An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War (11 page)

The man's teeth chattered. “I have something, sir, for I'm bloody well frozen.” He shivered.

Probably a summer flu, O'Reilly thought. It wouldn't take long to run him up to Holywood and get him under the care of his regimental doctor, but something made O'Reilly ask, “Have you ever had anything like it before?”

“Aye, twice now.”

“When?”

Rory made a brrrrr noise, shivered, and said, “The regiment'd been back from thon peacekeeping in Cyprus for about two months, that's about ten months ago. The doc said it was flu. I was like this for four or five days. I'd sweat something ferocious at night—”

O'Reilly made a mental note of that.

“—then about six months ago I'd another go for about a week, just like the one before. We'd a new MO then, young fellah just out of Queens and basic army training. He said it was flu too.” Rory shivered again. “And this attack's come on like the first two.”

“Everything all right, Fingal?” Barry asked.

“No. Rory has a fever. I'm trying to sort him out. Just be a minute.” That he was doing it in a pub was irrelevant. A sick patient needed care on the spot, be it in a familiar pub or outside a blazing bomb crater on a stricken battleship. “We may have to take him back to Number One, so hang on a tic, please.” O'Reilly concentrated on the job in hand. Two recent attacks of flu? This would be a third bout in less than a year. That wasn't right. “You were in Cyprus for how long?” he asked.

“A year, sir.”

“Been stationed anywhere else abroad?”

“No, sir.”

If Rory had been, O'Reilly would have suspected malaria, whose victims kept on having relapses, but to his knowledge there was no malaria in Cyprus. Still, three bouts of flu? He shook his head. He supposed a poker player
could
fill three full houses in three consecutive deals, but he'd not bet on it. “As I see it,” O'Reilly said, “you may have flu, but it could be something else.” Recurrent fever, rapid pulse and chills, and night sweats over a short time frame after returning from the Mediterranean? O'Reilly had a fair idea of what was wrong. “You need to be examined properly.”

“You're the doctor, sir.” Rory shuddered.

“I can nip home, get my car, run you up to the barracks, let your MO take care of you, or, and it's closer, head for my surgery, get a good look at you and see if we can work out what ails you.”

“I'd like that, sir.” He took a deep breath and said, “And if you'd have an aspirin, sir? My head's pounding fit to beat Bannagher.”

“I have in the surgery,” said O'Reilly. “Can you stand up?”

“Aye.” Rory staggered to his feet and O'Reilly put an arm round the man's waist. He was heavy and O'Reilly recognised that he was going to need help getting Rory to Number One. He lowered Rory back into his seat. “Donal, Barry, Rory's not well and I want to get him to the surgery. Donal, fetch the van and come right up to the front door.”

“Right, sir.” Donal, presumably believing in waste not, want not, sank the remains of his pint and trotted off.

“We'll give Donal a few minutes, Barry, then you help me oxtercog Rory out to the van.”

“Right.”

“I'll explain what I'm thinking once we get him home.”

“Fair enough,” Barry said, clearly stifling his professional curiosity.

“Willie. Gentlemen,” O'Reilly roared in his best force-ten-gale voice, “your attention please.” He was not going to submit Rory to the spectacle of being half-dragged out of the Mucky Duck without an explanation. Otherwise it might be all over town the next day that Rory had been stocious. And the poor man hadn't even had a sip of his beer. The conversations died. Every eye was on O'Reilly.

“Rory here's not very well—”

A chorus of “och” and “oh dear” and “poor lad” sounded throughout the pub.

“He's not infectious so you've nothing to worry about and Doctor Laverty and I can manage, so don't let us spoil your fun. But I just wanted you all to know.” He nodded to Barry and between them they each got one of Rory's arms round a shoulder, lifted him to his feet, and with him trying to take short steps headed for the doors that Gerry was holding open.

By the time they had Rory loaded into the van O'Reilly too, was sweating, but not sufficiently to distract him from trying to formulate a diagnosis. It was the combination of Rory's having been in the Mediterranean followed by three apparent bouts of flu that had given the clues. Lord knew O'Reilly'd seen enough cases when
Warspite
had left the Atlantic and been based at Alexandria in Egypt later in the war. A few confirmatory physical findings and a simple blood test he could do at Number One would clinch the diagnosis—and to do so would get Rory on the road to recovery and give a great deal of professional satisfaction to a simple country GP.

