F Paul Wilson - Novel 02 (36 page)

 
          
He
and Diana kept hoping their adolescent age would snap out of it, but after a
while it became clear that more than hormones were at work here. She lost
interest in her friends, her piano playing, her horse.

 
          
The
downs kept getting deeper and longer, and there never seemed to be any real
ups, only not-so-downs.

 
          
And
then she swallowed half a bottle of her mother's Dalmane and had to have her
stomach pumped. She was diagnosed with severe endogenous depression and the
endless rounds of antidepressants and outpatient therapy began.

 
          
Nothing
worked for very long. And then came that terrible night she locked herself in
her room and screamed with pain.
Duncan
kicked the door down and found her sitting
in the middle of her bed bleeding from a slit wrist.

 
          
They
hospitalized her for a month after that, and tried something new called Prozac.
Lisa responded beautifully. In her case it was truly a miracle drug.

 
          
Duncan
still remembered the day he came home from
the hospital to find Diana standing in the foyer sobbing. Immediately his heart
plummeted, expecting the worst And then he heard it, floating in from the
living room, the sound of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 21. Lisa was playing
again.

 
          
He
and Diana fell into each other's arms and wept.

 
          
Even
now his eyes clouded at the memory.

 
          
After
that, as Lisa brightened, so did their lives.
Duncan
hadn't realized how his daughter's problems
had tainted their entire family life. But now that she was getting back to
normal, the days seemed brighter, his own step lighter. Laughter again around
the dinner table as Lisa began riding her horse and hanging out with some of
her old friends. Her grades turned around and she began dating Kenny O’Boyle.

 
          
They
dated for months, and Kenny became the sole topic of Lisa's conversation. She
and Diana would have long mother-daughter talks about him, and Diana told
Duncan
she was worried that Lisa might be getting
too involved. She'd just turned eighteen, true, but she'd missed a lot of
growing up in those black years.

 
          
Duncan
wasn't crazy about Kenny. He seemed a
shifty, inarticulate dolt, but then
Duncan
was naturally leery about any male sniffing
around his daughter. Lisa adored him. And Lisa was happy. Happy for the first
time in years. So
Duncan
decided to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut.

 
          
And
then the McCready committee reared its ugly head. He remembered the morning
five years ago when it all began, in the doctors lounge at
Fairfax
Hospital
, somebody showing him the article on the
front page of the Post. He'd just come off two scheduled procedures, an
abdominal aneurysm graft and a carotid endarterectomy, all after rushing in at
3:00 A. M. to close a torn femoral artery on a motorcyclist,
"donorcyclist," as the E.R staff called them. He was tired. But not
too tired to be furious at Senator Vincent's public condemnation of his
million-dollar charge to Medicare the year before.

 
          
Every
time he turned around some baseball player or basketball dribbler was signing a
contract for five or six million dollars a year. How many lives did they save
in a year? Barbra Streisand can get twenty million for two nights of warbling,
but you, Duncan Lathram, you money grubbing bloodsucker, you charge too goddamn
much.

 
          
He'd
wished he had some legal recourse, but how the hell did you sue a congressional
committee? And what would he accomplish but call even more unwanted attention
to himself?

 
          
What
did it matter? he remembered thinking. The whole brouhaha would blow over in a
couple of days.

 
          
But
he was wrong.

 
          
His
auto-da-fe' at the hands of the Guidelines committee continued with unflagging
zeal. Apparently the members thought they'd found a particularly tasty bone in
Duncan Lathram and wanted to keep gnawing away at him. Then the Alexandria
Banner picked up the story, followed by a patient's rights group demanding an
investigation, so the State Board of Medical Examiners got involved, and soon
Medicare had a team of pettifogging auditors formicating through his office
records, pawing through his files, and swarming in the hospital records room,
sifting his charts for pecuniary indiscretions. To hell with patient
confidentiality. Those weasel-faced bureaucrats would know all the secrets of
everyone he'd operated on in the past few years. But what did that matter?
Spurred by the Guidelines committee, the government had declared jihad on
Duncan Lathram.

 
          
Duncan
was angry and embarrassed, but not too
worried. His medical records were impeccable, and he'd match his morbidity and
mortality stats against anyone in the country. Let them investigate. He'd come
up smelling like a rose.

 
          
He
just wished they'd hurry and get the whole mess over and done with.

 
          
But
it dragged on, and in the ensuing months
Duncan
began to notice a hint of coolness from
some of his colleagues at the hospital. He was getting fewer requests for
surgical consults. He understood their predicament, worrying about guilt by
association. They were waiting till things cooled down.

 
          
Still,
he was in for a nasty shock one day as he began one of the surgical
consultation requests he did receive. When he entered the patient's hospital
room and introduced himself, the patient bolted upright in bed.
Duncan
still remembered his words.

