Page 13 of A Country Practice Christmas
‘How loose are those shorts?’ she said, eyeing his crotch without the least degree of self-consciousness.
‘Um,’ he said, fighting the urge to suck in his guts and look manly.Hottie bartender with the biceps, he reminded himself.
She reached down and tugged a little at the fabric covering his thigh. It stretched and pulled and his mind moved even further away from hospital smells and doctors in scrubs.
‘They’ll do,’ she said. She hadn’t even noticed his biceps. ‘On you get. Face down.’
He did as she bid him, crossing his arms to use them as a pillow so his cheekbone and jaw didn’t bite into the wooden table. His skin smelled a little like the industrial detergent they used in the pub kitchen and a little like roasted coffee beans, and her thin towel smelled like soap flakes.
He jumped when a pair of cool hands reefed one leg of his shorts up so the back of his thigh was exposed.
‘This is not awkward at all,’ he muttered into the skin of his arm.
‘Did you say something?’
‘Nope. Carry on.’ The sooner this madness was over, the sooner he could get back to the blister pack of ibuprofen he had behind the bar and the frozen peas he had in the ice machine.
‘I’m just doing a visual first,’ she said, ‘looking for swelling or bruising or asymmetry with the other leg.’
Sure, he thought.Ogle the back of my leg while I lie on a picnic table at my place of work.
Then something—some part of her, soft and clothed in cotton—drifted over his other leg.Do not imagine what that was, he told himself. Fruitlessly.
This physio stuff was personal.
‘Hmm. I’m seeing a little discolouration, but nothing too ominous. Tell me when you feel any pai—’
‘Aargh!’ Some torture device, possibly a human hand, had just squeezed the back of his thigh. The pain was so bone-grindingly awful, he was pretty sure the veins in both his eyeballs exploded.
‘A definite defect in the belly of the muscle,’ his torturer said calmly. ‘What about here?’
Her hands had moved up. As inup.
‘No pain.’ Plenty of other stuff, but no pain.
‘Okay, we’ve no evidence of proximal hamstring tendinopathy, which is good news. A defect up here is a significant injury. Now, lift your foot up so your knee’s nearly at a ninety degree angle. That’s right, now I can see the distal hamstring tendons working. I’ll push down on your calf and you work against me. Good. I can palpate those tendons; they’re looking normal. Any pain?’
‘Not there, but yes where you viciously podged before.’
‘I don’t viciously podge. I assess and probe.’
‘Whatever,’ he muttered into his arm.
‘Let’s roll you onto your back. Now, do a straight leg raise so we can assess hamstring flexibility.’
Will did as she asked and gritted his teeth whenever she got her fingers into the soreness at the back of his leg.
‘I think it’s a pull or a mild tear,’ she said at last.
‘And that’s good, right?’
‘It’s certainly better than an avulsion injury.’
‘If I knew what that was, I’d probably agree with you.’
‘An avulsion injury is where the tendon has pulled away from the bone. That’s severe. A complete tear is less severe, but would also take months to heal. You’d need to go get an MRI to confirm if I thought that was the case.’
Not happening. ‘What about what I’ve got, a pull or a small tear?’
