I sat down, papers, empty pear tin and olive jar in my hand, and wondered if he’d recognise them as being from his cupboards. Hopefully I’d get a chance to ask him about the assignment. Evidence-based medicine struck me as something else that Andrew would have opinions on. I suspected he was actually composed almost entirely of opinions. And submission.
Everyone else ignored me and went back to their conversation, apart from Dr. Seagate, who I recognised from the BMA meeting. He stared at me for a moment, until someone in scrubs threw a marshmallow at him to get his attention.
“…wider responsibility,” the man in scrubs said. “As members of the profession, we’re looking at a question of the greater good.”
“Greater good is shit,” Andrew said. “Our primary responsibility is to our patients right this moment. Not to the ones that will come later, not to other people’s patients.”
“If this is an NHS-wide crisis, then aren’t we compelled to take action?” a woman asked.
“Given that I trained in a system where there was minimal free healthcare, I’m probably not the best person to speak on this,” Andrew said. “Hell, I can’t even vote here. In the short term we need to voice our support for F, who was after all just doing what any of us would do, and to keep caring for our patients. Long term, we need a broad-based community response. Someone who is a citizen needs to actually do something, run for parliament or seize control of their local Labour party branch.”
“Are you advocating that we don’t stop work?” the woman asked Andrew, and I could feel my jaw dropping open. They were going to strike?
“No,” Andrew said. “I think that we have to give the hospital enough notice to staff the wards with locums. I think we can quite reasonably stop non-essential work.”
“Monday?” Dr. Seagate asked.
Andrew nodded. “That should be long enough for admin to get back-ups in. It’ll cost them a fortune to staff the wards for eight hours, which will get their attention.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Doctors didn’t strike.
“Will it harm the patients?” I asked, making everyone look at me for the first time. Hell, I was going to be a doctor soon; I wanted to know about this shit.
Dr. Seagate said, “I was a medical student at the time of the Irish strike of ‘87. There was no increased morbidity or mortality from the strike, but that was only the junior doctors who were on strike that time. Registrars and consultants remained on the wards. Unlike then, we’re just one hospital; we’re not taking the entire profession out with us.”
“So we need to notify Homerton and St. Andrews. They get our emergency cases; we maintain skeleton staffing on the wards. As long as we don’t remain on strike, we can be pretty sure that the only people we’ll inconvenience will be the admin and God.”
God? Andrew was worrying about inconveniencing God?
The man in scrubs said, “Andrew, you’re confusing your med student.”
Andrew chuckled. “Relax, Blake, God is the director of medical services.”
“Are you really all going to strike? Has it happened before?” I asked, still trying to get my head around the idea.
“Looks like it,” Andrew said. “It has happened. Canadian doctors went on strike in 2002, Los Angeles doctors in ‘76.
Israel had a major countrywide strike that lasted for four months in ‘83. British doctors went on strike in the 70s.” He tapped my stack of printouts. “If you research the issue, you’ll find plenty of references to mortality and morbidity falling during a strike. The figures are crap, don’t believe them. There is a temporary drop because of no elective surgery, but as soon as surgery restarts, the figures come back up, and nobody is prepared to talk about the overall impact on quality of life of that delay.”
I nodded, and he looked at the papers in front of me.
“Hospital policy statements?” he asked, taking the stack off me, and I tried hard not to colour. It was hard to match the way he intimidated me like this with the man who had given himself so completely the night before.
“Yeah. I was, um, looking at the, um, policy of using evidence-based medicine. I went looking for journal articles and they weren’t in the database because they were anecdotal.”
Andrew was nodding approvingly when I looked up again.
“Excellent. This is instead of the presentation I asked you to prepare?”
I nodded. I was in the shit, no way around it.
“Tie it to the topic I gave you, and that’ll be fine.” He handed the printouts back to me. “I’ve got a copy of Callahan in my office if you want to borrow it now.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got a few minutes before I’m due at outpatients.”
I gathered up my papers, jar, and tin, and waited while Andrew said a round of ‘goodbyes’ to the doctors and Dr.
Seagate threw marshmallows at him, then Andrew strode past me, muttering, “I’ve got twenty minutes, think we can manage it?”
I took off after him. “No problems,” I said, pushing past the gaggle of nurses at the cafeteria entrance.
Chapter Eighteen
The Rottweiler was painting her nails at her desk as I pushed open the door to the offices, Matthew right behind me. I took the handful of messages she thrust at me, tiny slivers of red crescents marking them, and said over my shoulder to Matthew as I led him to my office, “I’m not happy about this, Blake. I hadn’t planned on spending my lunch break dealing with your crises.”
“Sorry, Dr. Maynard,” Matthew said, plaintively. “It’s a family matter…”
I unlocked my door, ignoring the beady eyes that had followed us down the hall. “In you go,” I said, holding the door for Matthew.
There was a lock on my office door, but it only worked from the outside, presumably cunningly arranged by the hospital to stop its staff from having sex on company time, but I closed my blinds, then wedged rolled up photocopies firmly under the door. Of course, if I was a consultant, my office would lock from the inside, and then I, too, could disconnect the smoke detector and smoke joints in it.
When I slid my hands around the back of Matthew’s neck and pulled him close, Matthew said, “You’re not serious about this, are you?”
“Oh, yeah,” I murmured against his ear. “Completely serious. I’m not going to see you until Monday at the earliest…” I kissed his neck, sliding my lips across his skin, inhaling the scent of him. “Not that I wouldn’t rather be safely in bed with you, preferably at my place where there are no drunken housemates, but I’d settle for your place if I had to.”
Matthew’s hands pulled the stethoscope from around my neck and tossed it onto the floor. I made a mental note to tell him how much a Littman digital cost one day, then his hands were unbuckling my trousers, and I had to bite my lip to stifle my moan.
Fuck it. I could always buy another stethoscope.
He was hard, too, and I could feel the bead of his piercing through his trousers, then my hands were sliding inside his trousers, and he was there, rock hard in my hands.
He kissed me deep, long and hard, and I pushed his trousers and underwear down roughly, then picked him up and deposited him on top of the mess on my desk. Stuff fell off the sides, coffee cups and paper and books, and I bent down and rummaged around in my briefcase for lube and condoms.
He rolled his own condom on, easing it over the beads, then I took him into my mouth; deep, long, and hard, too, his moans muffled by his hand. This was good, more than good, and I ignored the footsteps in the hall outside and the sound of traffic coming through the window glass.