Sex, death and a snake in the grass: 19 linked short stories, fiction for the Internet. Read in narrative sequence using the left-hand menu or follow characters through the in-page links
7
Sixty cigarettes a day for 30 years is bound to affect you, Debbie thought grimly. And Emily, a thin, elderly, dignified woman, had seemed resigned to her cancer when they brought her in. But nobody could have been prepared for the awfulness of what happened next.
Barely after an hour after she'd been settled in, Emily suddenly went white and started groaning. Things quickly got worse, and soon Emily's moans were audible at the far end of the ward.
It took Andrew, the Senior House Officer on duty, 5 minutes to arrive after Debbie's call. By then, things had got really bad, and all the other patients were terribly upset. Emily was writhing and screaming in agony behind the curtain that Debbie had drawn around her bed.
Andrew didn't even look at Emily. He disappeared straight into the staff room. Debbie assumed he must have taken Emily's notes with him to read. Minutes went by and nothing happened, except that poor Emily's pain seemed to get worse and worse.
Finally Debbie could bear it no more. She hurried over to the staff room, where she found Andrew sitting, with his feet on the desk, reading the Daily Mirror.
'It's her own fault,' Andrew said, without looking up. 'The abscess in her lung has burst and she'll be dead very soon. That's what happens when you smoke, Debbie.'
'What about her pain?'
'It's her fault,' Andrew said again.
To her credit, Debbie managed to stay calm. 'If you don't prescribe her some pain relief, I'll phone Mr X [the consultant] and ask him to come and do it himself,' she said.
Later, in the canteen, she couldn't stop shaking. She didn't think of herself as a brave person, and the look on Andrew's face as he picked up his white coat and pushed past had scared her. But the diamorphine had at least helped Emily in her last hours, a little. Debbie felt she could go back to the ward with her head held high. But first she'd have another cigarette to calm herself down.
