The Fishwhacker Swindle?

One afternoon I arrived at Shipmanville Hospital’s Accident & Emergency Department to begin a late shift. It was a weekday afternoon, traditionally a quiet time, and so there were only two of us per shift, on this occasion Dick and I. The casualty officers we were relieving had very little to hand over to us apart from two patients, a little old lady sitting quietly on a chair and a skinny young man groaning on a stretcher.

Dick made a beeline for the little old lady so I went into the cubicle with the young man and drew the curtain. The smell hit me instantly and I wrote in his notes: Ethanol +++. He was wearing a grimy T-shirt spattered with blood over one shoulder. His bleary, unfocused gaze wandered over me.

‘You doctor?’ he slurred. Liverpool. I nodded and introduced myself.

‘Gorra fuckin’ help me, mate,’ he moaned. He delivered the ck sound as though he was hawking up catarrh.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

He stared at me. ‘You’re the fuckin’ doctor, you tell me.’

Jesus. ‘You’re bleeding from your shoulder,’ I remarked. He frowned and tilted his head jerkily to peer at his shoulder. His eyes widened and he began to scream.

‘I’m bleeding! I’m stabbed!’

I managed to calm him down eventually. It turned out to be a wooden splinter from a door frame he’d barged into.

‘How many stitches am I going to need?’ he asked fearfully.

‘Perhaps an Elastoplast,’ I said.

In those days I was still a bleeding heart do-gooder so I decided to try a little counselling with him before he went home. I suggested that it might be in his interest to cut down on the daytime drinking.

‘Ah, fuckin’ grow up, ya bastarr,’ he snarled, and spewed rich brown vomit over the side of the bed.

I took my leave. Dick’s little old lady turned out to have a nastily fractured wrist, which she had been sitting with stoically and silently for the previous two hours.

About a month later, I had a day off and was doing some shopping in the morning for a party I was throwing the following weekend. I went into an off licence – liquor store to you unBritish – and loaded up a trolley with beer, wine, vodka, Scotch, gin and cider. I reached the counter. Standing behind it was the man with the shoulder splinter.

The transaction passed in silence, which was probably just as well. And if you think this is a bit of an anticlimax, remember that even small embarrassments can punctuate a life far more acutely than can conventional moments of drama. Here endeth the lesson.