Read by Lizzie Muncey
Daphne slammed “dial” the millisecond her clock flipped to 8am, and counted breaths as the call connected and the familiar robotic voice was patched in: “You’ve reached the Broad Street Surgery. Good luck!”
She couldn’t slow her speeding heart, imagining the thousands of other aspiring patients listening to the same menu. Mothers with spotted children, elderly folk who’d fallen and couldn’t get up, people anxiously rubbing suspicious lumps. Did she deserve an appointment more than them? She added tachycardia and poor self-esteem to the list of symptoms she maintained on her laptop. Yes, she fucking did deserve it.
Daphne put the phone on speaker and with the scratchy copyright-free music playing, got on with her day: YouTube pilates, three pod-espressos, email job (conducted slumped in bed), lunch of microwaved pulses and an iron supplement, doomscrolling through a Teams call. Finally, at 2pm, an annoyed voice stepped onto the line—“What do YOU want?”—and Daphne sloshed coffee onto her keyboard.
She tipped her laptop upside down and summoned servility. “Hello Siobhan.”
“Hello Daphne Maguire, DOB 12/10/95.”
“I’d like an appointment with Dr Greenwood.” During Daphne’s last appointment, in the geological age before Covid, GP Greenwood had been kind, even wrote her a prescription for exactly five diazepam.
“He doesn’t have appointments until March.” Siobhan barked.
“Great!” This was it!
“… 2027.”
“Fuck.”
“Language, Ms Maguire.” Siobhan had been a prison warden, then a head-teacher. Daphne had discovered this when she tried to bribe her.
“What can you offer me that several high-level narcotics traffickers and anxious parents haven’t?” Siobhan had said.
“Have you considered CBT?” she said now. “Calpol?
“Have you considered growing a heart, Siobhan!”
“Just adding ‘borderline personality disorder’ to your records. Cross me again and I’ll do narcissistic.”
--
Daphne would remain wracked with her cryptic pains. An ailment that sometimes felt like appendicitis, sometimes like tonsillitis, other times like ennui. Maybe she was a hypochondriac, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t ill.
However, even her hardier, less neurotic friends were thwarted by the NHS. Last summer Maeve broke her arm at the climbing wall and was told it was period pains, then that it was her fault. “Who are you, Edmund Hillary?” her GP said. “Stay on the ground.” Their NHS trust didn’t treat sports-related injuries unless you had a shot at the Olympics.
Then Priya was given a cervical exam over the phone.
Lounging in the bicycle-jammed living room of their houseshare that evening, they war-gamed Daphne’s next assault on Broad Street Surgery’s phonelines.
“Have you tried pretending to be a man with erectile dysfunction?”
“Obviously.”
“Posing as the business associate of a Tory MP?”
“I’ll put that on the list.”
“Getting sectioned?”
“Harder than it looks.”
“It’s easy to get a vet appointment,” Priya said. She’d taken her cat last week. “What’s wrong with him?” the vet asked, as her ginger tom ricocheted around the consulting-room.
“He feels he doesn’t have purpose,” she said, “and he can’t leave the house without checking like eight times if he’s left the hob on.” She was now taking feline sedatives and feeling much better.
“What about getting pregnant? Guaranteed appointment in nine months,” Maeve said.
“Ew, 3D-printing something with a soul,” Daphne shuddered.
“You can’t get pregnant alone,” Priya said pointedly.
Daphne was stubbornly single. Had been since her last boyfriend gave her the double-whammy of chlamydia and Covid during lockdown. He’d been fraternizing with an ex in a deserted playground tunnel while allegedly taking his allotted hour of outdoor exercise.
“The sperm donors are all on Hinge now,” Maeve said.
“If that’s what it takes,” Daphne sighed and grabbed her phone.
With Priya and Maeve hovering, she swiped through some ineligible bachelors. Failed artists who’d barely put up a fight. Tight-trousered men in groups—who knew which was “Chris S.”? Recently-divorced graphic designers in Breton stripes and beanies. She swiped left, left, left.
Then, suddenly: GP Matthew Greenwood. Sandy hair and a crinkly stare. The same reassuring smile he’d flashed as he took her blood-pressure. “A hypertensive crisis,” she’d said. “Nerves,” he’d disagreed gently. His stated hobbies were “flatpack furniture” and “taking things to the skip.”
“There’s your appointment!” Maeve said.
