Chapter 5
Inappropriate
I sat next to Rosie at the back of the meeting, bored out of my mind. Rosie was nervously nibbling on a chocolate brownie, and I was balancing my clipboard on my knee and sketching on the other side of my list. Most everyone at the meeting was eating brownies, probably in a futile effort to numb the pain of the endless echo videos we were being subjected too.
Over the last month I had brought in a lot of cakes. Baking to me was a compulsion (as well as a business), and there was only so much I could force down Lou, Dylan and (when I saw him) Papa’s throats, so I brought loads into work. This made me very popular with the whole cardiology department, from consultants to healthcare assistants.
Even Tom begrudgingly ate my cakes. In fact, he had snarfed three pieces of my millionaires’ shortbread yesterday, and I had caught him sneaking into CCU later and scurrying off back to his office with no less thanfourpieces. I had wondered if he had been taking some for his blonde girlfriend (who I had since discovered was an anaesthetist called Cassie).
Thinking of him and the tall, curvaceous Cassie having clandestine meetings in his office whilst eating my millionaires’ shortbread made my throat feel tight.
I had seen them together a couple of times since the pub incident. The first time they were sitting in the canteen at lunch, laughing and chatting. The second, they were walking to the hospital car park. Again they were laughing, and she had ruffled his hair in a casually intimate way that can only really be pulled off if you’re shagging the recipient of the hair ruffle regularly.
My hands literally itched to just touch his hair when I was near him. The thought of the blonde getting to sleep with him, ruffle his hair and eat my millionaires’ shortbread (which even I admitted was off-the-charts amazing) gave me the impulse to hunt her down, shove shortbread down her throat, and watch her slowly suffocate.
Why I was feeling possessive of Tom was a mystery. He wasn’t mine and gave no indication that he would ever want to be. I had worked out the whole ‘look into my eyes’ cob that he had gotten into the other day. I was friends with Dylan, whom he liked. I was also now close to Ash, whom he respected, and the cardiology department seemed to have taken to me (due largely to cake bribery). He obviously did not want to be shown up as the only one who didn’t get along with me.
I had realized that, as Ash had pointed out, I really did bring out his grumpy, taciturn side. With everyone else he was the happy, smiling Tom of my memories from uni. I even saw him the other day giggling like a schoolboy in the corridor, remote control in hand, and a huge toy tank firing water at the secretaries round the corner, causing havoc as they screamed their heads off.
Despite the apparently deadly dull subject matter, Rosie was leaning forward with a rapt expression on her face, as if trying to burn the image of each echo picture into her brain.
When I say Rosie was keen, I mean she waskeen. She pored over all the latest cardiology journals, was the first to arrive and the last to leave every day, and, even though she was relatively tiny, I didn’t doubt that she would happily wrestle a bear to get into the cath lab so that she could assist with an angiogram.
The weird thing was that despite all her enthusiasm, and despite the fact that she had a scary amount of cardiology knowledge, she wasn’t asked questions in the meetings, and she wasn’t invited to go to the cath lab. Most of the time she was stuck doing the grunt work on the wards and had no opportunity to do anything more interesting. It was bizarre.
What was even more bizarre was that Iwasasked questions in the meetings,andI was pushed to go to the stupid cath lab. Luckily I had so far managed to sneak my feet out of my clogs onto the cold floor without anyone noticing. This saved me from passing out, but did not save me from the endless questions Tom asked whilst doing the procedure.
Seeing as I could just about name the coronary arteries at a push, coupled with my difficulty speaking around Tom, I didn’t fare too well during these grillings.
‘Frankie!’ I snapped my head up in confusion from my sketch, having totally zoned out from the meeting.
Tom was standing at the front of the conference room, where he had been presenting the echo pictures, and his furious gaze was fixed on me, along with the rest of the cardiology department. I shrank down slightly, wishing I could disappear. ‘Sorry to interrupt but are you planning on answering the question anytime soon?’
Oh crap.
‘Um …’
‘Maybe the notes you’ve been taking could help us,’ he continued in a dangerous tone. He was weaving through the chairs towards me and I was too frozen in shock to react as he snatched my sketch, whisked it up to the front of the room and slapped it down on the projector.
A large image of three kittens all entangled together appeared on the screen. I was right: echo pictures did look like cats in a bag. The resemblance to the last projected picture was uncanny. Everyone was looking up at the screen, and there was a stunned silence before most of them lost their battles with laughter. Rosie (knowing how shy I was) must have realized my pain and was squeezing my hand.
I felt the heat hit my cheeks. I had never liked being the centre of attention, and I certainly not did relish being embarrassed in front of everyone. I felt my eyes sting and quickly looked away from Tom, but not before I saw a slightly panicked expression cross his face.
Mumbling something unintelligible to Rosie, I ducked my head and slid off the narrow table.
‘Maybe we could move on, Tom,’ I heard Dr Williams say as I squeezed through the other juniors and finally made it to the door. I walked blindly down the corridor, thinking how much I sincerely hated cardiology and how much I hated my stupid, stupid, mean, Weasel Gankface boss. I may not have been much of a swearer out loud but I could certainly let rip in my head. In my head I even used the c-word, such was my anger.
Realizing that I didn’t know where I was headed and that I was not ready to start the ward round, I assessed my options. I considered going to the mess or hiding away in the sister’s office, but knew I could be found easily in either of those locations. So I turned on my heel towards to one place that I thought I could probably be safe.
Mrs Jones was a bed-blocker. Patients who are taking up a hospital bed for non-medical reasons are called bed-blockers. It’s a huge problem.Huge. It stops beds being available for acute patients and those waiting for surgery. Mrs Jones had been waiting for two months for her nursing-home bed to become available. Her dementia complicated the issue, making the wait even longer, as she needed specialist care. She had come in to cardiology with a heart attack.
Ladies who have made it to the age of ninety are generally tough as old boots. It takes a lot to kill them. Mrs Jones had emerged relatively unscathed from her heart attack, and the next day was back to her cantankerous self, demanding ginger biscuits and tea. But it had become clear that she couldn’t go home: she had been leaving the gas on, there were three sets of keys in her freezer, and she thought the year was 1987.
There was also a slight issue with aggression. When Tom tried to refer her to Elderly Care to get her off his list, she told the Elderly Care consultant that he had a stupid face and punched him in the nose. She thought I was her niece Tabitha, and I have to say I wasnotsurprised that her niece didn’t visit.
‘Hi there, Gladys,’ I said as I slipped into her side room (no matter how much hibiscrub they used she had remained stubbornly MRSA positive, almost as if by sheer force of will so that she could retain her own room).
‘Oh, Tabitha, you’re here, thank God.’ She was sitting up in bed, cup of tea in her hand, looking cross. ‘Those darkies aren’t doing anything for me, dear. I could wither away in this room and nobody would ever know. They probably wouldn’t find me for days.’ I eyed the mountain of toast slathered in butter and jam in front of her, and raised my eyebrows. She waved her hand in front of the plate in a dismissive gesture. ‘I mean a proper meal, dear.’
