An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War Read Online Free PDF Page B

to purr. She was easily satisfied.
    O’Reilly looked across the hall to see a smiling Jenny showing a young woman into the surgery. He’d been around long enough to know that nearly every doctor would be excited when they started a new programme, but Jenny Bradley was a very smart woman. She had graduated from medical school with honours. Doing nothing but routine physical examinations, taking cervical smears, and giving contraceptive advice must surely be going to pall after a while? Making difficult diagnoses or doing surgery were the constant stimuli of specialty practice. Knowing your patients, and all the variety of complaints, were what made general practice so attractive to O’Reilly and, he knew, to Barry. But repetitive routine, day in and day out? He wondered if Doctor Jenny Bradley was going to be happy with her new position or whether after a few months she’d move on. He blew a magnificent smoke ring and invoked one of his favourite sayings. It was a bridge they’d cross when they came to it.
    *   *   *
    â€œDoctor O’Reilly.” Jenny stuck her head round the door. “Will you join us?”
    He put his pipe in an ashtray, decanted her ladyship onto the floor, and headed for the surgery. Once inside he closed the door. Jenny sat in the swivel chair at the rolltop desk. “How are you, Mrs. Beggs?” O’Reilly said to a short, slim, fair-haired woman wearing a light raincoat over a simple dress. She occupied one of the two patients’ seats.
    â€œI’m grand, sir, so I am. Your nice Doctor Bradley’s going til do one of them new- fangled smears for me, so she is. I seen Eileen Lindsay—her that won the Christmas raffle at the Rugby Club party…”
    Whose son, Sammy, had had Henoch-Schönlein purpura and was now quite recovered, O’Reilly thought.
    â€œAnyroad, she told me all about getting one so you’d not get cancer of the neck of the womb. We come in together, so we did. She’s next.”
    â€œEileen’s right about the test,” O’Reilly said. “We’re very lucky to have Doctor Bradley and the clinic here.” He was rewarded by a smile from Jenny and said to her, “Irene’s been a patient from almost the first day I started to practise here when I came back from the war. She was eight in 1946 and had tonsillitis. Had them out in ’48.” He smiled at the woman and said, “Isn’t that right?”
    â€œYou’re dead on, Doctor,” Irene said.
    â€œAnd apart from a few coughs and colds she’s been feeling fit as a flea since, haven’t you?”
    â€œI’ve always kept myself rightly,” she said, “and I get enough til keep me busy with my two weans.” She directed her next remarks to Jenny. “Doctor O’Reilly delivered wee Albert in ’62 and Doctor Laverty looked after me for Vera in ’64, so he did. Gertie Gorman’s minding them this morning for me. And Doctor Laverty had me in for an examination a year after wee Vera was born. Nothing til worry about. Just routine, he said.”
    Jenny was scribbling on a form of a kind O’Reilly hadn’t seen before, presumably a standard record for a well-woman visit.
    Not quite routine, he thought. Barry had sought O’Reilly’s advice during Irene’s postpartum visit in ’64. He’d found a mass about the size of a golf ball that seemed attached to the front of her uterus, the presence of which Barry had asked O’Reilly to confirm. It wasn’t difficult. Irene Beggs was slim with little abdominal fat and O’Reilly had concurred with Barry’s diagnosis of a small fibroid, a benign swelling of part of the uterine muscle, and was satisfied it was not of ovarian origin. X-rays were of little help in the diagnosis of pelvic lesions, and the only way to be absolutely certain was to open the patient’s belly, a pretty radical procedure