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Good Medicine
Bobby Hutchinson
Jordan had tried to love and support her husbandEven after he'd cleaned out the apartment and sold many of their belongings for drug money. But when, as the doctor on call in the E.R., she'd been forced to treat Garry's overdose, it had nearly killed her, too. Knowing she couldn't survive much more, she left him and Vancouver behind. She hoped only to find peace as the new resident G.P. in the remote First Nations village of Ahousaht.She never expected to meet someone as gentle and nurturing as native healer Silas Keefer, a man who understands Jordan's need to escape her past. He'd done the same thing himself years earlier.Their love is unexpected and right, but can Jordan and Silas have a future if they cannot heal the past?
“Resident G.P. wanted for isolated First Nations village, Vancouver Island’s West Coast. Ahousaht, Clayoquot Sound, Flores Island.”
The salary wasn’t what Jordan earned in the E.R., but at least there wouldn’t be shift work. And housing was included. And it was somewhere Garry wasn’t.
Impulsively Jordan took out her cell phone and dialed the number she’d copied down. The phone rang and rang, and she was about to hang up when a man answered.
“Hello?” There was a note of impatience in the man’s deep and resonant tone.
“Oh, um, yes, hello.” Damn, her hands were sweating and she could hear the strain in her voice. “My, um, my name is Jordan Burke, Dr. Burke, and I’m calling about the medical position. Is it still available?”
There was a moment’s silence. “I don’t know. You need to speak to Bennie. Call back another time.”
“Bennie? Bennie who?” Jordan was over feeling nervous and well on the way to being annoyed. Surely he could be more helpful?
“Just Bennie will do. He’ll be here in the morning.”
“And you are?”
“Silas Keefer. And I’m hanging up now, Jordan Burke.”
“But first can you—”
The line clicked and she heard a dial tone. The bloody man had hung up on her.
Dear Reader,
There’s a motto I try to live by. It is Whatever is happening now is right for me. It embodies acceptance and trust, and applying that concept every day is my greatest personal challenge. When life is filled with joy and excitement, it’s easy to say, “Yup, things are progressing exactly as they should—lucky me.” But when huge challenges seem insurmountable—that’s when it’s tough to let go of outcome and simply trust.
As a writer, I hand challenges to characters and then watch how they manage to surmount them. In Good Medicine, as in life, family became a central theme. And a trip to Ahousaht on Vancouver Island’s wild west coast made me realize that no matter how far we travel in distance and culture, the problems we encounter in life are universal. Not only that, they obligingly come right along with us.
This book taught me invaluable lessons about the different ways culture affects our attitudes toward the science of medicine and the gift of healing. The paths may vary, but the final answer is always the same—true healing begins in the heart. Love is the most powerful medicine. And yes, whatever is happening now is absolutely right for me!
With love, and gratitude to all of you who read my books.
Bobby Hutchinson
Good Medicine
Bobby Hutchinson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Marie Donahue and the other Nuu-chah-nulth women who greeted me in the Ahousaht Health Centre one rainy morning. Truly, the Ancestors were there.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER ONE
DOCTOR JORDAN BURKE walked over to the automatic sliding glass doors and peered out at the wet April night, not really seeing the eerie fluorescent glare or the deserted cement apron that led to St. Joseph’s Emergency entrance.
It was her birthday. A glance at her watch told her it was 12:40 a.m. She had no idea the exact hour she’d been born, so she might as well make it midnight on the nose. Which meant she was now thirty-two.
Spending the first six hours of her birthday working the graveyard shift in Emerg suited her fine. John Frankel, one of the other doctors, had the flu, and since Jordan was on her long break from day shift, she’d eagerly volunteered to fill in.
It wasn’t as if she’d be sleeping much, anyway. She might as well be working tonight as lying in bed tossing and turning, wide-awake and worrying.
She shivered, even though it wasn’t cold, and crossed her arms, hugging the front of her white lab coat.
Where the hell are all the patients? On most nights, the E.R. was so busy there wasn’t time to do anything except concentrate on the stream of desperate, frightened people needing medical assistance. But it had been nearly an hour since Jordan’s last patient was treated and released, and she was restless. Anxious.
She ought to be used to the anxiety. It never really went away these days.
“Quiet tonight, eh? Downtown Vancouver must be closed for spring break or something.” The tiny Asian nurse was new, and she laughed at her own joke.
“It is quiet.” Jordan nodded and attempted a smile. When did smiling become such an effort? “Calm before the hurricane,” she commented, aware of how callous it was to long for patients. It was just that she needed action, needed the degree of intensity that drove everything else out of her head.
“At least it gives us time to think,” the young woman replied.
“Yeah.” Jordan forced herself to nod, even though time to think was the very last thing she wanted. She glanced at the ident tag pinned to the nurse’s shirt. Jordan had been introduced when they came on shift, but now she couldn’t remember the woman’s name.
Lola. Her name’s Lola, numskull.
