|
Dr. Johnson’s Busy Day
part of the BobsWorld universe
by Setcheti
Disclaimer: I do not own Bob the Builder. I just love
him a whole lot and want him to be happy – isn’t that how fic usually
happens? And yes, before you go looking for him on the show, Dr.
Johnson is one of mine.
About BobsWorld: The BobsWorld universe is based on the
premise that the Bob the Builder characters are real people, living in a
real world. To find out more about BobsWorld, please go here.
Sunflower Valley, being a very small town, relatively
speaking, only needed one doctor. Todd Johnson loved being that
doctor. He knew everybody in town. He taught the local
schoolchildren about hand washing and germs. He made house calls,
even though he had a nicely modern medical center to work out of. And
he had a little blue truck, a non-sentient truck, to use for emergencies –
for obvious reasons, an emotionally immature and easily panicked AI vehicle
could not be used as an ambulance.
Although Bob, the town’s contractor and all-around
handyman, had managed to use one of his as emergency transport once when a
bad fall off a ladder had left him with a broken leg and no way to call for
help. Just thinking about that was enough to make Todd shudder, not
so much because of the machine’s involvement or because Bob was a friend of
his, but because of the circumstances and how easily they could be
repeated. The younger man had one of the most physically demanding
jobs on the island. Not to mention that he lived and worked with a
bunch of machines which were easily big and heavy enough to crush him if
they got out of control. Bob was incredibly safety conscious, but
Todd knew how easily accidents could happen. He’d worked as an emergency
room doctor when he was younger, there was almost nothing he hadn’t seen,
and one of the other reasons he loved his job was that for the most part he
didn’t expect to ever see most of those things in Sunflower Valley.
And so far, his expectations had been met. He saw
sprains and strains, the occasional light concussion or three-stitch cut,
and just over three weeks ago he’d seen Bob’s broken leg, which had been
the worst injury in the history of the town and God willing would stay at
the top of the list for a long, long time. Not that the broken leg –
a closed fracture of the tibula and fibula – had been any picnic.
Especially considering that Bob and his broken leg had ridden several miles
in the bucket of his backhoe over bumpy roads just to get back to the
building yard to get help. And that Bob had somehow managed to keep
said backhoe from panicking through the whole thing.
Todd wasn’t sure that anyone else except for maybe Fred
Pickles could have done that, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to find out any
time soon. Especially not with Fred, who had twenty years on Bob and
would definitely not recover from an accident as quickly.
Today, though, Todd’s day had so far been too busy to
spend much time worrying about accidents and who they might happen to.
He’d held open clinic for his pediatric patients for part of the morning,
then gone over to the lab compound to inspect their first aid stations, and
after that he’d headed over to Luigi’s Café for a late lunch. He had
house calls to make later in the afternoon but only paperwork to do until
then, so he lingered over his lunch and was prepared to take his time
walking back to his clinic. It was a beautiful day, and while he had
the chance to be outside he was going to enjoy it.
Or at least he was enjoying it…until he came across the
construction site where Bob’s partner Wendy was working with the machines
and saw Bob, crutches and all, supervising the job with clipboard in
hand. Todd shook his head and sighed quietly. He’d known it
wouldn’t work for long – or rather, he’d known Bob wouldn’t not work
for long. When the injury had first occurred, he’d managed to keep
the builder in his house for just over a week by only giving him a pair of
crutches and counting on limited mobility to keep him indoors. Then
Bob had used his crutches to sneak out of the house and all the way across
the building yard to his workshop, only to discover that he was still too
wobbly and in too much pain to put the crutches aside and actually do
anything once he’d gotten there. That was when Todd had brought in a
wheelchair as Phase 2, to keep Bob off his broken leg but still let him
putter around the yard.
The puttering part of Phase 2 had lasted about four
days, and then Bob had started getting adventurous again. Or maybe
that was industrious, it was hard to tell the difference with Bob.
The wheelchair went down the sidewalks in town just fine, it turned out,
and Bob was back in business anywhere his wheels and his crutches could
take him. Todd did not blame himself or any of the Valley’s other
residents for that, though; he blamed Bob’s latent claustrophobic
tendencies and the younger man's driving need to be doing something useful.
