Don’T Touch Family

By Marie Davis

Dont Touch Family is a drama depicting a young female physicians journey through her family medicine residency. Yet after a traumatic sexual assault by a member of the established medical world, she must conquer her demons as shes faced with true love and the painful realization of just how imperfect family can be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546208259

Marie Davis

Reader by night, physician by day; Marie Davis started writing stories about the unsung heroes in medicine, family doctors. These doctors don’t have the glory of surgeons or cancer doctors but they work in the trenches and know the stories of everyday people. Patients bring their deepest fears to family doctors for help and wisdom. At the same time, these doctors are people too and struggling to build their own lives. Marie has worked as a family doctor for years and hopes to give her readers a glimpse into this world.

Book preview

Chapter 1

W alking down the hall at a rapid pace, the click of her shoes echoing on the linoleum tiles, Jess felt a shiver of fear and excitement climb down her spine. She focused straight ahead, her heels touching ground half a moment before her toes, reminding her of the times her grandmother yelled at her to walk more like a lady. Jess recoiled at the thought of her younger self—berated for her unladylike knobby legs, awkward posture, and constant interrupting—and considered instead the image she projected now: a young doctor owning this hallway, wearing a white coat with an MD badge bearing her name on it.

The sickly creamy white walls on either side of the hallway gave the somber appearance of a place where people came never by choice but always in need. Both the unfortunate patients as well as the workers who hustled in and out of West City Hospital each day with the changing of shifts shared this place, had a need to be here but the motives were different. Some clung to hope, while the others held on to something more complicated—a passion mixed with a need to do something beyond the everyday job.

The public perceived that everyone who worked in this building was full of kindness and caring, but that wasn’t any truer than a fervent wish cast from every feverish brow. These staff members passed Jess by, jostling to get to the next elevator run in a blur of quick-moving, sharp-edged, and strangely focused attention. They wore the blue of the corporate hospital, and it created a bland mask of anonymity, not clearly identifying who worked with human plumbing and who worked with steel pipes.

Each person had a job here, but Jess didn’t see her role as a job, even though she anticipated the paycheck next week as much as anyone. The thought that she belonged here in this building gave Jess a warm thrill. A hospital was so foreign and foreboding to most, but to Jess it was full of a cacophony of feelings, pride, passion, excitement and belonging, traveled with her down this long hallway.

The hallway branched ahead, and she turned toward the left wing, clearly marked as the patient rooms. She strode past a laundry cart while she reached up for her shot of hand sanitizer, which she smeared diligently over her palms, carefully moving forward with a thrust of her shoulders and a sigh of finality that she was in a room with the first living patient of her new career.

The air vent above the bed trembled with a steady stream of cool breeze raining down on the patient and across the room. Jess felt distracted by the airflow blowing over the man’s head and toward her face, as she stood cautiously next to his bed, ready to meet him. Preoccupied with the bursts of chilly air that passed over the man, she found it difficult to focus and instead felt forced to view the results of the breeze as it cascaded across the room and ruffled bright-colored papers taped to the opposite wall, pictures of rainbows and sunshine, childish representations of hopeful wishes placed there to ward against the perils of illness.

The seconds of diversion finally over, Jess turned to view her patient, ignoring the vented air to take in the body lying on the bed beside her. She saw a mass of hair that was grainy yellow at the ends and balanced by a scattered, gray base that framed a starkly pale, angular face that was barely supported by skeletal shoulders covered in a thin veneer of sweat. The bedsheet was casually draped across his upper stomach. His hazy blue eyes looked like denim washed long in the sun, and he gazed at her with incomprehension in those pale, glazed eyes.

While this was Jess’s first day as a Family Medicine resident—what most people called an intern—she ticked off a mental list of the steps for assessing a patient taught to every medical student while the image of this man seared onto her mind. She stood there longer than was socially appropriate and knew her first step was to introduce herself, but she felt frozen by the chilling breeze and the stark image of his frozen face. The to-do list felt like an arcade of video game noise in her head: get the patient’s history, examine him, find his studies, talk to consultants, and figure out what was wrong. She couldn’t stop the noise, nor could she muster the will to proceed. She stared into his eyes and he held her stare.

