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had actually
set foot in the surgery because Dr. Harper, the kindly middle-aged
lady doctor, had of late taken to discussing his symptoms with him
on the phone so that she could dismiss them there and then, rather
than waste her time and his with a pointless visit to the
surgery.
    Last Monday evening, just as Dr. Harper thought she had dealt
with her last patient of the day, the receptionist had put a call
from Mr. Bloomfield through to her, as she did three or four times
a month.
    Dan, standing alone at the kitchen phone, began describing
his symptoms. This time it was gripping stomach pains, and frequent
loose bowel movements, which had a greenish tinge together with
reddish streaks which could have been beetroot from the beetroot
salad he'd bought from the deli on his way home from work the night
before, but then again could have been blood. All this, in his
opinion, and he felt sure she would agree, suggested several
possibilities:
    “Colitis was my first diagnostic port of call, although I'm
not sure I've got the characteristic mucus in the blood. I'd have
to take another look. Then of course it could be Crohn's disease or
diverticulitis. I know that patients bleed with both of those,
although I understand people with diverticular disease can remain
asymptomatic for years, but certainly severe cramps are a symptom
of both. Of course there is an outside chance it could be Whipple's
disease—I do have the chronic low-grade fever. Then there
is   .   .   .” Dan hesitated before saying the word,
“.   .   .   cancer. But of course you'll know better than
me,” he added as a deferential afterthought.
    That afternoon Dr. Harper had dispatched a burst appendix and
a suspected ectopic pregnancy to hospital, visited a senile chap
who thought his wife was in a coma, but by the look and smell of
her she had been dead for at least a fortnight, and had a
two-year-old with measles vomit over her new Mansfield suit. She
was tired, irritable and in no mood for malingerers like Dan
Bloomfield.
    “Me know better than you, Mr. Bloomfield? You flatter me,”
she spat sarcastically down the phone. “But, with your permission,
may I offer just a couple of suggestions? Have you considered
Norwalk virus infection or shigella bacillus?”
    Dan's heart didn't just skip a beat—it skipped an
entire drum solo. He was about to faint.
    Somehow, while still holding the phone under his chin and
maniacally scrambling through the
Home Doctor
index trying to find
N for Norwalk, he managed to get himself onto the kitchen floor and
raise his legs a few feet off the ground. After a second or two the
blood began to return to his head.
    “Good God, what the hell are they?”
    “What they are, Mr. Bloomfield, are nasty little so-and-sos
which give you an upset tum. You probably have a mild case of food
poisoning, nothing more. Simply take plenty of fluids. If you
insist, you can bring in a stool sample tomorrow morning and I'll
send it off to the lab for analysis. Good-bye, Mr.
Bloomfield.”
       
    D an did insist. However, in all the years that he had been one
of Dr. Harper's patients, he had never given a stool sample and
wasn't quite sure how one went about it. Dr. Harper had cut him off
without giving him any instructions. Would the lab want a whole
turd, or just a slice of turd, and what should he put it in?
    The first receptacle that sprang to mind as being vaguely the
right shape was the Habitat spaghetti jar standing next to him on
the kitchen worktop. Dan picked up the glass container, which was
full of spinach fusilli, adopted a squatting position and placed
it over his jeans in roughly the right position. He realized
straight away that it was going to be much too tall to fit between
his backside and the bottom of the loo, as well as too large to go
in his briefcase. Crucially, it also had no lid, although he
supposed he could cover it with clingfilm.
       
    T hen, as he rifled through the kitchen cupboards in search