'Did I ever tell you about the man who had lots of little live fish in his bladder?' William Haddock was saying.
'I don't think you did,' Goff said.
'When we were students at Barts,' William Haddock said, 'we were being taught by a particularly unpleasant Professor of Urology. One day, this twit was going to demonstrate how to examine the bladder using a cystoscope. The patient was an old man suspected of having stones. Well now, in one of the hospital waiting-rooms, there was an aquarium that was full of those tiny little fish, neons they're called, brilliant colours, and one of the students sucked up about twenty of them into a syringe and managed to inject them into the patient's bladder when he was under his pre-med, before he was taken up to Theatre for his cystoscopy.'
'That's disgusting!' the theatre sister cried. 'You can stop right there, Mr Haddock!'
Brian Goff smiled behind his mask and said, 'What happened next?' As he spoke, he had about three feet of the patient's small intestine lying on the green sterile sheet, and he was still feeling along it with his fingers.
'When the Professor got the cystoscope into the bladder and put his eye to it,' William Haddock said, 'he started jumping up and down and shouting with excitement.
'"What is it, sir?" the guilty student asked him. "What do you see?"
'"It's fish!" cried the Professor. "There's hundreds of little fish! They're swimming about!"'
'You made it up,' the theatre sister said. 'It's not true.'
'It most certainly is true,' the Registrar said. 'I looked down the cystoscope myself and saw the fish. And they were actually swimming about.'
'We might have expected a fishy story from a man with a name like Haddock,' Goff said. 'Here we are,' he added. 'Here's this poor chap's trouble. You want to feel it?'
William Haddock took the pale grey piece of intestine between his fingers and pressed. 'Yes,' he said. 'Got it.'
'And if you look just there,' Goff said, instructing him, 'you can see where the bit of bone has punctured the mucosa. It's already inflamed.'
Brian Goff held the section of intestine in the palm of his left hand. The sister handed him a scalpel and he made a small incision. The sister gave him a pair of forceps and Goff probed down amongst all the slushy matter of the intestine until he found the offending object. He brought it out, held firmly in the forceps, and dropped it into the small stainless-steel bowl the sister was holding. The thing was covered in pale brown gunge.
'That's it,' Goff said. 'You can finish this one for me now, can't you, William. I was meant to be at a meeting downstairs fifteen minutes ago.'
'You go ahead,' William Haddock said. 'I'll close him up.'
The senior surgeon hurried out of the Theatre and the Registrar proceeded to sew up, first the incision in the intestine, then the abdomen itself. The whole thing took no more than a few minutes.
'I'm finished,' he said to the anaesthetist.
The man nodded and removed the mask from the patient's face.
'Thank you, sister,' William Haddock said. 'See you tomorrow.' As he moved away, he picked up from the sister's tray the stainless-steel bowl that contained the gunge-covered brown object. 'Ten to one it's a chicken bone,' he said and he carried it to the sink and began rinsing it under the tap.
'Good God, what's this?' he cried. 'Come and look, sister!'
The sister came over to look. 'It's a piece of costume jewellery,' she said. 'Probably part of a necklace. Now how on earth did he come to swallow that?'
'He'd have passed it if it had
n't had such a sharp point,' William Haddock said. 'I think I'll give it to my girlfriend.'
'You can't do that, Mr Haddock,' the sister said. 'It belongs to the patient. Hang on a sec. Let me look at it again.' She took the stone from William Haddock's gloved hand and carried it into the powerful light that hung over the operating table. The patient had now been lifted off the table and was being wheeled out into Recovery next door, accompanied by the anaesthetist.
'Come here, Mr Haddock,' the sister said, and there was an edge of excitement in her voice. William Haddock joined her under the light. 'This is amazing,' she went on. 'Just look at the way it sparkles and shines. A bit of glass wouldn't do that.'
'Maybe it's rock-crystal,' William Haddock said, 'or topaz, one of those semi-precious stones.'
'You know what I think,' the sister said. 'I think it's a diamond.'
'Don't be damn silly,' William Haddock said.
A junior nurse was wheeling away the instrument trolley and a male theatre assistant was helping to clear up. Neither of them took any notice of the young surgeon and the sister. The sister was about twenty-eight years old, and now that she had removed her mask she appeared as an extremely attractive young lady.