“What? Get a date with him? Divulge my ailments over lukewarm beer to a guy who just wants his dick sucked?”
“Isn’t that a typical Friday night for you?” Priya said.
Daphne swiped right.
--
Daphne arrived at the pub early, wearing a top low-cut enough to expose the suspicious mole on her chest. She ordered a Cava—her standard sedative—and was down to the last gulp when Dr Greenwood appeared, shirt rumpled.
“Emergency chickenpox?” she said.
“Ear infection. Poor kid.” He nodded grimly. “Drink?”
“I don’t really drink.”
He eyeballed her nearly-drained glass.
“Ok, just 2-3 units a week.”
“That’s what they all say.”
They made strained chitchat over flat-tasting beer.
“What’s your favourite flatpack?” she asked.
“Partial to a Billy bookcase.”
“Does that go with red wine or white?”
“Tell me about your family,” he said.
“My mum has glaucoma, and my dad is pre-diabetic.”
Daphne usually thought of first dates as a nauseating medicine, one she occasionally knocked back to keep at bay the fears of dying alone and being eaten by cats. This medicine induced anxiety, cramped smalltalk, strained silences, and rarely, totally reversible lust.
But as she spoke to Dr Greenwood, her nerves melted. Their chat became less forced. He was kinda charming, neurotic but funny in a slanted, quiet way. And he was passionate about healthcare.
“It’s infuriating to see patients fall through the cracks,” he said.
“Do you think Labour can change anything?”
“Nah, they’re just a different presentation of the same illness. This entire country has austerity gangrene.”
Six to eight units of alcohol later, they were in her room, and Dr Greenwood was inspecting her Kallax bookshelves. He should see that breast lump, she rationalised, and unhooked her bra.
--
For six weeks, they hung out: pub-quiz, sex; house-party, fumbling, drunken sex; stroll through the misty park to grab coffee, cosy caffeinated sex. He had a good bedside manner, she confessed to Priya and Maeve, who squealed and rolled their eyes, respectively.
He never scolded her about vaping or tsk-ed when she ordered a fry-up to mop up last night’s alcohol. He wasn’t the health militant she expected from a man who knew all the diseases. But he also didn’t try to diagnose her. She wedged hints into conversations, about her nagging pains, racing thoughts. He offered sympathy but never a Latin name for her suffering.
Finally, one night when they were on the cusp of sleep, she asked him directly what she might have. Laid out her symptoms, head to toe.
“Dunno, Daph,” he yawned. “It all sounds benign, but if you’re worried, you could see an orthopaedic specialist, maybe a cardiologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist …”
She broke up with him the next morning (“Doesn’t feel right,”) and reactivated Hinge. If she’d found a GP, the specialists must be out there too. She also signed up for Happn, an app connecting you to people in your immediate vicinity, and starting hanging around hospitals. The white-coat matches flooded in.
Her first hit was an orthopaedic surgeon: a tree of a guy who contorted her in the weirdest positions during sex. “I can pop your hips back in if they dislocate,” he reassured her. He spent every weekend watching Premier League matches, not rooting for any team, but rather for injury. A player would topple, writhe on the grass clutching his thigh, and he’d jump up, licking his lips. “Looks like a hamstring tear.” Daphne “didn’t feel a spark.”
She couldn’t get past the first date with the psychologist, who said almost nothing, just let her ramble as they nursed G&Ts.
The cardiologist was way too eager. One date deep, he bought her a ring and filled the houseshare living-room with roses. Maeve diagnosed him as a textbook love-bomber. Daphne broke up with him, although she did pass on Priya’s number at her request.
And when an obstetrician said he “just didn’t like condoms”, Daphne kicked him out.
Five doctors: none were Harold Shipman but nor had they offered her even a diagnostic hint. She grew increasingly desperate. One night, she hung around St Thomas’s after the consultants had left and only A&E doctors were afoot, and opened Happn. She hadn’t resorted to swiping near A&E yet: you were more likely to catch a bloodied pub-brawler or habitual drunk than a doctor. But she needed answers.
Amidst the photos of crooked noses and hoisted pints, she spotted the glimmer of a nice wristwatch. It was on the arm of a man dangling from a rope off a cliffside.
“Got you,” she whispered.
--
A&E doctor Shane was two hours late to the skatepark.
