Psyc Out

Psyc Out
By Scott Wilson
Word Count: 280

Bob Reece shuffled towards the surgery door, dragging his slightly deadened left leg on the paisley carpet behind him. The stroke he had ten years after becoming a psychiatrist deeply affected the way he saw his patients.

“You just think about that,” he said in a low, gruff voice, to the young woman leaving his office. “I won’t put up with that again.”

Marge, the sixty-year-old receptionist in Dr Reece’s office, looked up from the game of solitaire she played on her computer.

“Same time next week?” Marge said.

The young woman looked at Marge, wiped a tear from her eye and nodded.

Dr Reece hobbled over to the front reception desk and taped the receptionist on the shoulder.

“Make a note on her file,” he hissed in a venomous voice. “That she is non-compliant and resisting treatment. I recommend that she be taken off her benefits and forced back to work.”

Dr Reece shuffled back into his office, tossed the young woman’s file in the red tray he reserved for ‘patients with an attitude’. He moved behind his large, antique oak desk and dropped into his leather executive chair.

Although he had his stroke twenty years back, when he was only thirty-four years old, the bitterness still consumed him. He had to work to pay the bills, keep a roof over his head and food on his table. His permanent disability made him unsympathetic to anyone on compo and he did everything he could to make them loose their compo so they had to go back to work to.