This particular situation, though…this was not entirely
Bob’s fault. This was Aaron Bentley’s fault, so Todd decided to deal
with him first. He walked quietly up behind the Valley’s building
inspector, an older balding man who was standing nearby with a clipboard of
his own, and eased a hand onto his shoulder. “So you’re a doctor now,
Aaron?”
Aaron Bentley jumped about six inches. Todd didn’t
laugh – part of him wanted to, but a bigger part of him didn’t. “I
don’t know what you…”
“Save it.” Todd looked past him, frowning when Bob
shifted his weight on the crutches and visibly winced. “Do you know
how he got out here?” Bentley shook his head. “Did you call
him out here?”
The building inspector puffed himself up, straightening
his gold framed glasses. “This job…”
“Must be completely within Wendy’s capabilities – or
else she would have called me and asked if I could give her partner a ride
to the site and back.” He let his frown become a scowl. “Since
I didn’t get that call, I’m guessing that you called the yard. Without
talking to Wendy. Which means that Bob either walked down here on his
crutches or rode down on one of the machines, because I don’t see his
wheelchair anywhere.” Todd tightened his grip on Bentley’s
shoulder. “Want to take a guess at how much fun that was for him,
Aaron?”
“He didn’t have to…”
“Oh yes he did.” Todd was implacable. “He
wouldn’t leave Wendy out here alone with you, Aaron, not when you’re in one
of these moods.” Bentley’s shoulders slumped, and Todd squeezed the
one he was holding. “Mary’s having a bad week?”
“It’s…I can handle it.”
“You’re trying to handle it all by yourself, and that,”
he gestured toward Bob and his crutches, “is the result.” Todd squeezed
harder. “Aaron, you know I wouldn’t send her away. But you’ve
got to start asking for help. Ask me, ask Lucas, ask Bob – you
know he’d be there with bells on if you asked him. And Mary
absolutely loves Bob.”
“Mary thinks Bob is our…” The building inspector
choked that off before he actually said the word. He slumped a little
farther into himself. “It’s just…it’s just hard, Todd. We have
children…”
“I know.” Aaron and his wife Mary had two grown
children of their own, children who had been almost viciously insistent
that their mother be put away in a private care facility after being
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Todd knew that his and Charlie’s promise
to keep Mary safely out of their reach had played a big part in Aaron’s
decision to join the Project. That decision had come at a price,
though; their son and daughter couldn’t be cleared to know about the Project
and wouldn’t speak to either of their parents, which had led to a lot of
hurt on Aaron’s part and even more confusion on Mary’s. On bad days,
she accused her husband of keeping their children away, on better days she
tried to call them…or she ‘replaced’ them with someone else, usually Lucas
Lewis or Bob since they were the only two men close to the same age as her
son who she came into regular contact with. Both men handled the
situation with grace and flexibility; it was Aaron who had a problem with
it. Todd decided to force a little perspective on the man. “If
you’d asked Bob for help instead of taking out your frustration on him,
he’d be sitting in your kitchen having tea and cookies with Mary right now
instead of trying to find a way to stand up that doesn’t hurt.”
The building inspector flinched, and when Todd followed
the direction of the other man's gaze what he saw was Bob looking back at
them both with a concerned frown on his face. The doctor could tell
just by looking that Bob was a) in pain, and b) fully aware of what Aaron
Bentley’s problem was, so he was c) willing to stay where he was, in pain,
and supervise the job if it kept the man off Wendy’s back while she worked.
Todd decided that he was going to let someone else sort
the building inspector out – he was busy today, he did not have time to
play psychotherapist on the side of the road with someone as stubborn as
Aaron. And he said so. “Do you actually need to be here for the
whole thing, Aaron?” he demanded. “Can’t you just inspect the job
after Wendy’s done? Of course you can.” He didn’t give the
other man time to reply, just turned him around and gave him a push in the
direction of Sunflower Valley’s small ‘downtown’ area. “Go sit around
with Lucas at the café, maybe get ahead on your weekly reports,” he
ordered. “I’m sure Wendy will call you when she’s finished.”
Aaron started to object, then looked past Todd,
blanched, and went in the direction he’d been pushed without another
word. Todd turned around and saw Bob awkwardly heading their way on
his crutches, the clipboard tucked precariously into place inside the
struts of one crutch and secured with what looked like a small bungee
cord. The doctor sighed; he supposed he should be glad that the
builder didn’t have his tool belt strapped around the other crutch.