 
          
"Oh,
no. Forget it. No way I'm gonna be operated on by some knife-happy,
money-grubbing quack!" Duncan was mortified, angry enough to punch a hole
in the wall. And dammit, hurt. He consoled himself that most likely he had just
experienced the nadir of the whole affair.

 
          
It
couldn't get any worse.

 
          
The
only way he could go from there was up.

 
          
Again,
he was wrong.

 
          
Because
all the bad press was having a devastating effect at home.

 
          
Duncan
Lathram, MD, was the talk of the town . . . including the high school.

 
          
And
so in retrospect it seemed inevitable that he would come home one night to find
Lisa sobbing in her mother's arms. She and Kenny had had a fight and broken up.
The cause of the fight? What the kids were saying about Lisa's father, saying
to Kenny behind Lisa's back.

 
          
Kenny's
parting shot? "Forget the prom! Forget everything! I ain't going anywhere
with the daughter of no crook!" Devastating for any teenager, but to Lisa
it seemed like the end of the world.

 
          
Barely
able to speak through her sobs, she wanted to know why her father hadn't said
anything, why he hadn't come out and defended himself.

 
          
Duncan
remembered the scene as if it had occurred
only a moment ago.

 
          
He
knelt before his daughter and gripped her hands. "Honey, these are lies
from spotlight-hunting buffoons. The way these things work, the louder I
proclaim my innocence, the guiltier I look."

 
          
"But
you haven't said anything!"

           
"I'm letting my records do the
talking. I've got nothing to hide, Lisa. When the bureaucrats finish their
investigation, I'll be vindicated. And they'll be the fools."

 
          
"But
meanwhile they're making you look like a crook! And making everybody hate me!
And you don't care!"

           
"Of course I care." He
realized then that he'd misread the whole situation. He'd treated it as a brief
but unpleasant interlude, another in a long series of fleeting Capitol Hill
cacophomes that would die down as soon as Congress, in tune with its
well-earned reputation for a short attention span, moved on to the next hot
topic.

 
          
So
he'd done nothing to counter the accusations leveled. That had been a mistake.

 
          
Another
mistake was thinking it would involve only his practice. He should have seen
that his professional obloquy would have a ripple effect on his private life as
well. He'd always separated the practice and the family, but there was no way
of insulating the latter from the ravages upon the former, not with an assault
of this magnitude.

 
          
He
hurt for Lisa.

 
          
"But
what could I have done, Lisa? What can I do to make this better?"

 
          
"I
don't know, something. You could plea bargain or whatever they call it.
Something, anything to make them shut up and get off our backs."

 
          
"Plea
bargain?" He was stunned. "You don't plea bargain when you're
innocent." Lisa tore her hands from his and ran upstairs, screaming,
"Thanks! Thanks for nothing! My life is over! And all because of you! I
might as well have AIDS! " Diana followed her, glaring back at him.
"She's right, you know. You could have done something!" This was
vintage Lisa, always taking everything too hard, seeing everything in the worst
light. With her history, though, that kind of outburst could not be laid off to
hyperbole and histrionics.

 
          
They
increased her therapy sessions and kept an eye on her day and night. But a week
later, when it became clear, at least to Lisa, that she and Kenny were through
for good, she dug out a hoard of old pills she had squirreled away over the
years, a potentially lethal combination of antidepressants like Elavil,
Parnate, Desyrel, Sinequan, Norpramin, Tofranil, Nardil, and lithium, and took
them all.

 
          
And
then she fell. Over the railing. Down to the hard, cold foyer floor. Where
Duncan
found her.

 
          
And
then she died. And Diana blamed him.

 
          
And
Duncan
blamed himself.

 
          
He
had never realized what grief could mean, never imagined he could mourn the
loss of another human being the way he mourned Lisa. And he knew it was all his
fault . . . all his fault . . .

 
          
Until
the audits and investigations were completed. Then he knew who was really to
blame.

 
          
The
rasorial crew of Medicare auditors finished their quest for any improprieties
that might grease his path to the gibbet, always in full view of his steadily
diminishing patient flow, and the worst they could come up with were a few
errors in the coding of certain procedures.

 
          
The
quality assurance examiners found no cases, not one! of unnecessary surgery.
Every single procedure met or exceeded recommended . . . .

 
          
Indications.

 
          
No
apology, though, from the Guidelines committee and their fugleman, McCready.
They'd moved on to other hatchet jobs.

 
          
Except
for a few loyal patients who wrote letters on
Duncan
's behalf, no one had come to his defense
throughout the entire ordeal. His colleagues had kept their heads down. Even
some A.M.A paper-pusher was quoted as saying the amount
Duncan
billed was "excessive."
Duncan
learned the meaning of alone.