Snowed in at the Practice by Penny Parkes

Author:Penny Parkes [Parkes, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2019-11-13T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 26

By lunchtime, Holly was reeling and she was fully prepared to admit that pedantic Patricia, her return-to-work liaison, may have made a valid point or two. This wasn’t just about finding the perfect childcare, or fitting back into her work clothes; there had been a fundamental shift in how she viewed the world, how emotionally invested she became, and how vulnerable she herself felt trying to tackle her patients’ problems.

She’d been kidding herself, she realised, if she thought that car park consultations and coffee shop ‘off the record’ chats had kept her eye in. One appointment after another, after another, was like a deluge of suffering and she was like a giant sponge soaking it all in.

‘Teflon not Velcro, Teflon not Velcro,’ she murmured to herself as she showed her final patient of the morning to the door. She’d been delicate after having Ben and Tom, but something about the financial necessity of that situation had toughened up her exposed vulnerabilities quickly. This time, with Olivia and Lottie being a little bit older, and with so much more support in place, she had assumed the transition would be painless.

She’d been wrong.

She pressed her hand over her mouth to stifle the sob that was building in her chest, shutting herself in her room so that none of her colleagues could bear witness to her losing the plot quite so comprehensively. Was it possible that Taffy, unburdened as he was by hormones and working-mother’s-guilt, actually had a more realistic take on their situation than she did, she wondered, ready to forgive all his overprotectiveness in the light of this new information.

She pushed her shoulders back, ignoring the hollow ache in her chest. All she had to manage was the short walk through the building and then she was heading home. She’d never been more grateful to Taffy for insisting that half a day was enough to start with, however much she had resented his patriarchal bossiness at the time.

She walked out of the door and straight into Dan.

‘Whoa,’ he said laughing, ‘someone’s in a hurry to get home. Are you sick of us already?’

Holly shook her head. ‘Of course not,’ she lied.

Dan shrugged. ‘I find it hard getting back into the swing of things after a fortnight on the beach. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.’

The feminist in Holly wanted to stamp her feet in protest at his assumptions, but in reality there was more than a grain of truth in his words. She settled for the middle ground, a half-truth. ‘I guess I’d just got used to having all the time in the world to chat to people, you know, out in the wild. Being their friend as well as their doctor. Ten-minute-medicine requires a different bandwidth, maybe?’

Dan’s expression tightened. ‘Well, you wouldn’t need that in private practice. I didn’t realise you were still in discussions with Mike Urquhart?’

Holly frowned. ‘I didn’t approach him, Dan. And yes, we’re talking, but mainly because the club has disposable funds and I’m keen to help him spend them.

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