10

My Belly Was Bitter

“Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen,” Richard Wilcoxson said from a few feet away. “Finish what you're saying, but then can I have a word, Fingal?”

Fingal, his first glass of Jameson in hand, had been in the middle of a lively conversation with Bangorman and old friend Lieutenant-Commander Tom Laverty,
Warspite
's navigating officer. Tom had worn well, his fair hair thick but cut short, his eyes blue and alert. There were deep lines at their angles. The one thing that had changed was that Tom had married in March 1938, but that was as far as the two men had got on personal matters in the crowded room.

“Excuse me, Tom, Davy.” Surgeon Lieutenant David Jones, the other member of the conversational trio, was a dark-haired Aberystwyth native and a fierce supporter of the Welsh rugby team. Quite naturally, the Welshman answered to “Davy” and took good-naturedly the inevitable jokes about his mythical Davy Jones's locker, where it was believed dead sailors fetched up. Sometimes, Davy had told Fingal, it was even suggested that sailors might end up there with a bit of help from a certain sawbones of the same name.

The mess anteroom he crossed was furnished and functioning like a gentleman's club with a highly select membership, which in many ways in the peacetime navy it was. There was, O'Reilly thought, something essentially British about having a piano in a room near the aft main fifteen-inch armament, and that an Oërlikon antiaircraft gun was mounted on the deck immediately overhead. They'd be some percussion section when they opened up, an event which sooner or later was going to happen. In late 1939, the war was fairly static, but things were bound to start heating up. “Yes, Richard,” Fingal said, after taking a few steps away to where the senior waited.

“Paddy O'Rourke's been along to tell me that Stewart's taken a turn for the worse.”

“So you'd like me to go and see him?” Fingal coughed. His pipe was adding to the tobacco smoke fug in the room. The wardroom anteroom and immediately adjoining wardroom for officers above the rank of sub-lieutenant was on the port side on the upper deck just ahead of X turret. Sub-lieutenants, midshipmen (known as snotties), and clerks had their own mess on the same deck on the starboard side. The anteroom hummed with the pre-dinner chatter of the off-duty officers, many of whom Fingal had now met and most of whose names had already become lost. No matter. In the weeks and months to come, he'd be getting to know them better.

Richard smiled. “Both of us will go. Judging by the report, I think I'll be getting that pink gin from you later. Seems he's chucked up and says the pain's in his right lower belly now.”

“Sounds like appendicitis.” There were other diagnostic possibilities, but as one of Fingal's teachers used to remark, “If you saw a bird on a telegraph wire in Dublin, it was more likely to be a sparrow than a canary.” Common things occurred most often. Fingal was glad that, contrary to his usual approach, he had sipped his first Jameson slowly, knowing he might have to work.

“I've told Paddy and Leading Sick Berth Attendant Barker to prepare the operating theatre. It'll take a minute or two, but we'd better get back to the sick bay, take a look at the patient. I'm pretty sure we'll be operating.” He turned to David Jones. “You stay and enjoy yourself, Davy, and try to get an early night. I want you to take the morning watch tomorrow. Give Fingal a chance for some shut-eye and with a bit of luck, you'll not be disturbed between four and eight
A.M
. You've earned a breather, Davy. Fingal and I can manage between now and then.”

Fingal was sure that they could. He'd not eaten since breakfast and with only a small amount of whiskey aboard his knees felt a bit rubbery, but he knew he was far from drunk. If he had been, he'd have apologised to Davy Jones—but asked him to do the work.

Wilcoxson turned back to Fingal. “You can anaesthetise, can't you?”

Fingal swallowed. Certainly as students they'd all been made to give a few, but he was no expert. “Yes.” He tried to sound confident. He'd assumed he'd be assisting.