What do you want? It was the man who finally broke the heavy silence.

The words were abrupt and forced; he spoke like someone who was accustomed to being ignored.

Freed from her paralyzing thoughts, Jess finally found strength to move beyond the litany of lists in her head to say. Hi, Mr. Clarkson, I’m Dr. Reed, your new family doctor. I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes and see how you are doing today.

Jess knew her vaguely worded introduction wasn’t too helpful and hoped that he wouldn’t ask who she really was, as she wasn’t in the mood to explain what a resident was. So she shouted her greeting loudly enough to give him confidence in her right to be there. As the words passed her lips, she realized the other patient in the room could hear her as well, but she shrugged with the knowledge that she couldn’t help the lack of privacy a curtain created in these small spaces.

The frail man passed his eyes over her face, creating the impression that he was sizing her up, and he was willing to accept her position of authority. Jess read in his nod the affirmation that she was accepted and had established her position in the hierarchy of this patient’s experience. The lines on his face shifted slowly and a cautious smile appeared, the one a patient offers to invite caring in those people they depend upon in a hospital. The smile spread to his eyes, and then, with a sudden jerk, his face shifted back to its previous pale and anxious state. A moment later, he proceeded to vomit profusely on the bedclothes and his chest; the residual splatter even hit Jess’s jacket. Looking down at the vomitus, bright red threads and small clots were evident and the color was so vibrant it announced a heightened sense of doom over the otherwise drab room.

The initial sight caused Jess a moment of shock before she tried to reach for a basin next to the bed in a vain attempt to do something useful. The vomit was accompanied by a pungent smell that caused Jess to deliver a fake cough to hide the fact that she reached her hand up to cover her nose from the fumes spreading across his body.

I guess I’m not so good today, he managed to get out after drying his mouth on his blanket when it was all over. Jess’s hurried attempt to place a basin under his chin to catch the last few retches into the inappropriate-sized receptacle felt pathetically inadequate, but he acknowledged her effort at helpfulness. She chided herself for responding so slowly; starting the day off with blood spatters on her sleeve seemed to foretell more trouble coming. Of course, she hadn’t thought to bring a spare coat.

The patient’s assessment of his state mirrored how she felt about her own professional abilities so far today. This had to be a classic intern worst first patient scenario—getting bloody vomit all over both of you even before morning rounds. Standing there with a basin in her hands while the bloody mess covered her patient’s chest made her feel slightly nauseated and completely incompetent. It was not the way she had imagined her first day of residency would begin. In all of her fanciful daydreams, July 1, the first day of being a physician, had never looked like this.

Jess’s mind wandered to earlier that morning and the night before. While she knew she needed to start with a clear head, the first-day anxieties had caused her to miss most of the night’s sleep. Frazzled nerves finally propelled her into action before the sun entered her room, as she couldn’t stand lying in bed and imagining the day ahead anymore. The reality had to be better than her imagined nightmares.

Grabbing her white coat loaded with stethoscope, business cards, pens, highlighters, notebooks, cell phone, and with one final glance in her pockets, she told herself it was all there. After a calm drive down quiet streets in the pre-dawn morning, the view of the parking structure coincided with the familiar chest-tightening grip that Jess knew so well.

As she walked into the main hospital building, Jess found herself inadvertently following two physicians who clearly belonged at the hospital. The taller of the two carried a crisp, long white coat draped over one shoulder; although the lab coat was pressed to perfection, his mop of shaggy brown hair seemed to originate more from a boy band than from the halls of academia. His lanky limbs and casual haircut made him an obvious foil to his colleague, who epitomized the stereotype of a proper physician with his sturdy build, square jaw, bow tie, and determined gait.

Hey, are you one of the new interns? the taller one called, turning to glance at Jess when they heard her footsteps racing behind them.

Right, she said, I am. Is this the way to Morning Report?

They laughed and looked at each other before the taller doctor gave her a wink to let her know she was heading in the right direction. The men exchanged a smirk as Jess hurried past them.

