Gus
‘You okay to keep an eye on her while I just pop into the recovery room?’ she asked, inclining her head towards the anaesthetised patient lying on the operating table.
‘She’s stable and I reckon these lads have got another twenty minutes before they close.
Is that about right?’ She peered down the operating table towards the surgical field and Barney Snell shrugged his agreement (which was not easy to do while holding a clamp).
He nodded and checked the time on the theatre clock.
Half past midnight. That meant it was now Friday.
It was odd how days of the week seemed to merge into one amorphous mass when you were working a series of night shifts.
Especially at Christmas. He thought back to Violet’s confession the previous morning, how embarrassed she’d been by the fact that she had chosen to work the festive period and how surprised to learn that he’d done the same.
Her admission had allowed him to vocalise that decision, to tell her how he had offered a swap with a colleague pleading a desperate need to be off in January instead, another lie as he had absolutely nowhere he needed to be in January either.
‘We’re both as tragic as each other,’ he’d said to her.
‘A pair of Scrooge McDucks.’ He smiled, thinking of her now, wondering which ward she was currently on and what she might be doing.
He’d brought his swimming kit back into work today in case she asked him along again.
It wasn’t just because he’d slept so well, although that was part of the reason.
Really he just wanted to see her again, spend more time with her outside the hospital.
‘You can manage the closing sutures, I take it?’ The senior surgeon, Ranj Singh, peered over his glasses in the direction of Barney Snell who looked bored.
‘Of course, Mr Singh,’ Barney said. ‘I’ll tidy up here. And thank you for letting me do some of the diathermy. I’m sorry that I?—’
‘Nothing to worry about Mr Snell,’ said Mr Singh graciously. ‘Ruptured appendices are very vascular. She’s fine now. Crisis averted.’ He lifted his hands to his chest and backed into the scrub room.
‘Would have been fine if he’d just let me carry on,’ Barney muttered to himself once his senior colleague had disappeared. ‘I’d have easily been able to stop the haemorrhage if he’d just given me a few more minutes.’
Gus was non-committal from the head end.
He’d seen the patient’s blood pressure drop precipitously during the incident Barney described and was glad that Mr Singh had stepped in when he had.
But he knew that a certain amount of dick-swinging was expected in the theatre and there was no harm in letting Barney grumble while he closed the layers.
‘I’ll be done here fairly soon, Gus.’ Barney lifted his eyes from the needle holder. ‘Have you made sure I’m on the op note?’
Gus looked at the paperwork. ‘Yes, mate. You and Ranj are both down here as named surgeons.’
Barney seemed to be smiling beneath his surgical mask although it was difficult to tell for certain.
‘Hopefully that’s the last one in theatre for a few hours at least,’ said Barney, pulling the vicryl thread neatly through the woman’s subcutaneous tissue and knotting it with a flourish.
‘Although I think you’ll have a couple of pre-op assessments to do before morning.
There’s a chap on ward ten, pancreatic mass. Needs an ERCP first thing.’
‘Oh, yeah, Karen mentioned him,’ said Gus. ‘Eighty-four-year-old man. Nasty looking CT scan. Mr Zeller, wasn’t it?’
Barney shrugged. ‘Can’t remember to be honest,’ he said. ‘Something foreign sounding. Eastern bloc. The only reason I mention it is that there’s some chippy bird up there on the ward who’ll rip your ear off if she thinks you’ve not consented him properly.’ He laughed but it sounded hollow.
Gus shrugged affably. ‘Oh well, a lot of the nurses up there are very protective over their patients,’ he said.
‘Oh, she wasn’t a nurse,’ scoffed Barney, ‘I’d have given her even shorter shrift if she had been.
No, she’s a doctor. But only just. Foundation year, she’s probably been in post all of a month.
Not that you’d know it from her attitude, acted like she was chief exec of the entire trust rather than someone straight out of med school. ’
Gus felt a prickling sensation across the back of his neck. He had a horrible feeling that Barney was talking about Violet. ‘What, and she wasn’t happy about your pre-op assessment?’
‘She wasn’t happy about much of what I did, mate.
Stuck-up bitch. Seems to think she can look down her nose at me.
I told her I’d have a quiet word with her boss and that shut her up for about a minute– then she was off again, giving it all that with the superior attitude.
That’s the trouble with these uptight academic ones, fresh out of medical school and no clinical experience, they think they know everything.
’ He busied himself for a moment with a suture and then leaned in towards Gus.
‘She was nice-looking though,’ he said, his voice suggestive.
‘I can think of infinitely more pleasant ways to shut her up…’
Gus felt his fists curling involuntarily.
It was clear what Barney was implying and he evidently assumed that Gus would either smile along or offer a similarly boysy comment of his own.
If he remained silent then no harm done, he could easily pretend to himself that he hadn’t understood Barney’s meaning.
He’d done as much in the past. But thinking about Violet led him to wonder what she would do in the same scenario.
He recalled the incident with Mrs Boulter and her comments about the ‘slums of Calcutta’ a few days earlier.
There was no way Violet would put up with this sort of insidious misogyny, in the same way that she wouldn’t tolerate ‘friendly’ racism.
He’d seen enough of her in action to know that she would stand up for what she deemed to be right, irrespective of the damage it could do to her own reputation, career or social standing.
And besides, he was already annoyed at Barney for his comments about the girl with sepsis the previous night.
‘What do you mean?’ He phrased the question innocently enough hoping to give Barney plenty of opportunity to correct himself. But no such luck.
