CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Synopsis
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Thanks For Reading!
NUMBED
The White Coat Series - Book Two
D.D. Parker
Parker Press
Copyright © 2014 by D.D. Parker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To Melody and Rebecca, helping out in more ways than I can count.
For Mondo, interrupting with interior design inspirations at all the best times.
NUMBED
My name is Dr. Jason Silvers. I was a drug addict.
Well… I am a drug addict. That’s why I can’t help but lose myself to the painkillers. The ones I needed after getting shot.
I did need them… right?
I wanted to stop but I couldn’t help myself. I felt the hole underneath me become deeper and deeper. I tried gripping onto something, something to keep me afloat, but I was just becoming more and more numb.
That’s when I realized; it was her all along.
Courtney Diaz, the feisty, personable, and drop-dead beautiful college volunteer at the hospital. She was my cure. She was what would drag me out of the numbness.
Except that wasn't the only thing that she had the potential of dragging out. My past is something I’m not proud of, and now it was coming back to haunt us.
Even then, I wasn't going to lose her. There was no way.
She was my drug now.
CHAPTER ONE
Getting shot is really fucking weird. And that’s putting it lightly.
I still remember it like I still remember my favorite Fast and the Furious movie, except I never almost bled out and died after watching a film.
No, in this case, a bullet shredded through my chest, missing my right lung by centimeters, and putting me in the hospital for a while, causing my body to melt into a hospital bed as I tried to regain normal functions again. It all happened so fast too. One minute, I was sitting on the couch, the next, a psychotic asshole busts through the door and shoots me clean through the chest. Thankfully I was lucky, if you can even say that. I dodged death by a hair, the bullet just managing to miss my spine which would have rendered me paralyzed. But the agonizing pain afterwards was indescribable.
On the other hand, I felt no pain during the shooting. It was such a weird sensation. It all happened so fast that I remembered thinking “did I just fall asleep on the floor?” It was like the Hangover movie just with more blood, yelling, and tears. Where the fuck was Zach Galifinakas when you needed the bastard?
Another thing I found weird was what you noticed as your life starts slipping out of your grasp. It was like most of the world was beginning to lose focus yet certain things became sharper. They stood out.
For example, while I was laying in a hospital bed, doctors and nurses all crowded over me, trying to get my blood to stop going where it wasn’t supposed to be. While this was happening, I saw the small fabric lines on the light blue scrubs an unusually hot nurse was wearing. I noticed the way her fingers held onto the clear IV bag pumping fluids into my circulatory system. Her nails were the color of the shiny new dark black Audi that I’ve wanted to get and now I probably wouldn’t even be able to drive. Her hair was held up in a messy, auburn brown ponytail, swinging this way and that whenever she would turn to grab a new medical utensil. Her nose was perfectly shaped to fit her rounder face that seemed so welcoming, so homey, it was nice. It was also oddly familiar.
I noticed the way the doctors spoke, their voices seemed collected yet commanding. I wondered if that was how I sounded when I was saving a life. That was another weird fucking thing. I wasn’t supposed to be on the hospital bed, I was supposed to be above it. I should be the one calling the shots. I should be administering the morphine, I should be doing the trauma intake, I should be ordering diagnostics. I was supposed to be invincible.
At least, that’s what medical school had led me to think. I guess I never noticed, but I did have a bit of a superhero complex. That white coat made me feel as close to superman as I was ever going to feel, and for me, that was fucking incredible. My whole life I was the underdog, always getting stepped on, never made to believe I could achieve greater things.
Well, suck it, assholes, because I became a doctor.
Of course, there was the whole dying part I had to deal with first.
“We’re losing him,” I remember hearing faintly, like something straight out of an overdone television medical drama. It sounded like I was underwater and drifting further and further down, the light having a harder time reaching me. I coughed up blood, feeling the thickness get lodged in the back of my throat as my eyes started to close involuntarily.
I was just getting so damn tired.
Why wouldn’t they let me sleep? I remember thinking. I just wanted to be left alone so that I could go to sleep, but no one was letting me.
“We need to get him to an O.R. right now,” Dr. Fineberg said, my mentor and favorite teacher from back in medical school. I was watching him through an expanding cloud, thickening my vision and making it harder to see. But I was able to make his face out, his acne scarred face that was so kind, so pleasant. He was the man everyone wanted to go to for advice. The grandfather of the hospital that led everyone down the right path. He was like Ghandi if Ghandi could prescribe Vicodin.
