The Hotel Doctor
Dr Vernon Coleman
‘Is that the doctor?’ asked a female voice. She spoke in English, with only a trace of a French accent.
I said it was.
‘This is Helene on the reception desk. Can you please see a girl in room 427?’
‘Do you know what the problem is?’
‘The mother says that the girl cannot breathe. She did not know we had a doctor attached to the hotel but since you’re here I hoped you would not mind my calling you.’
‘Of course not! Where is room 427?’
As I answered the receptionist, I felt my heart accelerate. There are, of course, various types of medical emergency. Not breathing is about as near to the top as it is possible to get. I started to panic a little. I was qualified, registered and licensed. I had satisfied the General Medical Council that I was able and competent. But I was nervous. Why, I wondered, couldn’t I start my new career with something simple and non-lethal: an itchy rash, a touch of flu or a bout of indigestion?
Helene, the receptionist, said that since I was new to the hotel, and didn’t yet know my way around, she would send a porter to fetch me.
He must have set off while she’d been on the telephone because he arrived less than a minute after I had put down the telephone receiver.
Three minutes later, I was standing inside a single bedroom on the fourth floor, clutching my black medical bag and looking at a young old girl who was sitting in a chair beside her bed, wheezing and clearly having a mild asthma attack. Her parents stood beside her. The girl, who wore a faded T-shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms, looked thin, almost under nourished. She was clutching a small, threadbare teddy bear and seemed anxious and frightened. A small boy, presumably her brother, sat on the floor, staring soundlessly. Their mother was small and also nervous looking but the father was huge and intimidating. The mother wore jeans and a T-shirt; the father wore a brown suit, a white shirt and a brown tie made out of some unpleasant looking shiny fabric and decorated with small gold symbols. I couldn’t see what the symbols were but I guessed it was a club or company logo of some kind. It was that sort of tie.
‘Good evening,’ I said to the girl. I introduced myself. ‘What’s your name?’
The girl struggled for a moment. ‘Tutti,’ she managed to say.
I smiled at her. ‘That’s a lovely name.’ Actually, of course, I thought it was a stupid name. And I thought her parents ought to be locked up for giving it to her. But you can’t tell a kid that she has a stupid name, can you? She knows.
She smiled back at me.
I turned to the boy. ‘And yours?’ I said to him. ‘What’s your name?’
He stared at me but didn’t answer.
‘His name is Pistachio,’ said the mother.
I thought they sounded like ice cream flavours but obviously didn’t mention this.
‘I can stop this for you,’ I told the girl. I reached out, picked up her hand and held it for a moment.
I turned my head. ‘Has she been like this before?’ I asked her parents.
‘Oh yes,’ replied the mother. ‘She has asthma.’
‘Does she take anything for it?’
‘Tablets and an inhaler,’ said the father. He spoke loudly and I guessed he was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. ‘She takes tablets every day and has the inhaler with her all the time. The doctor supplies us with an extra inhaler so that her teachers have one she can use when she’s at school.’
The man seemed to me to talk about his daughter as though she weren’t there, or was someone he hardly knew, a stranger.
‘Do you have the tablets and inhaler with you?’
‘No,’ said the mother. ‘We didn’t bring them in case customs confiscated them.’
‘You don’t have any of her medicines at all? No tablets? No inhaler?’
‘No,’ said the father. ‘Don’t you listen? My wife told you. It’s illegal to take drugs through customs.’
‘It’s not illegal to bring your own prescription medicines,’ I said quietly.
The father snorted and harrumphed and made it clear he didn’t believe me. Generally speaking, the English would rather die than make a fuss but he was clearly not a member of the silent majority.
I didn’t have any medicines at all in my bag, and although I had put suitable drugs and inhalers on my shopping list for Phillipe I didn’t have any medicines in my consulting room either. I turned to the open door where the porter was still standing. ‘Bring me a pot of very strong black coffee,’ I told him. ‘It must be strong.’ He nodded and hurried away immediately.
The parents looked at each other. They clearly thought I was ordering the coffee for myself.
‘What are you ordering bloody coffee for?’ demanded the father, glowering at me.
He was a very intimidating man.
‘The coffee is for Tutti,’ I told them. ‘The caffeine will open up her airways and ease her breathing.’
‘We don’t allow her to drink coffee,’ said the father firmly. ‘She’s too young for coffee.’
‘How old is she?’
‘She’s twelve.’ She looked younger.
‘The coffee will cure her,’ I told them both. ‘It’s quite safe. Caffeine dilates the airway tubes that are constricted.’
‘Don’t you have an inhaler you can give her?’
‘I’ll get her an inhaler tomorrow,’ I told them. ‘But I only arrived in Paris this evening. I don’t have any medicines yet.’
‘What sort of bloody doctor are you?’ demanded the father.
‘I can cure her,’ I assured him quietly. ‘We don’t need an inhaler.’
I opened my black bag and took out my stethoscope.
‘Would you be kind enough to pop outside for a moment?’ I asked the father. ‘I need to examine your daughter’s chest. Just wait in the corridor. We’ll fetch you in a moment.’
