny story—but it’s not that funny.”
FEBRUARY 1997
O’Reilly Finds His Way
“Doctor Gangrene” is no match for the rural GP
“You’d think I’d know my way about up here,” said Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, looking puzzled as he stood in the middle of the long echoing corridor of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.
I’d bumped into him on my way to the X-ray department from the ward where I was working. If you remember, I was employed as a registrar at the Royal, my day job so to speak, my other source of revenue and a smattering of post-graduate training, when I wasn’t functioning as O’Reilly’s part-time locum.
I had a moment of smugness. I did know my way about. Not surprising really; I worked in the place. But O’Reilly hadn’t specifically asked for directions. He’d simply made a slightly self-deprecatory statement: “You’d think I’d know my way about up here.”
The smug feeling passed. The burning question was, what was I going to do? Offering unsolicited advice to Doctor O. could provoke a minor seismic event. Neglecting to give the necessary directions, and perhaps allowing him to make an idiot of himself, could result in a major tectonic shift with all the resultant unpleasant fallout—usually on me.
It’s a fundamental law of politics and diplomacy that when one is faced with two equally unpalatable options—prevaricate.
“How long has it been since you worked here?” I asked.
“Years.”
“Perhaps they’ve moved the ward you’re looking for?”
He scratched his head. “Do you think so? I just popped in to see one of my customers who was admitted here last night.”
“It’s possible.”
“Rubbish. Nothing possible about it.”
“But, Fingal, the administrators do it, you know.”
“Admit my patients?”
“No. Move wards.”
“Oh, that.”
I felt relieved. He and I had nearly set off on another of our tortuous verbal peregrinations and to be honest I was a bit pushed for time. I was supposed to be assisting the senior gynaecologist Sir Gervaise Grant, a man who was obsessional about time. Lord help any assistant who was late in the operating room.
Sir Gervaise was renowned for the speed with which he could perform vaginal hysterectomies. “Watch me like a hawk,” he would instruct his assistant, the knife flashing, scissors snipping, ligatures going on like trusses in a turkey-plucking factory.
O’Reilly was saying something but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying attention. Coming down the hall, white coat flying, minions scurrying in pursuit, was Sir Gervaise himself. I had to get away from O’Reilly.
“Good God,” he boomed, in a voice that echoed from the tiled walls, “there’s ‘Green Fingers’ Grant.”
The “Green Fingers” soubriquet referred to the fact that Sir Gervaise’s wound infection rate was triple that of anyone else. But while he might be called “Green Fingers” behind his back, it was a braver man than I who would call him that to his granite-jawed, bristling, silver-mustachioed face. And judging by the scowl on Sir G.’s countenance—the sort that Medusa reserved for those passing Argonauts she really wanted to fix—he’d overheard O’Reilly’s remark.
I closed my eyes and adopted the hunch-shouldered crouch favoured by bomb-disposal experts when something unexpectedly goes “tick.”
“To whom are you alluding, O’Reilly?” Sir Gervaise’s treacly voice held all the warmth of a Winnipeg winter.
“Yourself.”
I opened one eye.
O’Reilly stood his ground, legs apart, chin tucked in. I could see his meaty fists starting to clench and remembered that the man had been a Royal Navy boxing champion. If a bell rang anywhere in those hallowed halls of healing, Doctor O. was going to come out swinging. One wallop would have rearranged Sir Gervaise’s immaculately coiffed hair, his nose, and his teeth as far back as his molars.
The two men stood scowling at each other like a pair of Rottweilers who’ve met suddenly and unexpectedly over a raw steak.
Discretion is the better part of valour. I knew that I should have found some excuse to slink away, but some idiotic impulse led me to step between the two and say, “Excuse me, Sir Gervaise, but I think we’re going to be late.”
The great man looked at me with all the condescension of Louis XIV for a grovelling peasant. “Indeed, Taylor. I don’t believe I sought your opinion. Indeed when I do want it, I’ll tell you what it is.”
Oh, Lord. I wished I had the tortoise’s ability to tuck its head into its carapace.
“Still. We can’t be late. Can’t be late. Don’t have time to waste on underqualified country quacks.” He strode off, courtiers following in his wake, with me bringing up the rear.
To my surprise, the eruption I’d been expecting from Doctor O’Reilly failed to materialize. All I heard him say to our departing backs was, “And good day to you too, Sir Gangrene.”
As we sped down the corridor it began to dawn on me why O’Reilly didn’t think highly of Sir Gervaise. I remembered the case quite vividly. The man with the Mach 1 scalpel had whipped her uterus out in something under fifteen minutes. Surgical time, that was. The victim took three months to recover from her postoperative abscess. And she’d been one of O’Reilly’s patients.
