Flowers fade and die but memories of a good doctor will live forever

BECAUSE it’s a bank holiday Monday, nobody’s in a hurry.

Traffic is thin and moves slowly enough to give drivers the time to glance around and notice stuff they might otherwise miss.

Like the flowers outside the medical centre. Bunches held stiff in shiny cellophane, ankle-bound with brightly coloured ribbon, leaning against the glass door. Noticeable because the door is at the top of one of those wheelchair and buggy-friendly concrete hills — as you’d expect of a recently built primary care centre. One with a reception desk and shelves behind the receptionists neatly stacked with brown-enveloped files. One with nebulisers and scanners and, as well as the GP, a nurse with her own treatment room and waiting area.

The flowers stand strangely, out of context. Tall-stalked blobs of red and blue and yellow from local garages are predictable at roundabouts where fatal crashes happen. Or at locations where someone famous and recently dead used to live. But this primary care centre was never operated by someone famous. Just by a local GP who achieved his own fame as patients who grew to depend on him and trust him went on to recommend him to others.

One woman, down on her knees in order to read the cards attached to some of the flowers, tells two women what the messages add up to. Sympathy and gratitude. They’re the key themes.

The other two women nod, knowingly. What else? He was always gentle, the tall one says. Would have a sort of smile on him, even when he was asking you serious questions. Wouldn’t be giving out to you for not losing weight like you promised you would, but concerned for you. Wouldn’t let you off the hook. For your own sake. You know what I mean?

The one on her knees straightens up some of the flowers and gets to her feet. Tells the others that only a fortnight ago, she persuaded Mrs So-and-so, you know the woman with the headscarf? Yeah, her. Persuaded her to shift away from another GP because he was treating her as if everything wrong with her was to be expected, now she was 70 and that’s just not good enough, that kind of dismissiveness. Like you’re just a number once you’re old. Mrs So-and-so couldn’t believe the thoroughness of the examination in the new place. And the fact that the doctor didn’t just cut her off while she was explaining things to him the way the other one did. I mean, it takes old people more time to answer a question. My mother practically goes back to the War of Independence if you ask her a simple question about something that happened yesterday.

Suppose she’ll have to go back to the other GP now. No, not my mother. Mrs So-and-so with the headscarf. She has a bad leg ulcer.

As they walk away, one of them glances back and notices the sign on the wall giving the opening times. Not that the GP who ran it ever stuck by those times. No matter how late it was, if people arrived feeling ropy, they got into the waiting room and in due course got to see him, even if it was way past closing time.

He ran marathons, the tall one says. Did you know that? He ran marathons. For God’s sake, wouldn’t you know just by the look of him, the middle one says.

They walk silently, thinking of the slim shape of him, and the quiet strength of him and how, nice as he was, he might give you a very small prescription for tranquillisers when you were kind of losing it, but that would be it. When you wanted a repeat, he’d talk you out of it for fear you’d get hooked.

One of them asks aloud to be reminded of “that foetal heartbeat time”. The other two compete to provide the details. This patient had had loads of miscarriages God love her. Four, was it? Five, more like. Anyway, several. And then she gets pregnant again and goes to the hospital for tests. Holles St? No, not a maternity hospital. General hospital. Up near Drogheda or Dundalk. The Lourdes? Yeah. Maybe. Not that it matters. Anyway, she’s thrilled with herself and the next thing they tell her the foetus is dead and she’ll have to come back and have a D&C (dilation and curettage) — you know that thing where? Mmm. Just to get rid of traces and so forth. And before she goes back for the D&C, doesn’t she go to the centre. The centre here — the old one, I think it was — and he does a scan on her and says he hears a foetal heartbeat and she’s definitely not to go back for the D+C. He was right, too. Seven months later, she had her baby.

When you think about it, it was amazing, just a GP knowing for sure when a whole hospital got it wrong. It was in all the papers at the time. Not his name, though. But around here, we knew it was him. The Evening Herald called him “hero doctor”, did you see?

They were right. He saved that child’s life, so he did. He was that good. He really was. That good. You wouldn’t get to know him. You’re right — I always thought he was sort of shy, but he was the best doctor.

NONE of them talk about the recent morning when he came in as normal and did a full morning’s work before getting into his car and driving to a wooded area about five minutes away. That’s where his body was found an hour or two later.

The three women already know the sketchy details and they don’t feel it decent to repeat them out loud. For different reasons, each of them owes him that much. Because, like most people, each of them has done more when they visited the GP than list symptoms and watch as he filled the details into the computer for the prescription.

The predictable pressure points of life get shared with GPs. Particularly a quiet man like him you’d know you could trust. The unplanned pregnancy. The partner who isn’t the wife-beater type, trust me, and always incredibly sorry afterwards. The adolescent who never goes out, spends most of the time in a smelly bedroom. You tell the GP that stuff. Who else could you tell it to? They’re trained to deal with it and let it roll off them. Aren’t they? “He probably had no idea how important he was,” the one with the buggy says.

The flowers will wither, be gathered up and dumped. But the dead GP will be remembered for decades to come, and remembered for more than hearing a foetal heartbeat and saving a baby’s life. He will be threaded through family legends. How he told bad news and let them cry. How he brought good news and nodded, smiling.

The stories, like the flowers, will carry themes of sympathy and gratitude. And therein lies a good doctor’s immortality.