The father stared at me, hesitated for a moment and then left.
‘Has Tutti been under any stress today?’ I asked the mother.
There was a pause. The mother looked at Tutti, looked at me and then looked back at her daughter before she spoke.
‘I think she was probably upset because my husband has been shouting rather a lot,’ she said softly. ‘He gets terribly upset whenever we travel. He’s a traffic policeman and he’s used to people doing what he tells them to do. He finds it difficult when he’s in a situation where he has to do what other people tell him to do.’
I wasn’t surprised to discover the father’s occupation.
‘Does Tutti often have asthma attacks when things like this happen?’ I asked.
Her mother went a little red and then nodded.
‘Let me listen to your chest,’ I said to the girl.
Tutti pulled up her T-shirt and I listened to her chest. To be honest, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, but people expect the doctor to do something practical and the mother, father and daughter would all have been disappointed if they hadn’t seen a stethoscope in action. And, in addition, of course, I needed to fill the time before the porter came back with the coffee.
The porter knocked on the door just as I pulled down the girl’s T-shirt. If he was puzzled as to why I had ordered a pot of coffee when I’d been called to attend to a patient he didn’t say anything or show any surprise. He put the tray down on a table, turned and left. I noticed, with a smile, that whoever had prepared the tray had added half a dozen cups and saucers together with a plentiful supply of spoons, a jug of cream, a bowl of wrapped sugar cubes and a plateful of biscuits. It occurred to me that the hotel staff had probably now acquired a strange view of British medical ways.
I poured a cupful of strong, black coffee and put it on the side of the table to cool a little. I offered a cup to Tutti’s mother but she shook her head and declined. If she’d accepted I’d have had a cup myself. Since we were in Paris it was a good Arabica blend and smelt very good. Actually, of course, I should not have been surprised since the French don’t do undrinkable coffee simply because no one in the country would drink it if they did. If you served a Frenchman a cup of watery, lukewarm, tasteless dishwater and called it coffee (as the English often do) he would kill you, give himself up to the police and be acquitted by the jury. The idea that the lover who commits a ‘crime passionnel’ is exempt from the extent of the law in France is entirely fictitious. But coffee? Well, I suspect that would be different.
I looked at the coffee longingly but felt, rather sadly, that it might be inappropriate for me to pour myself a cup.
By the time the coffee had cooled a little, Tutti’s wheezing had already subsided a little. She looked better and was clearly slightly more relaxed. I couldn’t help feeling that having her father out of the room had helped enormously. I strongly suspected that most, if not all, of her wheezing attacks probably coincided with moody outbursts from her rather scary father.
‘Just sip it,’ I told her, handing her the cup.
‘Are you sure it’s safe to give her coffee?’ asked her mother.
I reassured her.
Tutti sipped at the coffee. As she did so I talked to her mother about what the family was planning to do in Paris, what they hoped to see and how long they were staying. And I asked her about the children.
‘How did you think of such unusual names?’ I asked.
‘They’re both named after ice cream flavours,’ the mother replied. I had been right about that.
‘We named them after our favourite ice creams,’ she continued. ‘Tutti’s middle name is Fruiti.’ I smiled weakly and muttered something banal and complimentary. Don’t parents like these ever stop and think about their children growing up into adults? ‘Hello! My name is Dr Tutti Fruiti’. ‘Pray silence for Judge Pistachio.’ What would happen if Tutti fell in love with a Prince? She’d end up being known as Princess Tutti.
Within minutes Tutti’s wheezing had eased. And within a quarter of an hour the asthma attack was over. Her mother thanked me profusely before fetching the girl’s father. He, predictably, was not so courteous or so grateful.
‘Anyone could have given her a cup of coffee,’ he snarled, when he returned to the room and found his daughter recovered. I refrained from asking why, if that was the case, he hadn’t cured his daughter with a cup of coffee himself. I didn’t want to anger him anymore, lest his anger upset his daughter.
‘Call me if you have any other problems,’ I told them. ‘I live in the hotel and tomorrow I’ll have some drugs and inhalers delivered from the pharmacy.’
‘Don’t expect me to pay for your visit,’ said the father. ‘All you did was give her a cup of coffee.’ He paused, frowned and thought for a moment. I could almost hear the cogs whirring round. ‘And I’m not paying for coffee I didn’t order,’ he added.
I made my way back to my room feeling sorry for the man’s family. I had only had to deal with for a few minutes. They all had to live with the miserable git.
It felt good to be back in practice. And, in the end, I was grateful that my first patient had been so easy to cure. I wouldn’t have liked to try to cure a heart attack or a broken leg with a pot of coffee. I realised that I’d been lucky. But I couldn’t help thinking that the way things had been going I deserved a bit of luck.
Taken from `The Hotel Doctor’ by Vernon Coleman. To find out more about the doctor in this extract, and for details of how to purchase a copy of `The Hotel Doctor’ please CLICK HERE
Copyright Vernon Coleman June 2025
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