John Locke
Bad Doctor
I
I’m Dr. Gideon Box.
If you’re coming after me, don’t do it in a hospital.
That’s my domain.
And don’t piss me off in the real world and expect a smooth hospital stay in the future, because I have a long memory, and no one is exempt. If you’re not a patient but your loved ones are, I’ll harass them.
Before you bully me in a bar, embarrass me on a date, or refuse to replace the shitty car you sold me, think about this: you’ll never be more vulnerable in your life than when you’re spending the night in a hospital. You’re out of your element, drugged, and totally dependent on our schedules and personnel. When you’re here, you’re not family. You’re prey!
Your wife just had a procedure and needs her sleep?
Good luck with that.
I’ll swing by the nurse’s station, make a notation on her chart. Every two hours someone will be in her room, waking her up, changing her IV, moving her around. If you’re not guarding her closely I might slip in her room, flip her on her side, lift up her gown, check out her ass. Or maybe I’ll feel her up while pretending to listen to her heart with my stethoscope.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no interest in your wife’s nude body. I’d only view or touch her because I can, and because it’s another way to beat you.
You get what I’m saying?
Don’t fuck with me.
II
I didn’t kill Joe’s mom last week.
I could have killed her, but one glance at her chart told me the hospital didn’t need my help. Her catheter should have been removed a day earlier. Since it wasn’t, I figured the nurses forgot it.
I was right.
Like ventilators, catheters are breeding grounds for infection. Sixty-five thousand patients a year die from infections caused by these two pieces of equipment.
I never knew Joe’s mom, but thirty years ago Joe and I were on the sixth grade track team. A half-dozen of us were in the showers after practice the day Joe smacked my ass with a wet towel. I ignored it, but he kept smacking me. The others taunted me to do something about it. When I confronted Joe, he beat the shit out of me.
Picture me in a fetal position on the floor, clutching my stomach in agony. Now picture Joe and his friends pissing on me as a group, drenching me from head to toe.
Laughing.
Like I said, I didn’t know Joe’s mom, and didn’t kill her.
But I let her die last week from an infection I could’ve prevented.
III
I’m not an angel of mercy. I don’t kill random patients.
I’ve got a list.
If you’re on my list, it means you’ve done something I refuse to forgive. It’s probably something minor to you, something you forgot long ago. But like the Stones said in the second best song they ever recorded, time is on my side.
Like everyone else in the world, you and your loved ones will eventually get sick or have an accident. And when you do, you better not come to my hospital, because I can kill you, maim you, infect you, humiliate you, frighten you, aggravate you, and generally fuck up your life in a thousand different ways.
Want an example?
I bet you didn’t know that every year three hundred hospital patients burst into flames during routine operations.
Three hundred!
You think all those are accidents?
Thirty-six items in a standard operating room can explode under the right conditions. What I’m saying, I can turn your chest into a fireball using nothing more than an alcohol swab and a hot cautery device.
So don’t piss me off.
And tread lightly, because I’m tightly wound. Every day it takes less and less to piss me off.
IV
I’m the last guy you want to meet in the hospital-and not because I’m a vindictive son of a bitch.
I am a vindictive son of a bitch, but the reason you don’t want to meet me is I’m your child’s last hope for survival. When they wheel your kid into my operating room, it means his problems are so severe no one else can perform the surgery.
That’s because I’m the most technically gifted congenital/cardiothoracic surgeon in the world.
That’s right, in the world.
Think I’m bragging?
I’m not.
I take no pleasure in being the world’s greatest surgeon.
Someone in the world makes the best flapjacks. Someone else is the best seamstress. And someone owns the world’s biggest ranch, truck, or penis.
I’d rather be any of them.
Especially the guy with the biggest penis.
But it’s my job to be the best surgeon.
My skill is my curse, and forces me to work in hell, under excruciating pressure. I say that and you think, yeah, there probably is a lot of stress in what I do, operating on infants and children.
No.
You think you know, but you don’t.
You have no idea.
Want a glimpse into my world? That’s me in the operating room, standing in the corner, crying silently so the others won’t know. They think I’m psyching myself up for the six-hour procedure I’m about to perform.
See that tiny blue object on the table, surrounded by two highly-skilled nurses, a pediatric anesthesiologist, and assisting surgeon?
My patient, Lainey Sue Calfee.
Five pounds, less than a month old, structurally abnormal heart. It would take five minutes to tell you what’s wrong with her, but she’ll be dead by then. And anyway, those are only the problems I know about. You can bet I’ll find more bad news when I open her chest in a few minutes.
I always do.
What you need to know about Lainey is she’s not going to make it.
It’s okay, I already told her parents.
V
That’s me an hour ago, approaching the conference room to meet Lainey’s parents, Jordan and Will Calfee.
Of Calfee Coffee.
As I enter, Jordan and Will are on the sofa, grim-faced, holding hands. Nurse Sally’s in the straight-back chair, giving me the evil eye. Security Joe’s standing at the doorway.
As always, I nod at Security Joe and say, “Are you feeling okay? Because you don’t look so good.”
As always, he ignores me.
Jordan and Will jump to their feet, searching my eyes.
If my eyes could talk, they’d say I’m dying inside, thinking how the Calfee’s lives will change forever when I kill their kid on my operating table.
Nurse Sally hates me. She’s black, two hundred fifty pounds, her age a complete mystery. Could be forty, could be sixty. She’s a wonderful, caring person, my polar opposite. She visits the parents before they meet me, warns them about my notoriously foul bedside manner, and attempts to calm them down after I leave.
Security Joe is early-forties, former Marine, big, tough, freaky quiet. The kind of guy you’d expect to see guarding the president.
Joe’s chief of security, here to guard me from possible assault. He blends into the background, always ready to step between me and an angry parent. While Joe couldn’t care less if I offend the parents, Sally constantly wants to slap me up the side of my head for doing so.
I’d love to have Nurse Sally’s attitude, and probably would, if I had her job.
Or any other job.
I’m not asking for sympathy, but imagine if your job required you to do something that made you physically and mentally sick every time you did it. I know you can’t relate, and there are no good examples, but you know that chalky stuff you have to drink the day before getting a colonoscopy? It tastes like hell and makes you shit for twelve hours straight?
Let’s say your job was to drink that chalk every day of your life.
You’d like to quit, but you’re the only one in the world who can do it, and every day you don’t drink the chalk, a child you’ve met will die.