curtains behind her snapped open. “No need for a referral,” Dr. Chuck Prescott boomed. “He can come by the office and I’ll take care of it. Go ahead and put a permanent cast on it tonight, though.”
The easy moment between Charli and Neil evaporated. Charli closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, her headache surging forward again. “Excuse me, Dr. Prescott,” she ground out. “This is my patient.”
“Neil? You trust me, don’t you? If I tell you that you don’t need a bone-and-joint doc, you’re okay, right?” her father said, winking. At the wink, Charli thought she’d self-combust with anger. For two weeks, her father had been waltzing into her treatment areas and second-guessing her. This time, though, she was too tired and too frustrated to let it go.
“He’s a writer,” she said. “He needs full use of his hand, which will require physical therapy, and the break needs to be evaluated by someone who can give him optimum care—”
“Do you hear her?” Her father shook his head. “New doctors. They’re all alike, even my own flesh and blood. They sound like they’re reading out of a med school textbook. What she means is she doesn’t want you to sue her if you can’t bend your elbow the full extension once it heals.”
“Have you even looked at—” Before any other hot words of defense could leap out of Charli’s mouth, she jabbed a finger. “Outside.”
“Oooh, don’t write about this, Neil, but I think she’s taking me to the woodshed.” Her father waggled his eyebrows, bushy and gray, over eyes that sparkled.
Beyond the curtain, Charli marched down to the staff lounge. Anna, one of the nurses, quickly cleared out once she saw who Charli had with her. “Uh, I’ll let you two talk,” she muttered as she swept by with her half-eaten sandwich.
The lounge, like the rest of the hospital, was tiny, worn and had last seen a decorator somewhere around 1980. Her father pulled out one of the folding metal chairs and sat down.
As he did, his phone buzzed. He fished it out of his pocket, glanced at it, frowned and stabbed at the touch screen. His face cleared. “It’s Lige Whitaker. Well, he can wait.” His tone was entirely more cavalier than Charli would have treated their chairman of the hospital authority—their boss’s boss.
Her father pocketed the phone again. He leaned back against the chair. “This is where you tell me that I’m an old fogey, and that medicine has completely changed since I got out of med school myself a hundred years ago, and that specialists are specialists for a reason.” His lips twitched at the corner with barely concealed amusement. “I agree. Guilty on all counts.” With his foot, he shoved the chair beside him away from the table. “Have a seat. Now that you’re a doctor, you’ll need to learn to sit when you can.”
She crossed her arms. The chair was tempting to her aching feet, but she ignored it and her father’s good-old-boy charm, which he always pulled out as his weapon of choice. “No,” she said firmly. “This is where I tell you that the next time you undermine me with a patient is when I walk out. What you did—what you have been doing—is disrespectful and not professional. Emory University—along with Georgia Health Sciences, not to mention Memorial in Savannah—are convinced that I am a physician. So is the state board. You may have got away with treating other doctors like this—and the way you treat your nurses is like something you’d see on a 1980s soap opera, by the way—but you will not treat me with professional discourtesy.”
Her father wrinkled his nose. “Thank God some of those shows are off the air. All those subdural hematomas and amnesias and people waking up perfectly fine out of months-long comas bugged the stew out of me. Fake doctors.”
“I’m referring to the way those fake doctors treated their fake nurses, Dad.”
The older Dr. Prescott opened his mouth, shut it, fiddled with his stethoscope. “I’m that bad? I can’t be. I haven’t pinched a gal on the backside in a decade.”
Charli sent her eyes heavenward. Leave it to her father to think that simply avoiding overt sexual harassment was enough to prevent him from being gender-biased. “You’re lucky you’re the chief of staff at this hospital, Dad. Otherwise, you’d have been a frequent flyer in sensitivity training—and only if you’d had an understanding chief of staff.”
He ran a hand over his rumpled silver hair. Suddenly, Charli could see all of her father’s sixty-seven years in the lines of his face. “Dad...”
“Nope, give it to me straight. Cut me no quarter just because I’m your old man.” He held up his hands to forestall any softening in her stance. “I admit, I could probably do with a few of those sensitivity training sessions. I am an old fogey, but I can learn. And that in there—I was trying to save the poor guy money. He has high-deductible insurance that pays practically nothing. That’s what you young punks can’t get in your head—you think just because you have all this medical technology available you need to use it.” He must have seen her anger as it rekindled and realized his apology was going off the rails. “But you’re right. I’d have had your head if you’d pulled the same stunt on me.”
Her father stood up, back straight, lab coat amazingly still showing the creases her mother had lovingly pressed into it that morning. “Apology accepted?”
“Yes,” she said. “And by the way...Knife Guy? He’s staying.”
“You’re going to break this hospital, you know that? Knife Guy’s got no insurance.”
But her father didn’t wait for her to answer, just headed past her with a slap on the shoulder. “I’m proud of you, kiddo. You might make a good doctor one day.”
The door slammed behind him, and for a long minute she stood there. Would this ever work out? She’d either kill herself or kill her dad. But this was the one thing she’d wanted, right? To work by her father’s side, prove to him that she knew what she was doing, prove to him that she could be a doctor—not a nurse as he’d suggested so many times.
Don’t forget that by working here, a good chunk of your student loans will be forgiven, she told herself. It’s a win-win. I’m home with Dad and Mom, and I can work off some of my debt. So suck it up, Prescott.
She went back to see Neil Bailey on her own. “Let me tell you what could happen if you don’t see a specialist,” she said. “Your wrist has what’s called a Colles fracture, and the ulna has a clean break. Either one alone, I wouldn’t be too worried about. But since you broke both bones, and since you’re a writer, they worry me. I want you to have full range of motion with the wrist. It’s your choice. You can do it the—” She bit back “the old-fogey way.” Using that expression, even if that’s what she thought of her dad’s method, would break her own dictates about professionalism. “You can take my dad’s suggestion and follow up with him, since I’m assuming he’s your primary care doctor. Or...”
“I’ll take the referral. No offense to your dad. But I am a writer. Like you say. I’ll figure out how to pay for the specialist some way. How long do you think I’ll be typing one-handed?”
“Hard to say. But probably, if you don’t need any surgery or pins—which I don’t think you will—at least six to eight weeks, depending on if you drink your milk and eat your green veggies.”
Neil nodded. “I will double my intake of both.”
“Now, let’s give you some pain medicine
