my plastic garden chair. “You need to become a consultant, that way you’d have a comfortable chair for me.”
“So, the shit’s hit the fan. What in particular has gone wrong?” I ignored the jibe about being a consultant. My American medical degree just wasn’t classy enough for the British medical system; I was never going to make consultant here.
“God was waiting for me in my office this morning.”
“Yuck,” I said. God never ventured out of his office without a damn good reason; he much preferred to summon intransigent doctors to his offices.
“He asked me to resign to save the hospital the embarrassment of having to fire me.”
I was impressed. F had obviously seriously pissed someone off. “Are you going to?”
“No fucking way,” F said. “If I quit, I can’t claim wrongful dismissal. Bastards aren’t going to get rid of me that easily.”
I nodded. My thoughts had been heading down that path, too. “What are you going to do?”
F smiled, kind of like a shark would. “I’ve left a message with the BMA rep. This is war. The administration here can’t prevent me from doing my job the right way, then punish me when I do it the wrong way. It’s not actually my responsibility if their budget is fucked. Getting the best care I can for my patients is my responsibility.”
I mimed putting on a cowboy hat and spinning a six-shooter and drawled, “Them there’s fighting words, pardner.”
F laughed, making him sound kind of manic. “I’d watch that American accent of yours,” he said. “According to Lena, who is an integral part of the gossip network here, there’s some young thing in High Dependency who’s enthusing about the lovely American doctor that her housemate is shagging that saved her when she ripped her arm to bits. What have you been up to, you naughty doctor?”
I went hot, then cold, and swallowed hard.
“Ah,” F said. “In the midst of the ruination of my career, you’ve been indulging a little. I want details.”
F waggled his eyebrows at me, and I couldn’t help but smile. “I was at Matthew’s place last night and one of his drunken and/or stoned housemates shredded her arm on a glass door. I really didn’t have much choice but to ride in the bus here with her.”
“Matthew? Cute name. How is the adorable Matthew?” F asked.
“Matthew is fine. Can we change the subject?” I really didn’t want to go into how fine he was, not when my whole body was still suffused with contentment from last night.
F was grinning at me like the idiot he was, but I had no intention of elaborating on my sexual adventures. For a start, if I did, F might decide to return the confidence and tell me in excruciating detail about his sex life, too, and I really didn’t feel up to it.
F waited, and I sighed and said, “Go away F. You’re cluttering up my office, and while you might be about to be fired, I’m not, and I have a batch of med students I need to keep occupied before the nurses kill them.”
“Don’t forget your private tutoring,” F said with a leer, but he did peel himself off the plastic chair and wander out of my office.
I sat down at the table, feeling tired, and glanced around at the gathered fresh-faced med students. Nevins was still cheerful, and he looked less of an idiot than usual. Lin looked studious; the blonde girl as tired as me; Matthew was as gorgeous as always, but I didn’t let myself stare at him too closely. “Okay,” I said, tossing a handful of index cards on the table. “Take one at random. This afternoon, I want to know all about the condition, what the treatment options are; the usual drill. Let’s do some work.”
I left the kids attempting to put together a trolley for an IDC insertion and answered a call from F.
I could hear the steady clunk-clunk of equipment in the background when he spoke so he must have been calling from the dialysis unit.
“Wassup?” I asked.
“BMA rep. Stop work meeting this afternoon. We’re walking off the job.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, and my stomach plummeted. So it had come to that? “Okay,” I said. “When?”
“Five p.m.. See you there.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I put my phone away.
Chapter Seventeen
Andrew was sitting at a table of doctors, all of them involved in an intense conversation, with their heads pressed close together, when I walked past at lunch time, but he looked up and smiled at me. “Blake,” he said, and he nodded at an empty chair.
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.
