Stairway to Perdition: Part 1: Barbara - Sex Stories

Stairway to Perdition: Part 1: Barbara

It was the late summer of 1970 when Andrew “Drew” Dawson landed his first full time medical job at Barchester General Hospital on the outskirts of London. He had studied for his newly acquired medical degrees in the North, but, after five years away, a cluster of rather troubling personal reasons made him return to his home town to begin his career away from the supportive comfort of his former student colleagues and friends. Notwithstanding his relative social isolation, Drew had made a reasonably good start in his new job in general surgery, one of two compulsory six month stints (the other being in general medicine) which he had to successfully complete in order to become fully registered. A couple of short locum tenens appointments, undertaken during his final year as a student, had equipped him to start off this first substantive job at least knowing what was generally expected. Time spent working the university holidays as an auxiliary in a psychiatric hospital, and as a porter in another general hospital, had also given him a good idea of how other staff, particularly nurses, viewed the junior doctors. This wasn’t always positive, and, by having spent time on the other side of the fence as it were, he had gained a vital insight into the methods of passive control readily deployed by them to curb any doctor’s behavioural excesses. Armed with this preliminary experience, he had successfully avoided most of the pitfalls that commonly befell brand new house doctors’. One ...

... habit he deployed right from the outset was to make a nightly round of all the wards he was responsible for when on call, just before going to bed. None of the other junior doctors did this regularly. One or two had even told him he was just making work unnecessarily and raising expectations they were not going to fulfill. He saw it very differently. The nurses liked him to come around because they could raise any problems they had without having to track him down. Drew had far fewer trivial calls during the early evening, and much less chance of being dragged out of bed just after falling asleep. House doctors typically worked one hundred and twenty hours a week, using what was called a one in two duty rota system. This gave them alternate weekends as free time, one afternoon off a week, and a couple of nights free of calls. Being a house doctor, what the Americans called interns, was therefore very hard work with precious little personal time. One night, a couple of weeks after starting and just before midnight, Drew ambled up to the women’s surgical ward as usual, half expecting some problems. It had been his firm’s theatre day, and both his consultant, Mr. John Northover, and his registrar Mr. George Thompson, had undertaken lists of routine cases. All was quiet as he approached the desk; the nurse sitting there looked up and smiled at him. Instead of the usual night staff nurse, there was, judging by her uniform and the number of bars across the top of her head dress, a ...