Getting into Practice (Edward Vernon's Practice series Book 3) by Edward Vernon

Author:Edward Vernon [Vernon, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-10-12T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The next few days were hectic. The death of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary kept us all busy answering questions. Even I was not able to escape the enquiry which inevitably followed. The hospital committee members who set it up wanted to know everything I’d seen and heard. Even when I explained that I knew very little of what had gone on they still seemed to think I was hiding something. They insisted on my answering questions for another hour.

Andrew had been having a hard time too. He’d spent two hours With the Dean of St Peter’s Medical School and a further hour with the hospital’s governors. They’d obviously been more than a little upset by the story in the university paper, but there had been little they could do about it without attracting more attention. In the end they’d settled for giving Andrew a good telling-off and extracting from him a written promise that anything else he wrote about the medical school would be cleared first of all with the Dean himself.

The result of all this confusion was that our formal medical education seemed to stumble to a halt. The new patients admitted to the male surgical ward were suffering from routine problems. One had piles which needed annihilating; another a cyst on his back which had been taken away six months previously, but obviously needed to be taken farther away, since it had recurred.

There was one new patient on the female ward who proved memorable for several reasons.

Mrs Doreen Rogers was admitted because she was overweight. She had varicose veins, piles and a hiatus hernia which gave her heartburn every time she came within spitting distance of her feet, but her main problem was simply her weight. Still in her twenties, she weighed 266 pounds and was beginning to suffer badly. Even when it was cool she found breathing difficult; when the weather was hot she found it nigh on impossible. She insisted that she ate nothing more than a moth needs to keep body and wings together, and her evidence was so convincing that I, at least, decided that medical scientists must know nothing at all about the metabolic processes dealing with fat, or the mechanisms which turn food into flesh.

She had come into hospital to have a few feet of bowel removed. Mr Meridew, an imaginative and innovative surgeon, had developed an operation which involved cutting out a length of intestine so that food travelling through had less chance to be absorbed; Mrs Rogers seemed an ideal candidate. It was rather a frightening operation, with considerable risks, but although the dangers had been explained to her Mrs Rogers was enthusiastic about it. She’d discovered that her husband had begun an affair with a neighbour and she was determined to win back his affection.

During the previous four or five months she had, so she claimed, really struggled to slim. She’d tried diets involving nothing more than grapefruit and radishes, she’d bought a rowing machine because she was too shy to be seen jogging in the streets, and she’d swallowed tablets by the pound.

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