There was only one time I had seen him not smiling. It was when I went in for a question about the anterior pituitary gland after one of our finals. I entered his dimly lit office and sat down in a creaky wicker chair he liked keeping around, about to unload my bank of questions onto his strong oaken desk. That was when I noticed Dr. Fineberg had been crying. His face was puffy under his cheeks and the smile he so often would wear was gone. In its place was a look of pure determination to get through whatever he was going through. By then I felt like we were more than just student-teacher, I felt like we were friends. I asked him what was wrong and he told me his wife was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer and that there was nothing anyone could do.
The face I saw that day was one that said he had lost all hope.
The face I saw as I laid on the hospital bed said the same thing.
The little metal wheels of my bed creaked along as they wheeled me into the operating room. By this point, my vision was already starting to have those dark black blotches people talk about. The ones they get when they look at the sun for too long. Except these were growing, starting from the edge of my vision and reaching towards the center, threatening to blind me. Beckoning me to sleep
And finally, I slept.
The sleep was really fucked up too. It wasn’t a regular, restful kind of sleep. The ones that you feel as if your whole body is reborn. Like you’re a new person because you got just the right amount of sleep. No, this sleep felt restless. It wore me out me even more. My muscles fe
lt tense inside of me and my dreams were barely there, trying to cloud my sleep with distraction but failing, instead being replaced by a vivid nightmare. It felt as though at one point there was a war in my own mind, trying to battle it out for who won which part of my brain. The occipital lobe goes to... drum roll, please... a nightmare!
And that was because the only dream I remember having while I was in a medically induced coma was one that still haunts me to this very day. Let me backtrack, this wasn’t a dream, this was a memory trying to claw its way back up from years of suppression. It was the type of nightmare that left scratch marks at the center of your being, the one that dug deep and refused to be erased from your psyche. No matter how hard you tried. And the worst part of it all?
I couldn’t wake up from it.
Until I did.
CHAPTER TWO
The first few days of being awake were a hazy mess of different diagnostics and examinations run to make sure I was ok. They tested all my systems and ran a full blood panel to make sure I was clear of any infections. I watched them all go by, doing their jobs, very aware that they were treating and caring for a colleague. It was an odd situation to be in, getting taken care of by the people you work with. Susan from radiology, the woman who always ate lunch with me on Wednesdays because our schedules lined up perfectly. There was Sean, the night nurse that always had a sassy comment about some new pop culture phenomenon. Ryan, my best friend, would have been treating me too if he hadn’t been shot.
Fuck.
“Hey, Wanda, has anyone talked to Ryan?” I asked the nurse, worried about him. She adjusted the sterile white pillow behind me and beamed down in a reassuring smile, the kind that nurses seemed to have perfected over the years. The good nurses at least.
“He’s doing just fine. Already asking for a bag of sour patch kids.” Everyone who worked in the hospital knew about Ryan’s unnatural obsession with sour patch kids. He would have a bag with him pretty much every day, it was like a nervous tick for him. Whenever he would get anxious about something, he would pop one of those suckers in his mouth.
He was weird as shit. But I loved that kid.
“Good. Last thing I need is him getting messed up,” I said, pressing the little button at my side that promised to magically erase all of my pain. The one that would infuse my blood with painkillers. I felt the magic flow through my veins, spreading out through my capillaries, running right to the edge of my toes up to the tips of my ears, numbing the excruciating pain that was always threatening to crash over me. I could feel the medication hugging my nerves, silencing them from screaming out in protest, smothering them to the point of submission. The pain went. But in its place was something worse.
And it was growing.
It was the feeling of needing it. The grip of my brain telling me, “this is great! Look at how amazing you feel! Painkillers are your friend! Take them! Take them! TAKE THEM!”
I started craving that hit. The push of that button was beginning to feel like a reflex. The slightest sign of pain triggered my thumb to press down, releasing the substance my body depended on. I was aware that there were safeguards in place to avoid patient overdoses, but it still felt good. The numbness.
This was bad.
Before medical school, I struggled with addiction. To the point where I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with four other people all trying to support our various drug addictions. There was Marco, the Puerto Rican drug dealer that was on crystal meth, his teeth rotting out after every hit, but his mind escaping to a whole other world. Then there was Jessica, she was into heroin. Needles were always scattered around her sleeping bag, crusted red with dried blood. Stan was into heroin as well. In fact, they usually shot up together, helping each other find blown-out veins still able to take the drug. And last, there was Patrick. He used to be my closest friend, the guy who I could always count on. We both shared an addiction to coke and alcohol, partying it up every weekend, finding random girls to pump and dump after nights spent doing lines in the bathroom and taking shots at the bar. We scoured clubs together, claimed girls before the night even began, and would have a competition to see who could get their girl in bed first.
I won most of the time.