Forgetting things had become the norm. She’d lost her keys today, she’d misplaced her cell phone yesterday, she hadn’t remembered what she needed when she got to the grocery the day before last. Thirty-two was nowhere near menopause, but she knew that constant low-level anxiety could cause memory lapses. Eight months of anxiety. Ever since her husband’s accident.
She thought of Garry now, and her gut heaved as an all too familiar mixture of emotions coursed through her: anger, sadness, guilt, longing and an overwhelming sense of frustration and futility.
Two years, is that all it had been? She felt as if she’d been Garry’s wife for at least two long, painful lifetimes. She wanted desperately to help him, she longed for an end to the problems they were having, she—
Stop. Stop.
She would not obsess over her personal problems here, not while she was on shift. She turned away from the doors and walked over to the admitting desk. So there were no patients, okay, she could catch up on patient files. That tedious task was every doctor’s least favorite activity.
“No point getting your blood pressure up doing paperwork, Jordan.” Eddie, the desk clerk, grinned at her, revealing crooked teeth. “There’s an 18-year-old female on her way, severe headache, vomiting, recent history of stomach pain. Her dad called, he’s bringing her.”
A few moments later the patient arrived, a college student named Ardyth Malone, slender and very fit looking, but obviously in severe distress. Jordan escorted the girl to a cubicle and began taking a history.
Ardyth responded with negative answers to questions about drugs, alcohol, allergies, blows to the head. A careful physical examination ruled out appendicitis, inflamed ovaries, gallbladder problems. Each successive test was normal, until Jordan examined Ardyth’s eyes with the ophthalmoscope. There was a slight papillidema, a swelling of the optic nerve.
By now Jordan was beginning to feel really concerned, wondering if this was a brain tumor, but there were a few questions she still needed to ask.
“Ardyth, has there been any change in your diet recently?”
The girl shook her head. “I’m a vegetarian. I’m very health-conscious and careful about what I put in my body.” Her expression was virtuous. “I take tons of vitamins and I don’t eat sugar or saturated fat. Oww! Oh my God, do something! It hurts.” Bent double, she cradled her stomach, moaning.
A warning bell went off in Jordan’s brain. Taking iron tablets on an empty stomach could lead to excruciating cramps.
“Exactly what vitamins do you take, and how many?”
As the pain eased, the girl rattled off a dozen or more names, adding that she swallowed massive quantities.
“Have you taken any new ones recently?”
“Only more vitamin A.”
“How much more?”
“Seven extra pills. My skin’s been breaking out—vitamin A cures acne.”
“How long have you been taking that dose?”
Ardyth shrugged. “A couple of months now, I guess.”
“How many international units per pill?”
“Five thousand.”
“And when did you take your last mega dose?”
“A few hours ago.”
Thirty-five thousand units of A, ten to twenty times a normal dose, taken daily for sixty days. Jordan was pretty sure she had the answer to Ardyth’s symptoms, and it gave her a feeling of satisfaction. At least her personal problems weren’t interfering with her diagnostic ability. Yet.
“My guess is you have acute vitamin A intoxication, Ardyth,” she said gently. “I think if you stop taking it, your symptoms will disappear. We’ll run some tests, though, just to be absolutely certain we’re not missing anything here.”
Jordan was jotting down orders for a CAT scan and an upper GI series when Lola stuck her head into the cubicle.
“Jordan, a guy’s just been dumped outside Emerg. He’s unconscious—whoever brought him sped off in a car. They’re bringing him in now. Billy says he’s got track marks, so it’s probably an overdose. Can you come?”
“Be right there.” Jordan handed orders to an aide and then sprinted after Lola. There’d been a series of drug overdoses in the past two weeks, a result of exceptionally strong heroin having hit the downtown Vancouver streets. Usually the Emergency Response Team brought the victims in, but sometimes bodies were dumped at the door by people who didn’t want to get involved.
Orderlies and nurses were lifting the limp male figure onto a stretcher when Jordan arrived. The patient’s face was obscured by a nurse’s arm, but Jordan saw at a glance that this wasn’t the usual skid-row addict.
Caucasian, well-dressed, charcoal sports jacket, black trousers, blue silk shirt—
She struggled to get her breath as a wave of dizziness swept over her. She recognized that shirt. Reaching past the nurse, Jordan took hold of the man’s jaw and turned his slack face toward her, and her worst fears were confirmed.
Garry. It was her husband. She’d bought him the shirt for Christmas.
Someone on the medical team was calling out his vitals, but Jordan barely heard it. One of the nurses was holding Garry’s wallet, going through it to determine his identity.
“Hughes, Garry M., DOB 1968, March 13.” As the woman read out the information on his driver’s license, for one shameful instant Jordan was relieved she’d retained her maiden name.
“I’ll see if he’s listed in the book,” the nurse said. “We may need next of kin.”
The number was listed, but Jordan knew there was no one home in their Kitsilano apartment. The nurse would get the message Garry had recorded for the answering service.