Sir Gervaise seemed to have regained his icy equilibrium as we stood side by side scrubbing for the impending surgery. I wondered if he had any idea what he might have wrought. Recall how Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly lay in wait for Doctor “Thorny” Murphy. I could still hear the word
s “underqualified country quack” and picture the malevolence under O’Reilly’s grin as he bade Sir Gervaise “good day.”
When I was a boy I used to delight in a firecracker called a Thunderbomb. The instructions on the side read, “Light blue touchpaper and retire immediately.” Whether he knew it or not, Sir G. had lit O’Reilly’s touchpaper. There was a phone message waiting for me when I left the theatre. Would Doctor Taylor please report to the Pathology Department and see Professor Callaghan?
I imagine an altar boy would feel much as I did had he been summoned unexpectedly by the Pope. Awe, fear, and trembling. Professor Callaghan was the dean of the faculty and, in the eyes of us junior doctors, outranked the Pope. There was even some suspicion that he outranked God.
I ran to his office and knocked on the door.
“Enter.”
Oh, Lord. I opened the door and to my surprise saw his exalted magnificence sitting at his desk, head bowed over a piece of paper, which also seemed to be fascinating none other than Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly.
“That should do it, Fingal.”
“Thanks, Snotty.”
Snotty! Snotty? O’Reilly’s familiarity was on a par with that of the young American naval officer who, at some embassy function, asked Queen Elizabeth II, Fid. Def., Ind. Imp., “How’s your mum?”
“Ah, Taylor.” O’Reilly took the piece of paper from Professor Callaghan. “You know my old classmate, Professor Callaghan?”
I nodded. Yes, and I was on first-name terms with President Nixon and the British prime minister too.
“He and I played rugby together. He’s just done me a little favour.” O’Reilly rose. “We won’t detain you any longer, Snotty.”
“My pleasure, Fingal.”
I felt a bit like the Emperor’s new clothes: not there, as far as Professor Callaghan was concerned.
“Now,” said O’Reilly, “let’s get a cup of tea.”
He headed for the cafeteria with the unerring accuracy of a Nike missile, and this was the man who’d started today by remarking, “You’d think I’d know my way about up here.”
He refused to show me the paper until we were seated, teacups on the plastic tabletop. “Here,” he said, “take a look at this.”
I could see immediately that it was a copy of a pathology report form. Three pages of detailed description of a uterus that had been removed by—I flipped back to the first page—Sir Gervaise Grant. The sting was in the tail. Just one line, which read, “The specimen of ureter submitted showed no abnormalities.”
Dear God. The complication most feared by gynaecological surgeons. Damage to the tube that carried urine from the kidney to the bladder. “Is it true?” I asked in a whisper.
O’Reilly guffawed then said, “Not at all, but it should give old ‘Green Fingers’ pause for thought, possibly a cardiac arrest when he reads it, before he realises that the patient is fine and the report must be wrong,” said O’Reilly. He sipped his tea. “Decent chap, Snotty Callaghan, to fudge the report. He can’t stand Sir Gangrene either.”
He smiled beatifically. “And you thought I didn’t know my way round up here.”
MARCH 1997
Powers of Observation
O’Reilly accepts a bet
“Powers of observation,” O’Reilly mumbled through a mouthful of breakfast kipper.
“Pardon?”
“Why? You didn’t do anything. Did you?” He pulled a thicker than usual piece of fishbone from between his teeth and smiled at me. “Good kippers.”
“Yes. That was my observation.”
You would have thought that after working for Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly as a part-time locum for almost two years, I would have learned not to play the one-upmanship game with the redoubtable man. I had about as much chance of beating him as Tiny Tim had of wresting the world heavyweight championship from a Mister Muhammad Ali.
“What was?”
“What was what?”
“Your observation.”
“That the kippers were rather good.”
“No,” he said, after some thought. “That was my observation.”
“Well yes, I suppose so. But that’s why I said, ‘Pardon?’”
“Because I had observed that the kippers were good?”
“Er, not exactly.”
“They’re bad?”
“Not the kippers.”
“Sometimes, Taylor,” he shook his great head ponderously, “sometimes I wonder about you.”
He was not alone. Sometimes I had a similar feeling of confusion, usually at a time like this when our conversation seemed to be taking one of those wandering paths that inevitably led to my utter loss of the thread. Still, something lost, something gained: I usually ended up with a pounding headache.
