The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

a baking loaf, crushing itself against the confining skull. By the time he reached Newark, the boy’s pupils had bloomed dead, and the cry for a local hospital was taken up.
    With an initial donation of $5,500, a house on East Main Street was outfitted with electricity and running water and the latest technology of modern medicine, including a German machine that could photograph the human interior by means of ‘unknown’ or ‘X’ rays, and a surgical theater sunned by a new electrical bulb recently invented by Thomas Edison of neighboring Menlo Park. It started with ten doctors to attend twelve beds. As the county grew, the hospital expanded in step, adding wings and annexes until the simple wood-framed town house had molted into a redbrick city catering to dozens of specialized medical procedures, with over 350 beds for overnight patients and thousands of highly paid professionals to attend to them. It was blessed with abundant parking and a convenient location between the highways, and prosperous enough to offer a $10,000 bonus to experienced nurses willing to sign on for a six-month hitch.
    On August 15, 2002, Charlie sat down at the desk of Somerset Human Resources and filled the familiar blanks. 6 Nurse Cullen presented a tempting hire. He indicated truthfully that he was a certified and registered nurse, lied righteously about not having a criminal conviction, and wondered not at all whether they bothered researching those answers. He preferred Critical Care but would work in any ward, and was open to all hours, rotating shifts, on-call shifts, nights, weekends, 7 and holidays. For references, Charlie listed Saint Luke’s, indicating that he had left only because he “needed change,” which was true enough. He also listed his years at the Lehigh Valley Hospital Burn Unit, which “did not work for him,” and Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where “there weren’t enough hours available.” All were, in a fashion, true; it would be up to the Somerset Medical Center HR department to try and color in the details.
    Cullen’s former supervisor at Warren Hospital confirmed that Charlie had indeed worked there, and extolled Charlie’s work ethic, conscientiousness, and intelligence. And as promised, the Saint Luke’s HR gave his dates of employment and verified his former position. 8 In September 2002, Charlie was offered a job working full-time with some of the most vulnerable patients on the Somerset Medical Center CCU.

    C harlie quickly became a popular night nurse at Somerset. Usually, the handoff between the day and night shifts could last an hour, depending on the nurse, but Charlie was quick, he didn’t ask questions, and the day nurses were always thrilled to see him on the schedule. They could give him a quick report and go home, knowing he was already off down the hall with his little Cerner PowerChart, the mobile computer database of patient charts. His fellow night nurses appreciated Charlie even more; he started early, worked efficiently, and was always the first to finish. His colleagues would return from their initial patient checks to find Charlie already standing by the Pyxis machine, helping lay out their IV bags for the evening. Later, they would see him again, helping out at the code.
    Each night shift nurse had an independent schedule, and each night saw a different composite crew. Charlie was quickly singled out by one of the nurses he was often on with, a tall, pretty blonde named Amy Loughren. 9 She was a self-proclaimed “pain in the ass,” which meant she was outspoken and honest, the kind of person who cast a shadow Charlie could shade himself by. Charlie was quiet around her at first, but over the long overnight shifts Charlie began slipping in wry comments about hospital bureaucracy while waiting for the Pyxis machine, or sending a dramatic eye roll across the room during a particularly labored evening report. Late at night, after all the drips had been hung and their