Chapter 27 - Imagine

The voice of Dr. Marcel Milligan came from the CD player, his young voice calm, soothing, and yet commanding. "Imagine you are in the operating theater. The patient is ready; draped and prepped for surgery. The surgical assistants and nurses stand ready to do your bidding. And you are in calm and in control…"

I slowly dipped my fingers into the stainless steel basin and touched the beef liver which I had heated in warm water to human body temperature. I picked up the scalpel and sliced into the soft flesh. Blood pooled on the surface of the soft mass as I dissected out a major artery. The tissue was soft, slippery, bloody, yet I was in control. No nausea, no bile burning into my throat tissues, no Palmer sweating or fainting. I was in command, focused on the task at hand and it felt good. It felt the way it should be. The way I should be.

I looked away at the CD machine to adjust the volume and returning my left hand to the basin, I bumped it, and it flew off the shed table to the floor. The steel pan bonged and rang, hurting my ears, until the entire shed was vibrating in time with it and I felt intense nausea…

I gasped and awoke. I was in bed, upstairs at the surgery, not in the garden shed. The clock read 3 AM and the cottage was empty but for me and my frantic heart. I put a hand to my forehead and it came away perfectly dry, though. I sniffed my armpits and detected no smell of perspiration.

The cottage was silent. No gossiping patients clamoring for attention, no Pauline bugging me about my attempts to do my own blood draws, no Auntie Joan asking me to keep an eye on Louisa, no Louisa…

No Louisa. She's not here, not in the cottage. She's across the village harbor, in Routledge's smelly old cottage. She's pregnant, alone, but now on the mend after the misadventure of the midwife preventing her from taking antibiotics for her urinary tract infection. A close call as the delay nearly caused kidney involvement.

Louisa had shouted at the silly woman. "I am not a victim! Martin is a very good doctor!"

The midwife, Molly O'Brian had bristled. "This is just another sign of male domination…"

"No it's not! It's you have the problem with sex… I mean gender! I know you're tried your best, but it wasn't enough."

The woman marched out, slamming the door and I looked hard at Louisa, who had defended me fully and stated the one thing that I am proud of - being a doctor. Nothing else in my entire unpleasant life meant as much.

Being a doctor was all that I was good at. Fixing damaged clocks was just a hobby and one that was damned difficult. But the doctor thing…

When my mum would lock me under the stairs in the cupboard there, I used to imagine that I was with Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay on Everest. Our tiny tent was being battered by the storm and darkness was all about. But tomorrow morning, we'd make our assault on the final pitch, through the rotten ice and shifting rock to the summit.

Or I'd dream I was with Don Walsh aboard the USS Trieste, a bathyscaph, at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of all the oceans; 36,000 feet down - nearly 11 kilometers under the sea. We were the deepest men alive. The external pressures were tremendous down there and looking out at the deepest point we saw only a yellow mud bottom, and a half-seen fish started and swam away as we touched down.

Or I was the backup driver for Donald Campbell as he piloted Bluebird K7 across Coniston Water to a record speed. And many others I would dream.

And best of all was that I was a top-notch surgeon, applying my skills to save the sick and dying. Standing at my elbow was my father, Dr. Christopher Ellingham, and as he peered over my shoulder into the surgical cavity exclaimed "Tricky bit that, Martin. Jolly good!" He'd clap me on the shoulder then depart, knowing that I was better than him.

Imagine you are in control; the words of Milligan rang in my head. There was so little I WAS in control of in Portwenn. Not Pauline, the village or my patients, even Edith or Louisa. If I had a dog, smelly creature, it would be controlling me.

Imagine then, Ellingham, I thought to myself, that you are in London working at Imperial College. All was in readiness as you enter the theater.

I had breakfast with Auntie Joan and I told her that the job in London was mine and I was leaving near the end of the month. Jeffrey Rushton was leaving Imperial on the 31st, and they wanted me to start straight away, or so Edith Montgomery had passed on. Having missed Robert Dashwood's luncheon visit, and having apparently dodged his eye-to-eye question about my haemophobia, I had the job.

I didn't know that right away as I had responded to Bert Large's call that his cook's husband was quite ill. Appropriately enough they lived on Bodmin Moor, and I'm quite sure that Edith thought I had gone completely bodmin for attending to a patient, rather than her stuffy lunch.

Bodmin. Surely someone who ate road kill or carrion must be bodmin, and they were odd people. The badger hanging in the kitchen cupboard was a certain source of the cerebral toxoplasmosis with which the man and Marigold were infected. The look on Bert's face as I asked him if he had served any of this offal at the restaurant or if Louisa had eaten there was quite serious.

"We don't serve no badger at my restaurant! And we never will! And, no, Miss Glasson has not eaten with us." The man looked quite sad as he said this, and there was something else I think he wished to say, just as the emergency staff entered the house.

I shook my head in the darkness at the daftness of some local residents. Some were quite canny in justifying their actions. Like how that mad midwife had persuaded Louisa not to take antibiotics. Failure to act on an appropriate course of medical treatment - all for vanity, or hate, or prejudice. Must have been.

A failure to act, like my reluctance to tell Louisa I was leaving for London.

What did Auntie Joan say to me? "Does Louisa know? What about the child? Seeing it as it's growing up?"

"Well. Don't honestly see that I'd be a natural at it and all that, do you, when it came to it?"

Joan had called my bluff. "Well, you're just going to have to work twice as hard at it, won't you?" She followed that with another gem. "A long distance father is better than no father at all!"

When I put two-and-two together, having heard from Mrs. Tishell that Louisa was not taking her medication and that she was off school with "a nasty cold" that had torn it. I'd rushed to her cottage and diagnosed the flaming disease which was starting to wreak further havoc.

So Ellingham, my internal voice asked, why can you so quickly rush in and plop a diagnosis and treatment plan onto a patient with the swiftness of a falcon swooping on a hare yet have not been able to tell Louisa about London? My voiced sneered at me. Well?

Perhaps I can imagine the look of hurt on her face as I tell her. Louisa had even come to the cottage tonight to apologize for the antibiotic thing; even that she's to have the baby in the hospital. She looked well. Washed, rested, nearly fit, her cheeks a bit flushed; yet the glow of the pregnancy lit her up like the sun to my eyes. It would be so easy to say the damn words!

Yet when the door chime rang you rushed away and answered it to find Edith telling you that you had the London job. Edith had even told Dashwood that you were over the haemophobia. She had assured him of this.

And all the while you left Louisa standing in the kitchen and she had gone when you returned.

Imagine the look of hurt and disappointment on her face when you do tell her. It will be just as horrible as you can imagine, if not far worse. Her eyes will look away, and she will say "Right. Goodbye, Martin." Then she will go.

That will be the end. No absolution. No going back, Ellingham. She will walk from the cottage, down the hill, and be gone; once again. Just imagine that.