“Fingal, you said, ‘Powers of observation.’”
“Of the quality of the kippers?”
“No. Not the kippers. I asked, ‘Pardon?’ because I wondered what you meant by the remark.”
“Haven’t the faintest idea. Pass the marmalade.” He rose from the table and wandered off, happily munching a slice of toast. “Don’t be late for the surgery. It’s antenatal clinic today.” He stopped in the doorway. “I’ll teach you about my powers of observation. Mark of a good physician, you know.”
“Now,” said O’Reilly, some time later, leaning forward from his swivel chair, “I’m going to teach you something you didn’t learn at medical school.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” His craggy face split into a great, conspiratorial grin. “I bet you didn’t know that you can tell what underwear a pregnant woman is wearing just by observing her urine sample.”
Sure, and you could pick the winner at Goodwood racetrack by consulting the entrails of chickens. I smiled a skeptical little smile. “A pound says you can’t.”
“You’re on.” He stretched out his hand and we shook. “Seems a shame to take your money.”
We’ll see, Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. We’ll see.
The door opened and Mrs. Kincaid ushered in our first patient, dressed in her Dior creation with a split down the back. So he wasn’t going to be able to fool me by making an intelligent guess by looking at each woman’s outer garments.
“Mrs. Robertson,” said Kinky, handing O’Reilly the chart and a small glass bottle containing the patient’s urine sample.
“Good morning, Mrs. Robertson.”
O’Reilly rose from his chair and took the sample. “Doctor Taylor here will just take you behind the screens and examine you.”
“Thank you, Doctor O’Reilly.”
I ushered the patient behind the screens, rapidly took her blood pressure, and then examined her abdomen. She was wearing black silk underpants. “Everything looks fine,” I said in my best professional manner. She left.
“Black silk,” said O’Reilly.
Dammit. He must have caught a glimpse through the split in the back of the gown. I hoped that was the explanation. I could feel my hard-earned pound slipping away.
“Jeannie Neely,” said Mrs. Kincaid.
“Sample,” said O’Reilly. “Morning, Jeannie.”
“Morning, Doctor.”
He nodded toward the screens. I escorted the woman to the examining couch, taking great care to place myself between her retreating back and Fingal. I stole a surreptitious glance in his direction. He couldn’t have cared less. He was bending over the sink, urine-testing stick in one hand, the specimen in the other, and a look on his face of sublime confidence.
“Red flannel drawers,” he said when she left. He was right again. I swallowed. This was getting serious. That pound was meant to be taking me and my girlfriend to the cinema on Saturday night.
“Annie O’Rourke,” said Mrs. Kincaid, ushering in a woman who either was carrying quintuplets or had single-handedly by her eating habits almost caused the second great potato famine. She had, I think, a singleton, vertex, and probably had inherited some genes from old Ahab’s mate, the gre
at white whale. More importantly, her complete lack of underwear was going to be O’Reilly’s downfall.
“Off you go, Annie.”
She left.
“None,” said O’Reilly with the absolute confidence of a master.
I saw eighteen women that morning. He was wrong just once. I could only hope that the light of my life would be happy to settle for a long walk on Saturday.
O’Reilly leaned back in his chair and stretched out his hand. “I believe you owe me a pound.”
I grudgingly handed it over.
“Ta.” He stuffed the note into his trouser pocket.
I gritted my teeth. “Fingal, how did you do it?”
“Powers of observation, my boy.” His expression wasn’t that of the cat who’d got the cream. His face had the felicity of the feline that had feasted on the fermented foaming of an entire dairy.
I was actually thinking of another “F” word, but delicacy forbids its use.
He must have noted my chagrin. “Come over here, lad.” He rose and ambled to the sink. There in neat array stood the containers in which the patients had brought their samples. In those days, the niceties of little plastic bottles hadn’t yet been introduced. He picked up the first receptacle. “Here. Mrs. Robertson—Chanel No. 5—black satin; Jeannie Neely—jam jar—red flannel; Annie O’Rourke—Guinness bottle—none.”
The old devil.
He swept the assorted glassware into a wastepaper basket. “First thing I said this morning, ‘powers of observation,’ and not of the quality of the kippers.”
Blast him and blast his powers of observation. My promise to take a certain nurse to see Lawrence of Arabia had gone down the pipe as the urine bottles had been chucked into the rubbish.
“By the way,” said O’Reilly, pulling something from his pocket, “here’s the two quid I owe you for staying late the other week.” He chuckled. “I was looking at your face, Pat. Amazing what I observed.”
APRIL 1997
Stress of the Moment