The coffee was good and strong, and I leaned against the pantry, mind pleasantly empty. Divisional meetings usually made me all bitter, but my brain was like Jell-o this morning.
I didn’t think I could even manage to quote Hemingway at anyone.
“‘Never been daunted in public… I’m like a cat that way,’” I quoted. Oh, great, I managed to be intellectual and literary at six in the morning, and there was no one here to appreciate it.
The coffee percolator just sulked, so I shrugged and went and brushed my teeth.
I woke Matthew, gently shaking his shoulder, and he blinked at me and smiled slowly. “I have to go now. Do you want me to drop you back at your place? Or do you think you can deal with catching a bus from here?”
“Where are we?” he asked, stretching under the bedding.
“You’re close to Euston Road, aren’t you?”
I nodded and pointed. “That way, about four blocks. Just pull the door closed as you leave, don’t worry about the security system, it can stay off all day.” I kissed him quickly.
“Must go now; borrow a shirt or something if you need to.
And a razor.”
Matthew smiled at me. “Sure.”
I couldn’t help but smile back. “Dinner tonight?” I asked.
“Or is your workload too much?”
Matthew’s mouth twitched a little, perhaps in surprise, and he said, “Dinner would be wonderful, but I do need to hit the books tonight. Perhaps I could do that here, if I’m not being too pushy?”
“Sounds good. It’s not like I’m short on work to do. I’ll pick you up from your place?”
Matthew nodded, and I kissed him and left before we started showing each other our cocks again.
I wandered into the conference room, coffee in one hand, sticky bun in the other, files under my arms. I was still feeling peaceful and undeniably fucked, and F slapped me hard on my back, slopping my coffee.
“You’re looking relaxed there, Andrew. Had a good night?”
“You’re painfully happy there, F,” I retorted. “Get any sleep?”
“Like an infant,” F said, sitting down beside me. “She’s a qualified massage therapist and Reiki practitioner. I’m in love, or at least in like. What about you?”
I shrugged. “How about I just say that I had my horizons broadened?”
F’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?” he said in a low voice. “I want to hear about it.”
I could trust F; he’d never betrayed a confidence before.
“One word for you: apadravya.”
He looked puzzled and I smiled in a way that I hoped was enigmatic, but probably looked smug.
The head of the division came in and sat down and I leaned back in my chair, prepared to enjoy the show. F had grown frustrated with the bureaucracy and politics and had deliberately misdiagnosed one of his patients as having kidney cancer, with the patient’s full knowledge, just to force a surgical team to review her. It had worked, but he had pissed off a lot of people, including the head of the surgical division. This was going to be fun.
The division head dropped a stack of patient case files on the table and said, “I need to talk about proper channels today.”
“’Don’t you know about Irony and Pity?’” I quoted under my breath.
There was a gaggle of med students in the staff room, waiting for me. I put what must have been my fourth or fifth coffee of the morning on the table and sat down, looking at them. The boy with the spots looked anxious, and I wondered what he’d done wrong. The girl with the repaired cleft palate was yawning sleepily. Lin looked smug. And Nevins … Nevins looked like he’d found heaven or something. He was positively beaming.
Matthew—no, Blake, since we were at work—looked the same as he always did. He was a better actor than I would have thought possible.
“There’s a British Medical Association divisional meeting this afternoon so I won’t be able to listen to this week’s presentations. You can choose between working on whatever assessment pieces are overdue, or sitting in on the meeting, which is where I’ll be.”
“What’s happened?” Lin said. “The division meeting isn’t due for another two months.”
I looked at her, impressed, and she coloured a little. “I joined last year,” she explained. “All the meetings are in the newsletter.”
“Excellent,” I said. “The rest of you, as soon as you can afford it, join the BMA. They’re the closest thing you have to a union, and when your employer tries to discipline you for doing the best you can for your patients, you’re going to need them.”
She leaned forward, elbows on the table, and said, “What’s happened? Is there something going on in the hospital to make a meeting necessary?”
“Okay, a reasonable point. One of the renal consultants couldn’t get the thoracic surgical team to assess one of his patients. They claimed they didn’t have space on their list to even consider it. So, after talking to his patient so she knew what he was doing, he changed her diagnosis to malignant tumours. Surgical team saw her instantly and complained bitterly about the consultant bypassing the system. The admin wants to discipline the doctor; we want the BMA in on it because the doctor was just doing his job in the best way he could.”
The students all stared at me, and I felt guilty for disillusioning them. “Who can tell me what the underlying issues are?”
Nevins was off in sexual fantasy heaven and I felt like grabbing him, shaking him, and shouting, “Do you think you’re the only one here that had sex last night? The rest of us are managing to concentrate!”
I waited.
Lin said, “The primary objective is patient care. If it takes deception to manipulate the bureaucracy and get that, what’s the problem?”
I waited, and said, “And?”
Blank looks.
“What about the surgical team?” I asked.
“By the first doctor misleading them and forcing them to divert resources that they couldn’t spare, it decreases their ability to provide care to their patients,” Lin said.
“And?”
Lin looked puzzled, and it was Nevins who looked up and said, “It says something about the hospital if it is that short of resources.”
I was stunned. Obviously a degree of critical thinking had been imparted by osmosis.
“Absolutely,” I said. “What occupancy rate does the hospital run at?”
It was a rhetorical question; I didn’t actually expect anyone to know.
“104%,” I said. “Yes, we manage to consistently run at significantly over capacity. If you ever meet Rina, the bed manager, ask her about it. She describes it as rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.”
“How?” Blake asked. “How does the hospital fill 104% of its beds?”
What the hell, it didn’t look like we were ever going to manage to do rounds today, so I might as well show them.
“Let’s go. Come and have a look at the dark underbelly of the hospital, see how many people can be packed into Casualty on a bad day.”
F was in the cafeteria at lunchtime and I took my burger over to join him. He was looking far more cheerful than I had expected from someone who’d had a new one ripped at an early morning meeting.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Fucking awful,” he said brightly. “But that’s all right. I typed up a letter of resignation and left it in the printer
’accidentally’ for a minute or two. That should help things.”
“I made my med students think about your problem. Then I took them to Casualty.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? Did it help?”
I shrugged. “Fuck knows.”
He smiled knowingly. “I looked it up. I’m impressed.”
