MEDICAL MATTERS:A doctor on holiday is not too hard to spot, writes PAT HARROLD
‘SEAMUS, SEAMUS, another pint of the usual. Good man yourself.” The tall man in the white trousers and blazer was pathetically eager to be seen as the barman’s bosom buddy. This was odd, because Seamus was a charmless spotty youth who worked in a pub in a remote holiday village, and I recognised his new best friend as a hospital consultant from the big city.
He was a man of great reputation, mostly for arrogance and inapproachability, so why he was acting as Seamus’s new best friend was puzzling. But that’s doctors on holidays for you, and watching them is a charming, if occasionally bewildering, pastime.
On the surface there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection between doctor spotting and bird watching. But as the hurling takes over from rugby, and cricket from soccer, I trade one hobby for the other.
High summer is the worst time to bird watch. The foliage is thick, the birds are silent. But to make up for it doctors shed their white coats and flee the cities. They are now incognito, and the thrill is to spot them in the field on their annual migration.
Your typical workaholic doctor, of course, hates holidays or, at any rate, hates the idea of releasing control. He gloomily announces to his team that he will be forced to take holidays soon by his unreasonable spouse.
He is terrified the team will slacken off and bemoans that he ever left the States, where nobody took holidays and he used to perform a private operating list on Christmas day. Happy days.
He rings his locum twice from the hospital car park and then the deed is done. He is officially off, to join his family on holidays.
After the embarrassing moment when he failed to pick out his wife in the crowd he is now free, seemingly without a care. First he turns his attention to his family. See how they have shaped up since the last vacation. He buys his daughter a beach ball and an ice cream and returns to find her seated on a bar stool, smoking a cigarette and surrounded by swarthy admirers. He realises that the strong young man who helped with the luggage is actually his eldest son and that the toddlers, whom he assumed were his children, are in fact his grandchildren.
He realises that he has probably left it a bit too long since his last holiday. Feeling a little out of touch he rings the ward in the hospital at home, but is left hanging on and eventually gives up. He is not sure but he thinks that he may have heard laughter down the line. Nobody laughed when he was there. He makes a note to fire the registrar on his return.
So he heads for a drink and finds himself being watched from the corner by a bearded chap who looks vaguely familiar.
If you want to be a doctor spotter you have to be inconspicuous. Binoculars are frowned upon. You may start off at large fields and coastlines where doctors are apt to congregate. Rugby grounds are always good spots, and the Volvo race in Galway had more doctors than seagulls. A conference is a good place to spot them in captivity, and a must for the beginner.
But in the field it is more difficult. The plumage is often helpful, but nowadays only the very young and the very old wear ties.
Behaviour is a better clue. They may absent-mindedly wash their hands up to the elbow, or cut their meat to shreds when eating dinner. Psychiatrists have a habit of staring fixedly at you with a poker face, and ignoring anything you may say. Anaesthetists are in high good humour, liberated from the oppressive presence of surgeons, rather like the celebrations after the Berlin wall came down.
But at the end of the day all doctors just want to be liked. Which brings us back to Seamus and the consultant. The consultant, as a last resort, has tried to talk to his wife. To his horror he realises that she has recently completed a PHD in political science and disagrees, fervently and fluently, with the opinions that were treated with such silent respect in the operating theatres.
So there he is, in the bar, trying to impress the barman with his good-natured banter.
I felt sorry for him. He deserved better. He deserved a witty and congenial bar tender, full of local lore and wisdom, who would suitably attend to his desperate need for respect.
I almost felt sympathetic enough to reintroduce myself, but I was frankly frightened that the presence of another doctor might cause a reversal to his former, pre-holiday self, in which case both Seamus and I would be loudly and ponderously berated for no good reason. But I felt that he wasn’t having a very good holiday so far. Ah well, better luck with the retirement.
- Holiday maker Pat Harrold is also a GP in Barna, Galway