Patient Read Online Free PDF Page B

especially if you choose a specialty like oncology, or critical care, or certain branches of surgery, where a fair percentage of your patients are going to suffer and die in spite of everything you can do for them.”
    Jessie’s office was a lilliputian, one-window cubicle, made to feel even smaller by dark cherry paneling. A desk, two chairs, a locked filing cabinet for patient records and journal articles, and a set of shoulder-to-ceiling bookshelves on one wall all but filled the room, although she had managed to personalize the space with a couple of small watercolors, some framed photos from her rafting trip down the Colorado, and a planter.
    Narda Woolard’s words were echoing in Jessie’s head as she sank into her chair. She did five uninspired minutes of Tetris and set a timer for fifteen minutes. Then she put her feet up on the desk, leaned back, and closed her eyes. Usually even fifteen minutes was long enough for her to drift off, enter some sort of REM sleep, and awaken rejuvenated. This time, her thoughts refused to slow. Early on in her internship, a cynical resident, already in advanced burnout, first exposed her to what he called Fox’s Immutable Laws of Medicine: Good guys get cancer. Trash survives . Who Fox was, the resident never explained. But Jessie had seen the laws hold too many times ever to ignore them. And Sara Devereau was an exceedingly good guy.
    Could Sara have been cured by a properly aggressive initial operation? Jessie had wondered this many times. Had Carl Gilbride even given the case much thought? How would he have felt if he had been to Sara’s house? Met her husband? Her kids? Would he have spent an extra hour or two at the operating table? Gone after those few extra tumor cells? Fat chance. Throughout her experience with the man, Jessie had never heard him admit to so much as a shortcoming, let alone an actual mistake—and there had been many over the years. ...
    What difference does it make now, anyway? Tomorrow morning Sara would have her last shot at a surgical miracle. The envelope was going to have to be pushed and pushed some more. Walking, sight, arm use, speech ... there was no telling what would have to be risked—even sacrificed—in the interest of getting all the tumor. And there was no predicting what was going to be left of Sara after the operation was done.
    Go to hell, Fox, whoever you are!
    “Jess?”
    Emily had opened the office door and was peering in. Jessie realized that she’d been out cold, tilted back in her chair, orbiting Neptune. Her timer, which she had apparently shut off, was clutched tightly in her lap. Forty-five minutes had passed.
    “Whoa,” she said, shaking the cobwebs loose, brushing some wisps of hair away from her eyes, and fumbling for her glasses on the desk. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
    “You okay?”
    “Let’s just say I needed the rest.”
    “I’m glad you got some. Ready to finish rounds?”
    “I am.”
    “It shouldn’t take too long. Oh, before I forget, there was a call for you at the nurses’ station just a little while ago from Dr. Mark Naehring.”
    “The shrink?”
    “Exactly. Remember that show he put on at grand rounds?”
    “Who could forget it? That poor woman.”
    Naehring was a psychopharmacologist. In front of an amphitheater filled with two hundred or so physicians and other practitioners, he had used a combination of drugs to rapidly and very effectively hypnotize a middle-aged woman with profound emotional illness. He then extracted, for the first time, a terrifyingly vivid description of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father and his brother, at times both at once. Naehring then used more medication and posthypnotic suggestion to remove all memory of his patient having shared anything. He would introduce her revelations gradually in their therapy sessions, making use of a video where needed.
    “Hopefully, the breakthrough helped her in the long run,” Emily