We hope your group knows something … anything … about surgery, the tall one called as she glided by.

"God, I’m not ready for another group of those residents. Every year they show up less prepared than the year before. We have to teach them everything," he griped to his colleague.

Jess didn’t feel the warm welcome she hoped for at her new hospital from these two, but she ignored their sarcasm and rushed ahead to Morning Report. The men persisted, trying to keep the conversation going despite her apparent anxiety and need to break away.

We’re both general surgeons, the tall one said. We work with you residents all the time. I’m Snyder, he’s Karagosian. He’s the nice one.

Great, I hope to work with you soon, she muttered brusquely as she headed down the hall, hoping they would understand. She had more important things to do this July 1 than chat with them.

Jess could hear them chuckle—something between a laugh and a snort—and one of them darkly mumbled something about those family residents as they moved down the dank corridor and away from Jess. She felt much more comfortable once they were gone.

Opening the conference room door, she noticed three fellow residents. Her relief at seeing their familiar faces at the long, worn table gave her a moment of near joy. The residual thoughts swirling in her mind from the surgeons were quickly replaced by a sense of warmth she found waiting for her in the room.

This was how this day had started. After years of working so hard to get here, Jess felt an unreal sense of déjà vu; she had thought about her first day so much that the real thing seemed like an insane reality TV show version. Vomit, blood, rude surgeons—and it was only 8 a.m. Had she really worked eight years for this?

Jess felt only minimally relieved to know that she wasn’t alone. Of course, she was here in a relatively small residency program, with only eight residents in each class. Some large centers had hundreds of residents, all starting today. If she had the time to think about it, she might realize that the others in her program were feeling as lost, confounded, and scared as she was. But she didn’t have the time.

She was quickly assigned five patients to see before 11 a.m. rounds, and she knew she wasn’t going to make it. Medical school had given her the tools she needed to do this, but it had been so different when a senior resident had all the responsibility. As a student, she only had to interview her patients and worry about not having a long enough differential diagnosis. Even though she had worked hard, when her senior residents constantly told her how easy it was to be a student, she thought they were being condescending and a little rude. Now she was beginning to wonder if maybe they were right.

Finally, the reverie broken, Jess realized she was still in her first patient’s room. She wondered how long she had zoned out. The patient spoke, and Jess realized he had asked her twice for a sip of water. She pushed herself out of her self-imposed fog and quickly reached for a glass, reacting on instinct. Then she realized it was a lay instinct—not a doctor instinct. When her inner doctor took over, she stopped short of offering the plastic cup of water. This man was bleeding and might need surgery. He should be NPO, nothing by mouth.

Sorry, sir she calmly explained. I can’t let you. Not now.

Luckily, a nurse arrived, walking through the doorway with a pursed smile plastered to her face. The slit of her eyes more accurately revealed her true feelings. A small, dark woman with a colorful smock top over her pristine white pants, the nurse exuded an efficient kindness that eased some of Jess’s awkwardness while at the same time reinforced her sense of inadequacy.

With her sense of being alone momentarily alleviated, Jess allowed herself to slip away from the patient, while the nurse busily began to take the patient’s vital signs and call for help with clean-up. Jess knew her role was to go and write some version of new orders and make a thoughtful and organized plan for the patient.

Sitting at the desk, thumbing through his chart, she was deep in concentration as she agonized over a Tylenol order. Although Jess knew she had the initials MD after her signature and she finally could sign medical orders, she found herself terrified to do so. Even ordering a simple medicine like Tylenol overwhelmed her. She fretted about the dose. What if she ordered it and it covered up a fever? Would that be worse? How often should the nurses give it?

She couldn’t imagine prescribing complicated therapies right now as she looked around for a more senior resident. She needed someone to help her so she wouldn’t hurt anyone. She felt a light touch on her shoulder from behind.

Need some help?

It was Sajani, her senior resident on the inpatient team. Jess smiled and looked up at her, pleading with her eyes.

Yes, I guess so. This guy has liver failure and he just started GI bleeding. On me.