‘She just needs something else to keep that busy mouth occupied,’ he said, laughing.
‘Girls like that, they like to pretend they’re in charge but get them in the sack and it’s a different story.
Oxford English Dictionary on the streets, Urban Dictionary between the sheets. I bet she likes it rough.’
‘Mate, you really can’t say that sort of thing,’ said Gus, his voice still light. ‘It’s completely inappropriate. Come on.’
‘True though, isn’t it,’ Barney mused. ‘They like to be shown who’s boss. She’s probably dying for a good fuck, likely hasn’t had one in months. Head buried in a textbook or halfway up her own arse most of the time I expect.’
‘Jesus, Barney, I mean it,’ said Gus, shaking his head. ‘Enough.’ His tone was warning now, but the surgeon either didn’t hear it or didn’t care.
‘It builds up, doesn’t it?’ Barney continued, waving his toothed forceps around airily.
‘All that frustration, trying to keep up with the men, trying to prove themselves. That’s what makes them such goers.
Of course, the irony is that all the “I work just as hard as the boys”, “I’m devoted to my vocation” talk disappears as soon as they hit thirty and want babies.
It’s no wonder we’ve got a recruitment crisis.
That pretty little doctor up on ward ten, she’ll be trying to pretend that her number one priority is progressing her career, when chances are, she’ll be up the duff in a few years then coast along on maternity leave and part-time hours for the rest of her working life.
’ He gestured to one of the scrub nurses to find a dressing for the wound site and backed away from the operating table.
‘Either that or she’s a lesbian,’ he said, rolling his eyes as if to imply that women having sex with other women was even worse than them having the temerity to want a career and children.
Gus sighed as he regarded the sedated face of his patient, her endotracheal tube taped in position, the blue hair-net drawing a fine red mark across her forehead.
He moved the elastic slightly further back so it sat on her hairline where it wouldn’t irritate the skin and watched the gentle rise and fall of her ribcage as he considered what to do, how to act upon what had been said.
There was no response required of him as far as Barney was concerned, he obviously felt he’d said his piece, expressed his view of the world, and that was that.
But Gus couldn’t let those comments go unchallenged, could he?
He knew that keeping in with the surgeons was critical to future career success, and that the chances were, if he stayed in Bristol and wanted any private work in the future, he would need to keep people like Barney Snell onside, or at the very least, not offend them to the point where they refused to work with him.
But on the other hand, could he live with himself if he just sat there and let this tsunami of predatory chauvinism wash over him?
Didn’t he owe it to his female colleagues to say something?
‘Barney, mate,’ he said, trying to keep his voice reasonable.
‘You really can’t say things like that. She’s a colleague for a start, but you can’t talk about women in that way generally.
All that “oh, she’s either gagging for it or she’s a lesbian” shit– it’s a bit rapey to be honest. Have you not heard of Me Too? ’
Barney looked up in surprise. ‘Fuck off, Gus– I know that,’ he said, affronted. ‘It’s not like I’ll be filing a report to the GMC expressing my views, but you know, in here it’s just us blokes, it’s not like you’re going to make a complaint is it!’ He laughed at the very suggestion.
‘Yeah, but I don’t want to hear it,’ said Gus.
‘You saying those sorts of things in here, to me– it means that you think I agree with you. And I don’t.
It’s still really tough for women in medicine.
There’s loads of institutional sexism and misogyny about.
’ As you’ve nicely demonstrated , he thought to himself.
‘Yeah, whatever.’ Barney removed his gloves and dropped them in the bin as he picked up the patient’s notes. ‘Forget I said anything– it was just a bit of banter.’
‘It’s not banter though, is it,’ said Gus, his voice taking on an edge that he hadn’t known he possessed.
‘It’s the reason things don’t change. Why is it that a woman who is focussed on her career is inevitably seen as a bitch, whereas an ambitious man gets invited for a round of golf?
’ He was getting cross now. ‘It’s piss poor,’ he said.
‘I see Karen, working her arse off, day in day out. She’s brilliant.
Really bright, got a PhD alongside her medical degree, passed membership first time, published a couple of papers…
And she’ll get her consultant job when her number comes up, of course she will, but she’ll be back of the queue for private work, won’t she?
Because that’s where you boys come in. It’s the surgeons who’ll decide whether to put the lucrative stuff her way, and they won’t because she’s not a mate of theirs– in fact a lot of them think she’s a pain in the arse, which she can be, I grant you– but she’s a bloody good doctor and it’s not fair that she has to work twice as hard as one of the blokes would just to get to the same place. ’
Barney had been ostensibly writing up the procedure and staring resolutely at the patient’s notes for the duration of Gus’s impassioned speech, but he raised his head now and opened his mouth to respond.
His attention was diverted by the presence of Dr Karen Stringer who had returned from the recovery room.
Neither of the men had any idea how long she’d been standing there.
‘Everything alright in here?’ she said, her voice non-committal.
‘All fine,’ said Barney smiling thinly as he gestured towards the notes.
‘I’m done.’ He glanced briefly at Gus before leaving the theatre in what could only be described as a surgical flounce.
Gus grimaced. Not only had his senior colleague almost certainly heard him calling her a pain in the arse, but he had also likely scuppered any future good working relationship with the local surgical fraternity– his name would now be passed around as someone unbearably woke and earnest, someone who took himself too seriously and therefore couldn’t be trusted.
Oh well. He needed to take a leaf out of Violet’s book and ask himself whether it mattered.
In the grand scheme of things, probably not.
He’d done the right thing. Just as she would have done.