“No rest for the wicked, eh, Fingal?” Tom Laverty said. “Nor for me. I'm going to be busy tonight, then I've got a week's leave. My wife Carol's staying in a boarding house here in Greenock…”

Fingal's friend needed to say no more and he envied him. “Lucky devil,” Fingal said. “Enjoy your leave, give my love to Carol, and we'll get a chance for a blether once you're back. A lot's happened to both of us since the year of our Lord 1931. I want to hear what you've been up to.” Fingal put down his unfinished drink. He turned to the PMO. “Ready when you are, Richard.”

He sighed as together they began the walk back to the sick bay. Talk about being chucked in at the deep end? Only on board for a few hours, not yet able to find his way around the labyrinth of passageways, hatches, and lobbies, and now about to give an anaesthetic, something for which he was hardly trained. Still, what did the lower-deck sailors say? “You shouldn't join if you can't take a joke,” a way of expressing that all sailors were expected to take everything the service threw their way and deal with it. He just hoped he could.

To add insult to injury, dinner was going to be served in ten minutes and almost certainly by the time they'd finished with the patient the meal would be over. Unless things had changed since the last time Fingal O'Reilly had set foot on one of his majesty's ships, tonight he was going to have to settle for a late supper of bully beef sandwiches and hot greasy cocoa.

*   *   *

“Any change?” Wilcoxson asked Paddy O'Rourke, who had met them in the sick bay.

“He's thrown up twice more, sir, and his temperature's one hundred and one point eight.”

“Come on then,” said Wilcoxson, “let's take a look at the victim.”

“Ronnie Barker's setting up next door,” Paddy said.

When they arrived at the patient's cot, Fingal became aware of a smell of vomit and the man's clearly worsening condition.

“The doctors have come back to see you, Stewart,” said Paddy O'Rourke.

Commander Wilcoxson stood beside the cot looking down. “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty crock, sir. Pain's down in my right side and it's a damn sight worse now.”

“You've upchucked?”

“Aye, sir. Three times.”

“Stick out your tongue.”

O'Reilly could see how furred it was and even from where he was standing on the far side of the bed he could smell the patient's halitosis.

Wilcoxson sat on the cot and was taking the man's pulse. “Hundred and twenty,” he said. “Now let's see your belly.” He pulled the blankets down, opened the patient's pyjama jacket.

O'Reilly noticed a likeness of Popeye the Sailor Man tattooed on the patient's chest and “Janet” in a scroll underneath a heart pierced by an arrow.

Wilcoxson undid the trousers string, and began a running commentary. “No obvious abnormalities. Abdominal wall moves on respiration.”

So, Fingal thought, there's probably no generalised peritonitis. If the membrane lining the abdominal cavity was infected, breathing would cause the patient severe pain and he would tighten up his abdominal muscles to prevent that.

“No visible peristalsis…”

The bowel was not obstructed.

Wilcoxson put the earpieces of his stethoscope in his ears and the bell on the patient's belly. “Plenty of borborygmi.”

So, the bowel was contracting and making its usual rumbles and gurgles, more evidence that it wasn't paralysed because of infection of the entire peritoneal membrane. If that were the case, the belly would be as silent as the tomb, and if a sulphonamide couldn't cure the infection, it would indeed be Davy Jones's locker for the victim. Fingal gave an involuntary shudder and was grateful that Stewart's condition was not so dire.

“Tell me if this hurts,” Wilcoxson said, and began gently to palpate the abdomen, initially avoiding the right lower quadrant. The patient lay quietly until Wilcoxson's questioning fingers reached there, then Stewart sucked in his breath. “Bit of guarding,” Wilcoxson said, and suddenly released the pressure.

“
Yeow
. Jings, sir, that hurt like the very devil.”

“Sorry, Stewart.”

So there was localised peritonitis over the spot where the appendix lay. The patient, by tightening his muscles, was trying to protect himself from pain—called guarding—but the sudden movement when the fingers' pressure was released caused the muscles to spring out, thus moving the undoubtedly inflamed membrane. It was called rebound tenderness and the finding of it in that precise spot, taken in conjunction with the other symptoms and signs, was pretty conclusive of a diagnosis of—

“Appendicitis,” Wilcoxson said. “You were right, Paddy.”

The CPO inclined his head.

“It'll have to come out,” Wilcoxson said.

O'Reilly was surprised to see the width of the patient's grin, which he quickly hid. “So will I have to go to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, sir?”