Going Loco by Tom Smith

Author:Tom Smith [Tom Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907595912
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2011-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

SETTLING BACK

We had been seven years away from our beloved Stinchar Valley and we were returning to a very different role in the community. There was a new doctor in our old house in Collintrae, and etiquette, as well as common sense, required that I mustn’t in any way come between him and his patients. Happily, it wasn’t hard. David was an older man, well aware of my previous role in the district, and was happy to welcome me back: he asked me to do the odd surgery and few days of locum for him; the old practice was in very sound hands, and I was privileged to help him out from time to time.

My former patients, too, recognised that things were different, and were savvy enough to avoid medical subjects when we met in the street or in the shops. I was now just the ‘locum’ and not ‘the doctor’ and they quickly adjusted to the new relationship.

Some things, however, remained the same. Like the weather. During our first winter back, I was asked to ‘do a week’ to let David step off the GP treadmill for a while. It wasn’t a good week. The snow and I started together on the Monday, and it didn’t stop for four days. By Thursday Collintrae was cut off from Girvan to the north and from Stranraer to the south by drifts. We could only be reached by boat, of the life or the fishing variety.

That was awkward: I had enough drugs in the dispensary to last for several weeks, but there were patients who needed specialist opinions, some of them fairly urgently. In those days, consultants were happy to do ‘domiciliary visits’ for their country colleagues, and Dr David had arranged, before he had gone off duty, to bring down one of them to see three patients in and around the village. I was to meet him and take him to them. It was a part of country general practice I hugely enjoyed, especially as Dr Slessor, the consultant who was coming, was a good friend and an excellent heart and lung man. On a normal Thursday we would have given him lunch, then seen him off on the road to Stranraer, where he had an afternoon clinic.

Except this week there was no road to Stranraer, and no road from Girvan. That was no problem for Alec Slessor. He wasn’t letting a little snow get in the way of seeing his patients. A keen sailor, he phoned the previous evening to say that he would take a boat from Girvan (the road from Ayr was still open), call in at Collintrae harbour, and then carry on to Stranraer. He might not get home to Ayr that evening, but a good meal, a glass or two of Scotland’s finest and a warm comfortable bed in the best hotel wouldn’t come amiss.

That’s how it came about that half the population of Collintrae, when they heard the news that the good doctor was coming, was lined up at the top of the beach, well wrapped up against the cold, waiting for his arrival.

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