“Amazing!”
“It becomes easy then, with this presupposition, to find the smoking gun. Was it the aspirin he got for a headache? Or perhaps the stress of his dinner being ten minutes late? God forbid his nasal prongs slipped for a minute. You see, the inept doctors and nurses did him in.”
“Those villains!”
“Something sure as heck caused that heart attack, and any lawyer with half a brain can comb through the medical chart looking for one hair out of place, one ‘i’ not dotted, to hang his case on. You see, with the two laws already firmly established in the American consciousness, he’s won the case before he starts. The only thing up in the air is the amount of the award.”
The two again consulted their watches and stood up together. “So, what do you think?” Dr. Landry asked as he gathered up his trash.
Rusty smirked and replied, “We shoulda been lawyers.”
“You’re right,” Dr. Landry said. “C’mon, let’s go. We have two more cases to go, and I believe one of them could use a spinal.”
“A spinal. You don’t say.” Rusty felt himself get excited and tried to put a lid on it. This was more than he could hope for.
“Ever done one?” Dr. Landry asked casually.
“No, but I’d sure like to try!” Rusty felt he had died and gone to procedure heaven.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Doug left the hospital in good spirits and headed for his truck. Still pretty darn cold, he noted. It was one of those winter days where the sun put in a good appearance, but did little actual work and looked to be in a hurry to leave, even though it was only four o’clock. Doug was glad to be heading out because he had a rough weekend ahead. He was on call Saturday which also meant being late-man on Friday, and back-up call on Sunday. Call was a gut-wrenching, twenty-four hour shift in the hospital, starting and ending at seven o’clock in the morning. On-call weekends were never something he looked forward to.
He climbed in and turned the key. The engine was slow to turn over and took several tries but finally caught. However, he thought, it was better than it had been in the morning when the night’s deep freeze had turned his motor oil to sludge. He’d have to remember to get the battery checked.
Doug decided he had time to stop at the gym on his way home. He tried hard to squeeze in several visits to the gym a week; he needed it to help deal with the stress of his job. As he sped down the interstate, radio tuned to The River, a classic seventies and eighties soft rock station, he thought about Rusty. Doug had forgotten what a pleasure it was to work with bright young students. Teaching the medical students used to be one of the high points of his residency at Pitt. Seeing Rusty get his first intubation was a treat. His enthusiasm was refreshing, something foreign to the usual life-in-the-trenches at Mercy. Walking him through the spinal was also special. Rusty’s smile reminded him of watching his son, Teddy, get his first hit in Little League. Doug remembered running out to first base to give Teddy a congratulatory high-five. He would never forget the look of sheer joy on his son’s face.
But Doug sensed there was a calculating side of Rusty as well, one that wasn’t all that visible from the surface. He had asked a lot of questions about Marshall and Raskin, and the early days of the Mercy anesthesia department. Why would he care? Was Rusty for real or was he just playing the med-student game for grades? Maybe, Doug reflected, it hadn’t been such a good idea to tell him the Stephanie story. He hadn’t even told Mike, whom he considered one of his best friends.
Doug stamped hard on the brake pedal when he saw the traffic in front was almost at a standstill; the construction zone had snuck up on him. God, he couldn’t stand this mess. This particular stretch of I-283 had been torn up for what seemed like ten years. Doug especially loathed the concrete barriers, which herded the traffic single file for several miles. He always thought they were dangerous. Too damned narrow.
As he crawled forward, Doug’s mind drifted back to his final days as an anesthesia resident at the University of Pittsburgh. Whenever he thought of teaching medical students, he wondered if he had made the right decision when he left academics and had opted for private practice twelve years ago. He knew that a rather large gulf separated the academic world from the world of private practice, or “real world” as he now chose to call it. The academicians, holed up in their ivory towers, believed they were the sole masters of hi-tech, rigorous medicine and medical theory, and looked down their collective noses at the lowly grunt on the front lines. Here, they preached, was to be found only incompetent losers practicing outdated medicine poorly.
