Your Life In His Hand
The nurses called him ‘His Lordship.’ He always found fault with them. He thought very little of them. To him, they were nothing but women with little education and of little intelligence. He saw them as mere supporters who were there to simply carry out the doctors’ instruction without questioning. As he always said, they were ‘housewives with uniforms on.’ He believed in the superiority of the male gender.
Junior medical staff referred to him as ‘Robot.’ His middle name was Robert. And because they believed he behaved without a second thought, they found Robot a befitting name. And as if he agreed with them, he often carried a portable computer about. Apparently, one of the students once remarked, “He has his brain in his hand but often loses it.”
The anaesthetists found it more appropriate to call him ‘007 – licensed to kill.’ They saw him as a surgeon having poor judgement and undertaking unreasonable risks. He could be termed the ‘general surgeon’ – the Jack and Jill of all aspects of surgery who would tackle anything at any time. He was the image of a generalist, terrifyingly convinced of his expertise in all areas and always willing to ‘have a dig around,’ dabbling here, dabbling there.
The senior medical colleagues found ‘Professor’ to be befitting. They called him professor even though he wasn’t. He was aware of this, and indeed, liked being called ‘professor,’ believing he was the most brilliant surgeon in the hospital. Since he joined the surgical department doctors had found medical meetings quite interesting. They found him to be amusing. He always boasted about his surgical experience and often quoted journals that were non-existent. Some of his fellow consultants knew that a lot of the things he said was untrue.
And even the medical students knew that he was not as brilliant as he had made people to believe. Having been a senior registrar for eight years, and he boasted of this, so many students had passed through him, some of them now his colleagues. And he always said that he would have been a consultant a long time ago but for the ‘incompetent system’ of surgical training.
His name is Dr Braver.