Knocking at Death's Door 2

“I’d very much like a second opinion,” asserted the patient, buttoning up his shirt and stuffing the tails into his trousers.

“Dead, quite dead,” murmured Dr Millmoss, updating his notes in turquoise ink which he blotted carefully and then tucked away into his capacious wood and brass filing cabinet. Dr Millmoss, after fifty years in practice, intended to let the cyber-world pass him by.

“Bit of a cough, I grant you,” continued the patient, bending over gingerly to do up his shoelaces. “And perhaps a pound or two over what is considered fashionably healthy.”

“Would you kindly ask the next...” the ancient doctor gave him a vague wave of the hand along with his best professional twinkle over his half moon glasses, and then looked out of the window at the rose bushes in the practice’s garden.

The patient stood up and gripped the front of Millmoss’s desk to steady himself , as a wave of giddiness and, he had to admit, anxiety washed over him, “But ‘dead’, dammit?”

“Oh, yes. Dead as a doornail,”the doctor gave him an avuncular smile. “No pulse, d’you see? No pulse at all. Vital sign, the pulse.”

The patient grabbed his own wrist; his pulse appeared to be racing away. In time with the blood pounding in his temples and echoing in his ears. “What are you talking about? I can feel it!”

The doctor stood up and ushered him condescendingly to the door, “These things are best left to a medical man.”

With that he shut the door, leaving the patient face to face with the doctor’s receptionist, a kindly woman of a certain age.

The man thrust his wrist out towards her, “Dead, he says! No pulse, he says! Feel that!”

“Oh dear,” the receptionist sighed. “Doctor’s left his gloves on again.”