Of course, across the divide, the private practice docs viewed the academicians with similar contempt. Their credo was: If you can’t do it, teach it. They viewed their university counterparts as arrogant stuffed shirts with abysmal bedside manner coupled with poor skills, who would quickly starve in the real world of patients, referrals, and word-of-mouth advertising.
As is frequently the case, Doug figured the truth was lost somewhere in the middle. Some academicians would have performed brilliantly in private practice, but chose rather to focus their talents on didactics or research. Similarly, many physicians in community hospitals practiced state-of-the-art medicine, honed to an unequaled level of perfection through sheer volume of cases.
Doug pulled into the local Gold’s, which was not far from his home. In the locker room, he encountered two of his ‘favorite’ individuals, “Chowder” and “Mule.” The two had given themselves the nicknames for unfathomable reasons. Doug decided he could easily detect them with his eyes closed; they gave off an unpleasant odor of testosterone sweat mixed with body oil. He had reason to believe they lived at the gym, for he couldn’t recall a time he had come in when they weren’t there.
Both men were posing their formidable, jock-strap-clad physiques in front of the full-length mirrors. They were flexing various muscle groups hitherto unknown to Doug, despite his detailed knowledge of human anatomy. Neither was tall. Mule, at about five-foot-six, stood several inches taller than his white counterpart, Chowder. Both exhibited massively muscled bodies plus the thinning hair and acne associated with anabolic steroid use. Their conversation consisted of grunts and guttural noises peppered with several discernible expletives and punctuated with raucous laughter.
At times like these, Doug wondered about the evolution of the human race. Could this possibly be the same species that had produced the transistor, the microchip, airplanes, and space flight? No, scratch that. Was this the same species that came up with the wheel?
Out on the gym floor, Doug made his way to the bank of Stairmasters and climbed onto one of the empty ones. He programmed the Stairmaster to Pike’s Peak, entered his 180-pound weight, set the time and level, and began pumping away. This day would have to be an aerobics day; he only had about thirty-five minutes before he had to leave to take his middle son, Steven, to Cub Scouts. He immediately checked out the “scenery,” as the guys at Gold’s quaintly referred to the female members. When in Rome . . .
Until recently, Doug’s scouting sessions had been a harmless activity. Oh sure, there had been several occasions where he had gotten into trouble with his wife, Laura. Doug remembered one particular night when they had gone out for dinner and a drop-dead gorgeous blond sat down at the next table. She had on a very short, very tight, very low-cut dress. Doug tried mightily to look at his wife, but his eyes kept getting pulled off target as if drawn by a strong magnetic field. Laura didn’t say anything at first. After about twenty minutes, she glared at him and whispered hotly, “You’re making me real dizzy, Doug. Your eyes are bouncing back and forth so much I feel like I’m watching a damned ping-pong game. You better take a good look at those boobs over there, cause you sure aren’t gonna see any tonight!”
Doug scanned the gym, but didn’t see much of interest. His Stairmaster was squeaking a little as it relentlessly increased the pace, and he was beginning to breathe hard. Doug had learned to control his wandering gaze around Laura. He was genuinely sensi
tive to her feelings and didn’t want to offend her. He knew he had no real interest in these women; he just liked to look.
Over the past six months or so, a subtle change had seeped into their marriage. Communication was somehow more difficult. Laura seemed unhappy and even depressed. He never thought he’d see Laura like this; depressed just wasn’t in the equation for her. In fact, Doug remembered that Laura’s happy, bubbly personality was what had attracted him in the first place.