“Sorry, dude,” he said, wrapping Daphne into a hug. “Was packing for this trip to the Alps, and time got away from me.”
“What are you doing in the Alps?”
“Gotta memorial for my buddy who died BASE-jumping off the Matterhorn.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry.”
“Shit happens. We’re gonna smoke up there,” he said, “then BASE-jump.”
He’d brought her a skateboard, but no helmet or wristguards.
“You gotta raw-dog it, man. I’ll teach you.”
They stood at the half-pipe’s lip, looking down. It might as well be the Matterhorn. Daphne imagined Maeve and Priya hosting a memorial for her here.
“I’ll miss how Daphne’s conversation was like listening to an American drug-commercial: learning all the ways this medication will make you crazy and shit yourself, spoken really fast.”
“I’ll miss how she could route every discussion to prion diseases.”
That wasn’t how she wanted to be remembered: as a worrywart, a hypochondriac. The girl hanging back as other kids belly-flopped off the diving-board and clambered out of the pool, laughing despite their pink-raw stomachs.
“I’ll do it,” she told Shane.
“Woohoo!” He high-fived her.
He helped her position the board, cantilevered into nothing, her foot on the back. “Other foot down, shift your weight forward, go!”
She did, and suddenly she was sailing down the sheer vertical, sliding into the transition …
… and crashing, somersaulting, board over tits, onto the concrete. Her ankle caught beneath her and snapped gruesomely.
Woozily, she watched Shane ride up the pipe’s far side and do a whirling trick with a stupid name that would probably exclude you from life-insurance forever. When he finally landed, he examined the protruding bone of her ankle. “Gnarly,” he said—and called an ambulance.
Wasn’t that what Daphne’d always wanted? Being rushed to a hospital, with something so obviously wrong as her bone sticking out, doctors clucking around her? But she didn’t feel relieved, as the sirens neared. She felt stupid, and suddenly, she missed sensible, caring, funny Matt Greenwood.
--
When she was discharged from the hospital post-surgery, Daphne tried to text Matt. But her messages didn’t deliver and on WhatsApp, his photo was greyed-out.
“You’ve been blocked, sweetie,” Priya said gently.
“I blew it,” Daphne wailed. “And he was great.”
Maeve stroked her hair. “You could try to get an appointment with him, if you’re desperate?”
So once again, shipwrecked on her couch, ankle elevated, Daphne braced for the phone menu, the queue. She’d almost missed the jazzy hold-Muzak. She got through in a record two-and-a-half hours.
“Spit it out,” Siobhan’s acid voice greeted her.
“I’d like to make an appointment with Matt... uh, Dr Greenwood.”
“About what?”
For the first time, Daphne couldn’t summon any ailment, except the obvious compound fracture. And heartbreak, but that was probably beyond the NHS.
“Is this Daphne Maguire, DOB 12/10/95?” Siobhan said sharply. “You broke Dr Greenwood’s heart.”
She’d probably get blacklisted from the surgery now.
“I just want a chance to explain …”
“It’s been a nightmare here since you dumped him,” Siobhan said. “He’s been diagnosing every patient with mania because they seem so happy compared to him. Writing prescriptions for sertraline, crying over babies.”
“I’d no idea he took it so hard.”
“He’s been saying you’re the love of his life, which, looking at your chart, I think is a tad dramatic. Your vitamin D levels are in the basement.”
“Could you ask him to call me?”
“I’ll get you an appointment,” Siobhan said briskly.
Daphne’s heart plummeted. It was hopeless: in eight months’ time Matt would certainly have met someone else. The next time he’d see her naked would probably be at her 60+ breast-cancer screening.
“How does 3pm sound?”
(c) Lauren Van Schaik, 2025
Lauren Van Schaik’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Galley Beggar and White Review Short Story prizes, named an “other distinguished story” in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's annual Best American Short Stories, and performed at Liars’ League. She’s currently writing a novel and a TV series.
Actor/Writer Lizzie Muncey’s play Superhero Snailboy, which started at the Edinburgh Fringe, toured nationally & she writes regularly in collaboration with theatre company She Said Jump. Acting includes The Mousetrap (St Martin’s Theatre), Nigel Slater’s Toast (The Other Palace), Beauty & the Beast (National Theatre), Doctors, & Call the Midwife. Her short story “Talons & Teeth” was one of Liars’ League’s six Stories of the Year 2024.
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