Doctor in the House
Marie Ferrarella
To Dr. David Neubert,
who is everything a doctor should be.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 1
Dr. Ivan Munro liked saving lives, liked making a difference in those lives. It was people he didn’t care for.
People with their endless complaining. People with endless details about their humdrum lives that he had absolutely no interest in. If he possessed so much as a thimbleful of mild curiosity regarding his patients, he would have gone into a medical discipline that required contact with those patients on a fairly regular basis.
But such contact would have necessitated feigning interest on his part and he had never been one to lie or even seen the need to lie. Ever. For any reason whatsoever. The truth, any truth, was what it was and needed to be faced. No sugarcoating, no beating around the proverbial bush. Just shooting straight from the hip.
He’d chosen neurosurgery as much as it had chosen him and he’d selected it for three reasons. The first was to heal, to pit himself against the power that delivered such a low blow to the individual on his operating table. The second was that it was the only way he could possibly make it up to Scott, even though Scott was no longer around to see the results.
The last reason was distance. Neurosurgery afforded him distance. Once he tackled a condition, he could distance himself from the recovering patient and thus move on, leaving the chore of hand-holding to the patient’s friends, relatives and/or referring physician, all people who were far better suited to the tedious chore than he. They were the ones who either wanted or felt compelled to establish and maintain a rapport with the patient.
He’d been told, more than once, that he had the bedside manner of an anaconda. He took it as a compliment. Ivan could not, would not, allow emotions to get in the way of his making a judgment call.
Unfortunately, emotions or some sort of cursory display of them, was what most patients thought they both needed and were entitled to. His chief of staff, Harold Bennett, a man he grudgingly admired and respected, told him that was the way patients knew that they were in capable hands. They measured capability by the physician’s capacity to act as if he or she cared.
Ivan cared, all right, cared that he successfully eliminated the tumor, or reconnected the nerve endings, cared that he did no harm and only accomplished what he’d set out to accomplish: to make the patient better than he or she had been when they’d first laid down on his operating table.
But as for verbally talking the patient through the steps of the surgery before it transpired to set to rest any fears that patient might have, well, that just was not why he got up each morning to come to Blair Memorial Hospital.
Being “patient with patients” wasn’t something he was any good at and he saw no reason to pretend that he was. He wasn’t in medicine to forge friendships, only to save lives.
“They call you Ivan the Terrible, you know,” Harold told him over the lunch he’d insisted that his chief neurosurgeon share with him in his office.
There was an ulterior motive for the invitation. It was that most painful time of year again. January. Time for the annual review where budgets were wrestled with and unpleasant decisions had to be made. It was a time to lightly sprinkle praise and to make a sincere call for improvement. This meant even from a man who clearly did have the ability to walk on water, but did not, to any and all who took note, possess so much as a single drop of humility.
“I know,” Ivan replied, his attention appearing to focus on his sandwich. “It’s my name. Good sandwich,” he commented in the next breath, infusing as much interest and feeling in the last sentence as he had in the first two he’d uttered.
After almost a dozen years, Harold was skilled at tiptoeing into conversations with his chief neurosurgeon. “Funny, I don’t remember seeing ‘the Terrible’ on your application form.”
“I didn’t want to brag,” Ivan replied in the semi-raspy voice that was his trademark. As far as anyone knew, it had been awarded him courtesy of a near-crushed larynx he’s sustained from an incident in his late teens. An incident that he never talked about. Rumor had it he’d offended someone and they’d tried to hang him. The rumor tickled Ivan and he never bothered correcting it.
Harold tried again. “Ivan, I know that you’re good at your job—”
Dark eyebrows rose on a relatively unlined forty-six-year-old forehead as Ivan looked up at the man across the desk. He stopped eating.
“‘Good’ is a very mediocre word, reserved for things like pudding or foodstuffs chosen for breakfast and touted in mindless television commercials. It also can be used to praise a child for mastering accomplishments society requires, like potty training. ‘Good boy, good job,’” Ivan added for emphasis and as examples. “It also blandly shows up in greetings. ‘Good morning. Good afternoon.’ Or in partings. Such as good night or goodbye. Equally as bland and in no way descriptive of what I do when someone comes to your illustrious hospital holding a severed hand and expecting to be reunited with it so that it’s of some use to them.”
The chief of staff closed his eyes for a moment, searching for strength. He and Ivan had known one another for twelve years now. He had been the one to hire him and he was as close to a friend as he imagined Ivan Munro had. But there were times when the man’s personality was a little hard to take. Specifically the hours between dawn and midnight.
To get to his point, Harold acquiesced. “All right, you’re magnificent at your job—”
“Better,” Ivan allowed charitably, nodding his head and once again focusing