They had met while both attending Cornell at an ice hockey game. Hockey at Cornell was huge. It was a Division One sport and permeated every aspect of campus life. Doug had worked as an usher at the home games and had noticed her instantly. She came in with several of her girlfriends, but stood out as if a spotlight shone on her. What impressed him more than the way her silky black hair framed her pretty face, was her smile. Her face was transformed when she smiled, taking on an angelic glow. He couldn’t stop staring. What also got his attention was her laughter; it was so clean and genuine. She radiated such an aura of joy, she positively sparkled with the pleasure of life. He just had to get to know her. After several hockey games and some impressive small talk such as, “You can see better from these seats,” Doug finally mustered the courage to ask her out. Actually, they agreed to meet at a Friday evening public skating session. He recalled the evening vividly. She showed up wearing a tight blue and white ski sweater and jeans and looked awesome.
Despite her athletic build, Laura couldn’t skate that well, but this worked to Doug’s advantage. He skated backwards, relying on his intramural hockey skills, and held her hands. Frequently he would have to stop to avoid hitting someone on the crowded ice, and Laura would plow into him, laughing all the way. Several times, she even made Doug lose his balance, and they both went down in a sliding heap. Normally he would’ve been embarrassed, but that night he didn’t even notice.
He drove her home afterwards in his 1968 VW beetle with the broken heater. They both froze, but neither seemed to mind. She invited him up to her apartment for some hot chocolate to warm up. They talked the night away until three in the morning before either of them noticed the time. Embarrassed, Doug got up to leave. She tugged on his shirt and wouldn’t let him go unless he promised to come back for breakfast; she said she made killer pancakes. He promised. They shared a long goodnight kiss and finally said goodbye. Doug walked outside into the night oblivious to the cold, his head spinning and lips tingling but feeling happier than he had ever been. The crescent moon smiled and the stars winked at him as he skipped to his car. He went home but couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t wait to see her again. They saw each other constantly over the next two weeks, and separations longer than several hours were painful. By the end of the school year, they were engaged.
The Stairmaster chimed, proclaiming he had reached his goal, and Doug was yanked back to the present. The emotive part of his brain was still resonating with the memory of Laura, basking in the afterglow of their newfound love, and he was reluctant to relinquish the feeling. He hadn’t thought about their first date in a long time. The pleasant memory made their current troubles all the more strange and difficult to understand. What was happening with their marriage now was hard to put a finger on. Doug wondered if the problem was simply due to the hectic nature of their lives with two children in school and a preschooler. But he wasn’t sure this was enough to explain it. Other things came to mind.
Laura was a stay-at-home mom who excelled at it, but she had a strong work ethic, possibly the result of a father who had abandoned the family early in Laura’s life. She tended to be extremely sensitive to the other women around her who had jobs. She felt they viewed her as a lazy wife who sat at home having coffee with friends, watching soaps, and chatting on the telephone. Being a doctor’s wife didn’t help because she felt guilty that she could stay at home with the kids, and the family could survive on one income.
To assuage her guilt over being a stay-at-home mom, Laura volunteered for everything from homeroom mother for the boys in school to assistant soccer coach to Cub Scout den mother. If there was a job opening for a parent—the more onerous the better, no money please—Laura was always first in line. She managed to squeeze in delivering Meals-on-Wheels to the elderly shut-ins between shuttling the kids back and forth to activities.
In addition to being an avid volunteer, Laura lacked the capacity to say “no” to anyone asking a favor. If her friends asked her if she’d mind feeding their dog while they went away for the week, she’d respond, “No problem. I’m home all day anyway.” Unfortunately, she made it sound like she had nothing to do and that she’d be thrilled to help out, so that her friends did wind up taking advantage of her.
Ironically, Laura wound up working twice as hard as any “working” mother. Sadly, no one realized this except Doug. The neighbors and Laura’s friends and acquaintances still thought she had it pretty easy. After all, she found time to volunteer for all sorts of things; she must be bored. Even Laura herself didn’t perceive herself as taxed to the limit; her sense of work ethic/guilt clouded her view.