“Stay right where you are!” he called out to Bob, and then walked over to
him with a tread that meant business.
As soon as he got close, Bob immediately started
defending his need to be there, on the job site, with the clipboard.
“I’m not doing anything, I’m just standing there checking things off so
Wendy doesn’t have to stop for Mr. Bentley all the time,” he told the
scowling doctor. “The job will go a lot faster if I help.”
“No, the job will go a lot faster now that I made Aaron
leave.” Johnson corrected. He looked Bob up and down, scowl deepening
a little when the younger man couldn’t keep from shifting again.
“Does your leg hurt?” Bob opened his mouth, and the doctor held up
one hand. “Please keep in mind that you can’t lie to save your life,
especially not to someone who knows you. So, does it?”
Bob sighed, coloring up a little. “Yes, it
does. In fact, I pretty much hurt all over right now,” he
admitted. But he looked Johnson in the eye and in a lower voice
followed up with, “But you know why I had to come out here,
Todd.”
It was Johnson’s turn to sigh. “Yes, Bob, I know,”
he said. “But you could have called me – we have cell phones now,
remember? How did you get out here, anyway? I don’t see your
wheelchair.” This time the younger man didn’t meet his eyes, and the
doctor’s scowl returned. “Tell me you didn’t walk.”
“You said I couldn’t lie to you,” Bob returned. He
shifted again, winced. “I was working on the wheelchair when Mr.
Bentley called; one of the tires was wobbling and I was trying to fix
it. I couldn’t get it back together fast enough to make it over here
in time.”
Johnson thought about that for a minute. He could
only imagine how Aaron had sounded on the phone, so he had to admit that
Bob had probably had good reason to think time was of the essence.
The doctor spotted Wendy looking in their direction and waved, letting her
know that everything was all right, and then returned his attention to her
partner. “All right,” he said. “I’ll accept that. But I’m
going to go get the truck and then you’re going home – no arguments.
You’ve got until I get back to tell Wendy anything she needs to know about
passing inspection.”
Bob smiled at him. “Deal,” he replied. “And
I’ll tell her to call Mr. Bentley when she’s finished – on her cell phone.”
“Deal,” Johnson agreed, and headed back to the clinic to
get his truck. He took the time to call the mainland and leave a
message for Charlie, and then drove back to the work site to get Bob.
Who came with him without any arguments, as agreed, and only put up a minor
fuss when the doctor insisted that he go to bed instead of sitting up in
his chair in the living room. “I don’t want you on your feet again
until tomorrow unless it’s a necessity,” he told the younger man, who in
spite of the fuss had settled into his bed with a groan of pure relief and
let the doctor prop his casted leg up without comment. “And just so
we’re clear, nothing work-related is considered a necessity. Necessity
is to the bathroom and back, possibly with a short detour along the way to
get something from the kitchen. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes.” Bob swallowed the pills Johnson handed him,
then let himself sink into his pillows with a sigh. “I’ll stay put,
Todd, I promise. I just couldn’t…”
“I know.” Johnson gave him a smile. “Get
some rest, and I’ll come by tonight after dinner to check on you.”
Bob agreed with him sleepily, the pain pills already kicking in – which
made the doctor wonder if his patient had eaten lunch or not.
Probably not. A quick look through the house showed that he had,
though, fed his cat, done some laundry, and partially disassembled his
wheelchair. Johnson looked over the parts spread out on newspaper on
the kitchen table and shook his head. Bob had been more bored than
he’d thought.
He called Wendy, letting her know that her partner would
be asleep for the rest of the afternoon, and then took his truck back to
the clinic. He had about an hour and a half until his first afternoon
house call, which was only about two blocks from the clinic; he still had
time to do some paperwork. So he sat down in his office with a glass
of ice water, spread his paperwork out on his desk…and then leaned back in
his chair and looked out the window, enjoying his view of the clear blue
sky and white fluffy clouds that were accenting such a nice, sunny day.
Because one of the many things Todd loved about being
Sunflower Valley’s only doctor…was that he was never too busy to stop
being busy for a few minutes whenever he felt like it and just enjoy the
moment. And he was really, really hoping that would never change.
|