But that life all came to a screeching halt when I found Patrick face down in a puddle of vomit, his airways obstructed and his heart stopped. I rolled him over and won’t ever forget his clouded, empty eyes staring back at me, chunks of his dinner still crusted on his morphed, blue face. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. We were supposed to take on the world together. Fuck girls, get money. That was the motto, right? We were fucking gods... so how did Patrick die?
That same day I vowed to put the pieces of my life back together in any way that I could. I got my shit together and went back to school, finding a passion in addiction medicine and deciding I wanted to become a physician, to the shock of pretty much everyone that knew me.
“But you don’t look like a doctor!”
“Are you sure you can handle it?”
“It’s a tough road.”
“You’ll have to be studying all the time.”
“But look at you! Go into real estate, you’ll make money and look good doing it.”
I heard it all, but I persisted anyway. If there was one thing Patrick showed me, it was that life was too fucking short. I needed to work towards what I wanted and get it, regardless of what other assholes had to say about it. So I did, and I graduated from UCLA medical school and became a doctor, saving lives and shit.
Through it all, I stayed off drugs and kept my life clean, focusing on the books and staying away from girls as best as I could. Everyone who had known me before saw me as another person. The drug-addicted, one night stand lover, bad boy turned doctor was shocking all the people in my life. My parents, both influential environmental lawyers, finally felt as though they had their son back.
And as I laid in that hospital bed, with each pump of numbing painkillers into my system, I felt them begin to lose their son again.
I was hardwired for this. The drugs are what gave me life back then, and the drugs were beginning to give me life now. The rabbit hole was beginning to open up, and it was getting deeper and deeper. I tried to cling onto the edge, my fingernails scraping at whatever perch they could hold on to, but instead of latching on, I pressed the button again. The sweet, sweet button that gave me just what I needed.
“Jason! You’re up!” I heard a cheery voice say from the doorway. I slightly tilted my head, the movement feeling light and airy, but I knew it was slow, my muscles still tense from the trauma.
It was Courtney Diaz, the spunky hospital volunteer that stopped me in my tracks the first time we ever met, quite literally. She was smart, sharp, and uninhibited. She was also fucking gorgeous. She had sandy blonde hair that looked like it was straight out of a Pantene Pro-V commercial. Her eyes were an incredible auburn shade, the lightest brown eyes I had ever seen. She always had a smile on and carried herself with confidence and a self-knowing that was hard to find amongst the college crowd these days.
She also had an incredible rack.
“You had us all really scared,” she said, pulling up a chair and sitting next to me, the cart of files she was wheeling to the storage room was left abandoned by the door. We had built a sort of rapport with each other after the first day she started volunteering when she accidentally strolled into me, spilling my grande mocha frappuccino all over the both of us. I could see how scared she was, probably thinking her whole career was over and that she would never be allowed into the hospital, so what else was I supposed to do except pretend like I was furious?
“Shit! Do you know how much it costs to dry clean this?” I remember saying, pointing at the growing brown stain that was dripping down my white coat and onto the pastel tiles on the floor. She just looked at me, opened her mouth slightly, and turned an impressive shade of red.
“No, seriously, how much is it? I’ve never done it before. Here, I can take
yours too,” I said, breaking the joke and laughing as I picked up the now empty cup from the floor. She immediately broke out in a nervous fit of giggles. Probably the cutest giggles I had ever heard.
“Wow, I for sure thought you were going to punch me out and then surgically remove my kidney for the black market.”
“Don’t worry, I don’t do kidneys anymore,” I said, joking along with the new volunteer. I noticed her scent was wafting my way, its rose-like freshness opening my senses. This girl was fucking hot. Like surgically remove my own kidney for her hot.
“But seriously, I’m so sorry. It’s my first day and I’m a bit lost,” she said, still blushing from the accident. At least that’s the reason I assumed she was blushing for.
“No worries, where did you need to go?”
“I’m meeting with Dr. Fineberg today to shadow his rounds and then I have to file some paperwork I think.”
“Oh, that’ll be a ton of fun,” I said, remembering my own volunteer days when I would be locked into a small storage closet surrounded by stacks and stacks of patient files, all improperly color-coded and alphabetically fucked up. It took me an entire semester to get that place in order.
“Yeah, I bought my iPad to watch stuff while I work. I figured if I didn’t I would probably melt of boredom.” Her honesty was a refreshing quality and her perfume was still making its impression. Along with how smooth her skin looked. How thick her hair was. How gentle her lips looked. A familiar feeling was starting to push out logical thoughts. It was weird. Lately, I had been feeling more and more empty after my one-night rendezvous, which I was trying to cut down on anyway. And now, after waking up from a near fatal gunshot wound, I felt like those one-nighters needed to come to an end.
Numbed (The White Coat Series) Page 1