Doctor in the House by Richard Gordon Page A

twelve.
    ‘Look where you’re going!’ a female voice said angrily in my ear.
    I spun round. Behind me was a cross-looking nurse. She was young and not bad looking, and she wore the bows and blue belt of a qualified staff-nurse.
    ‘Can’t you see that floor has just been polished?’ she demanded.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. She tossed her head and stalked off with a swish of starched apron.
    Number twelve was a stout young blonde browning at the roots – a frequent condition in female wards. She was sitting up in bed in a green woollen jacket reading a book by Peter Cheyney.
    ‘Good morning,’ I said humbly, expecting she as well would attack me.
    She immediately slipped a piece of paper in her book, set it down on her bedside locker, threw off her bed-jacket, and dropped the top of her nightdress off her shoulders to reveal a large and not unpleasant bosom. Then she smiled.
    ‘Good morning,’ she said. She was obviously used to the routine.
    I felt a little at a loss. I had never been in such circumstances before, anywhere.
    ‘Er – do you mind if I examine you?’ I asked diffidently.
    ‘Go ahead,’ she said invitingly, giving me a bigger smile.
    ‘Thanks awfully.’
    The experience was so unusual I couldn’t think of anything to say. I groped for remembrance of the instructions, but the sheets in my mind’s eye were as blank as the patient’s counterpane. I felt like an after-dinner speaker who had risen to his feet and found he’d forgotten his notes. Then an idea rescued me unexpectedly – I would take her pulse. Seizing one wrist, I felt for the throbbing radial artery while I gazed with unseeing concentration at the face of my wristwatch. I felt I had held her arm for five minutes or more, wondering what to do next. And all the time her gently heaving breasts kept tugging at my eyes. They fascinated me, not with any sexual appeal but alarmingly, as if they were a couple of dangerous snakes. I noticed they had fine drops of sweat on them near the nipples.
    A thought exploded in my mind.
    ‘I must fetch a nurse!’ I exclaimed. I dropped her wrist as if she had smallpox. ‘A chaperone, you know.’
    She giggled.
    ‘Oh, go on with you!’ she said playfully.
    I backed away quickly. A nurse undecorated with belts or bows was dusting a locker on the other side of the ward. She looked hearteningly junior.
    ‘I wonder if you would kindly chaperone me with a patient for a few minutes?’ I asked urgently.
    ‘No!’ she said. She paused in her dusting to glance at me. I must have looked so miserable a little pity glowed in her heart. ‘Ask the junior probationer,’ she suggested brusquely. ‘It’s her job. She’s in the sluice-room cleaning the bedpans.’
    I thanked her humbly and went to look for my helpmeet. She was a worried-looking girl of about eighteen who was busy polishing a pile of metal bedpans as if they were the family silver.
    ‘Will you please be my chaperone?’ I asked meekly.
    She pushed a lock of straw-coloured hair out of her eyes wearily.
    ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘If I have to.’
    We went back into the ward together and gathered some screens round the stout blonde’s bed. The probationer stood opposite me with a look of contempt on her face for my inexpert manipulations while I examined the blonde’s tongue, her eyes, and her teeth. I stuck my stethoscope warily here and there on her chest, though the noises were as uninformative to my ears as the sound of sea on a distant shore.
    Taking the earpieces out I said ‘Good!’ as if I had completed my diagnosis.
    ‘Aren’t you going to examine my tummy?’ asked the blonde with disappointment. ‘All the doctors examine my tummy. It’s my tummy what’s wrong.’
    ‘Tomorrow,’ I said firmly. ‘I have to go and operate.’
    How could I tell her in front of the nurse I had not yet learned as far as the tummy?
     
    Inspection, palpation, percussion, auscultation – the unalterable, ever-applicable tetrad. They