Violet
She shook her head, cross with herself. There was no point in trying to work out who the complainants were.
If she was honest with herself, the list of people she had potentially offended over the past few months was probably quite lengthy, this being a recurrent and perplexing theme in her life.
The more pressing issue was what she was going to do about it, and for now, that was too big a problem to get her head around.
Best thing to do was simply get herself through this week of nights, focus on the job in hand, and worry about the difficult looming conversation with her boss, Dr Corbishley, some other time.
‘Hello, Mr Zeller. My name is Dr Winters. I’m one of the junior doctors and I need to ask you some questions if that’s okay?
’ She thought she’d used the right tone to convey that her question was rhetorical but Mr Zeller clearly wasn’t paying attention to her tone, either that or she’d got it wrong again.
‘No,’ he said, his eyes springing open to give her the full force of his jaundiced glare. ‘It is not okay. Not okay at all.’ He squeezed his eyelids firmly back together. ‘Kindly leave me alone and please turn off that overhead light. It is impossible to get a moment’s peace around here.’
‘Mr Zeller, I’m afraid I can’t go away and leave you alone. I have a job to do and I need to ask you these questions in order to keep you safe.’ She looked across at him. He was still staring unblinking at the ceiling.
‘The good news is that the quicker we get this over and done with, the sooner the nurses can turn your light off and you can get some sleep.’ She glanced at her watch.
Although what she said was true, it was only two hours before the drugs trolley would be coming round, and unfortunately that wasn’t as much fun as it sounded.
Mr Zeller definitely wouldn’t be able to sleep through the clanking of that particular contraption, or the constant checking of those in the neighbouring beds.
The ceaseless noise of a medical ward was enough to make you ill all by itself.
She snuck another look at her reluctant patient.
He had folded his arms and his facial expression made her think of the time a well-intentioned nursing home visitor had asked her grandmother whether she would like to join in with a nice singalong, and her grandmother had told him to eff off.
She decided to go for a bit of ‘small talk’.
Not that she was ever terribly successful in this particular field but she’d seen others have good results with the same approach.
‘Are you having a good Christmas?’ she asked, trying to copy the tone she’d heard the nurses using.
Mr Zeller threw her another scornful look reminiscent of Granny as he gestured to his festive surroundings which included a paper chain hanging limply from the neighbouring curtain rail and two garish cards featuring improbably clothed cartoon creatures left by the bed’s previous occupant.
They were silent for a moment as Violet wondered whether to ask another conversational question or just proceed straight to the clinical information (she had already worked out that an opener of ‘Looks like you might have something terminal’ was not going to be conducive to establishing a good rapport) when to her surprise Mr Zeller began to speak of his own volition.
‘Christmas is always bloody awful,’ he said, speaking quietly but firmly, as if conveying an irrefutable truth. ‘Hate it at the best of times.’
Violet felt that something was expected of her at this point in proceedings. ‘Oh?’ she said, her pen tapping against the folder.
There was a long pause. ‘But I don’t want to talk about it,’ Mr Zeller said eventually.
Violet beathed out a sigh of relief. ‘Good,’ she said before she could stop the word emerging from her mouth.
Mr Zeller barked a short laugh. ‘That’s not the party line, is it? I thought your lot were all for talking things over, endlessly examining how we’re feeling and sharing it with the world.’
‘Not me,’ said Violet. ‘To be honest, I just want to know about your medical symptoms. I’m not really interested in why you hate Christmas.’
Mr Zeller turned his head towards her, his rheumy eyes fixed on her face. ‘You’re an odd one,’ he said, again stating it as fact.
‘I am a bit,’ she admitted and shrugged. ‘But it takes one to know one.’
He half-laughed and half-coughed again. ‘D’you promise me something, Dr Winters?’ he asked.
‘Depends.’
‘If I answer your questions, will you go away and leave me alone?’
She nodded. ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Although I can’t guarantee you won’t see me again this week. That’s just a cross you’ll have to bear.’
‘Fair enough. Let’s get this over with then.’
* * *
Violet went through the standard history-taking, documenting Mr Zeller’s new symptoms and his past medical history with meticulous attention, despite the late hour and the fact that he’d already been clerked in by the A chances of winning the lottery or being hit by a bus for example. ’
Mr Zeller nodded. ‘And sounds like this one might be a double-decker,’ he said quietly. ‘If it is a cancer, do you think it’s a bad one?’
Again she paused; what did a bad cancer actually mean?
Bad was such a subjective word and she much preferred objective terminology that couldn’t be misinterpreted.
Probably best to break her answer down into factual information.
She was always on safer territory if she stuck to that.
‘If it is a cancer, it may well have metastasised,’ she said.
‘Which means spread. Maybe to your lungs, maybe to your liver. Something like that would account for your symptoms: the weight loss, the breathlessness. Your skin is quite yellow, you might have noticed? And the whites of your eyes are the same, that sort of lemony colour. That’s jaundice.
It can mean that something is blocking the liver, specifically the bile duct.
And a blockage can be caused by something as simple as gallstones or something nasty like a tumour.
But, like I say we don’t know for certain.
Once you’ve had your scan things will be clearer.
It’ll give us a picture of what’s actually going on inside. ’
They looked at each other for a beat of time.
Violet wasn’t sure if she’d said too much, or not enough.
She never really knew what patients wanted to hear and it was so hard to judge their need for information from the way they phrased their questions.
Her usual response was the plain unvarnished truth, but as Anjali had pointed out with her weird American-accented impression earlier, some people couldn’t handle the truth.
The problem was that Violet never knew who these people were or how to talk to them.
Thankfully her bleep went off before she could overthink it and it seemed on this occasion at least that she’d got the tone right.
‘Thank you for being honest,’ Mr Zeller said, rolling back onto his side away from the festive cartoon animals and away from Violet. ‘None of those other buggers would tell me anything.’