Doug, however, realized his wife frequently bit off more than she could chew, and sometimes he and the kids got caught in the crossfire. Their lives seemed to be an endless array of activities centered around the three children. There were constant soccer/baseball/swim team practices and games, homework, science fair projects, piano lessons, cub scouts, etc. Laura orchestrated the scheduling of all these activities with a precision the Pentagon would have been proud of. Doug plugged into the scheme of things whenever he was available. Their conversations consisted mostly of planning the logistics of the busy evening or weekend. Minor concerns were often left unaddressed until they became unbearable and blossomed into full-fledged shouting matches.
Doug was startled out of his introspection by a voice and a blur of blond hair coming from the Stairmaster to his right.
“Hey, you come here too!” The voice and blond hair belonged to a surgical intensive care nurse at Mercy.
“Yeah, uh, you work at Mercy, don’t you?” Doug managed to get out. He was horrible with names. They both had to talk louder than Doug was comfortable with to be heard above WTPA, the heavy metal station cranked up on the gym’s sound system.
“Yep, I’m Jenny Stuart. I work in SICU. I just joined Gold’s a couple of weeks ago.”
“Hi, I’m Doug Landry. I work in anesthesia.”
“I know who you are. I was there the other night when you brought that ruptured triple-A in. That was some case!”
“I remember you now. You look, uh, sort of different,” Doug stammered. God, she’s pretty!
“Different? Hmmm. Now there’s a compliment.”
“No, no. I mean your hair and all. I just didn’t recognize you, that’s all. You look great.” Doug felt himself blush, and they both laughed.
“How’s he doing?” Doug continued quickly, eager to get back on safer ground. “He was pretty sick when they brought him to us—no blood pressure—the typical abdominal aortic aneurysm. Bled like stink when they opened him.”
“He’s doing really well. In fact, he’s being transferred out tomorrow. You do good work, Doctor.” She punctuated this with a big smile as she gazed a bit too long into his eyes.
“We got pretty lucky with him. I didn’t think he was gonna make it there for awhile. Must’ve had good nursing care postop.” Doug smiled back and returned an equally long stare. He’d never seen her with her hair down or dressed in a tight gym suit before. She was slim, about five-foot-four, with shoulder-length blond hair and a body Demi Moore would have envied. He had trouble keeping his eyes on her face as they talked.
“So, how long have you been coming here?” she asked.
“Oh, a couple of years now. It’s a nice gym and right on the way home from the hospital.” Funny, he thought, her lips are so full. He never cared much for full lips, but suddenly found them irresistible.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“Just down
Route Thirty, three or four miles down the road in Heatherfield.”
“Which days do you usually come to the gym?”
“Kinda whenever I can. I try to get in two or three times a week, although I do come in pretty regular Friday nights after work.” Why is she asking so many personal questions and why am I so willing to answer? He felt sort of guilty talking to her just after he had been reminiscing about Laura, but the twenty-year-old fading memory couldn’t compete with the here and now in the flesh. Doug’s Stairmaster program was over again. He quickly punched in another ten minutes and adjusted it to Level One so he wouldn’t get too out of breath.
“I used to belong to a Gold’s in California,” she said. “They’re all over the place out there.”
“Yeah, you look like you’re pretty serious about your exercise.”
“Whatever do you mean?” She flashed another big smile at Doug, who could feel his heart accelerating even though he had turned down his machine.
“You have a really nice figure.”
“Well, thank you. I do believe you’re getting better at giving compliments. You look like you’re in pretty good shape too.” Her eyes slid up and down his torso and legs.
“Naw, not really.” Doug felt the blood threatening to return to his face. “I don’t exactly belong at Gold’s. You know, the image is serious body builder and all that. Look at the guys around here—they’re animals.” Doug nodded toward Mule and Chowder. As if on cue, Mule let out an inhuman scream as he successfully squatted over five hundred pounds, the bar literally bending over his shoulders. “I just come here because it’s the only gym on the way home from work. I do some basic weight stuff to keep my back in shape. But, muscle-head I’m not.”
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