Oh, what a way to start the day! At least your coat is still somewhat clean. Sajani smiled, but mostly with her eyes; the pale lips against her smooth, brown skin barely moved.

The comfort Sajani brought gave Jess’s flagging spirits a lift for a while as they sat at the desk. The senior resident talked her through the chart and all of the nuances of this hospital’s records. Under her firm but gentle direction, Jess managed to construct some reasonable orders and a plan.

The day was looking better, until Jess glanced down at her phone and saw the time.

Oh my God, it can’t be 10:30! I have four more patients to see!

Don’t worry, it’s your first day. He understands.

The he was Dr. Jacobsen, her inpatient-attending physician. He was the one ultimately responsible for the care of the patients, and he saw all of them, too. Jess had no idea how he managed to do it so quickly. The briefest thought of his disapproval brought back Jess’s stomach pains as she hurried on to her next patient and returned to the long and unsettling day ahead.

Chapter 2

F inally, it was Saturday, the day off in her first week of residency. Tired didn’t really begin to express how Jess felt, but it was only part of the mood she was dealing with today. She knew residency would be tough, with long hours and all, but it wasn’t the sheer number of hours that made her so exhausted—it was the immensity and intensity of the tasks she’d attended to all week. Her first week had left her feeling totally empty. The mental drain, coupled with the physical fatigue and the overlay of all the emotional highs and lows, made Jess experience a new sensation. She came to think of it as over-charged fatigue.

Tomorrow, she was going to be on call again, as she had been on her first night in the hospital, four days earlier. Today was a glorious day off, and Jess’s only plans were to sleep all morning.

The constant ringing of her phone foiled those plans as she rolled over to answer her mother’s call. She felt guilty that she hadn’t talked to her mom sooner, although she had sent a few quick texts to tell them she was okay. She should have known they wouldn’t be able to wait until the afternoon to check in with her.

As always, her mom was chipper and talkative. Jess tried to match her mood as she answered all the usual mom questions like how the people were, did she enjoy it as much as she thought she would—and was she meeting people?

Yes, great. Yes, of course, everyone is really nice, Mom.

She knew enough to supply a few details. Her mother’s Zen-like artistic nature didn’t apply to Jessica; from her daughter, she was never happy with casual platitudes. Their conversation covered the attending physicians Jess liked, a description of her day-to-day responsibilities, and the pace of her workload.

"Well, Honey you sound tired and I don’t want to keep you. I don’t understand how they can expect you to work so hard, it’s not right. You know I wondered if this was right for you but I know you can do it, really we are so proud of you. Dad is worried too and he want’s to hear your voice so talk to him some today, ok? She finished the call with a kiss and a promise to call next week.

It seemed liked only minutes had passed when Jess’s dad called and he sounded like he was at the office. He assured her that her mother wasn’t worrying too much, and he reminded her how proud he was of her new role and responsibilities. Jess’s relationship with her father was warm, pleasant, and a little remote. He was a soft shoulder when she needed a hug. She could count on him to tell her she looked beautiful when she knew she didn’t.

His favorite topics were whatever his current projects were: the water department mismanagement or the local mayor’s office scandal. He always seemed a little uncomfortable talking about the details of medicine. Jess noticed that he squirmed when she spoke too vividly, so she left out details about the diseases and surgeries that were part of her job. That didn’t leave her many areas for conversation with her dad, so they usually just covered the basics: school, grades, and whether she needed money for books or supplies. But he was a good listener and he was always there for her when she needed him, even when he was traveling.

Jess hung up the phone and gazed at the sun shining outside her window when she got a call from Caitlyn, her best friend from medical school who was anxious to compare notes on their first week. Jess was torn between talking to her first true adult girlfriend and getting a few minutes to herself. The pull of her friend proved stronger, Jess could never resist the magnetisms Caitlyn had for her She was the polar opposite of Jess on the outside, but they were soulmates in every way. The funny thing was that Jess would never have considered Caitlyn to be a potential friend during her growing-up years. Caitlyn was a pixie blond with sparkling brown eyes that every guy in the vicinity thought were directed at him. She had a heart-shaped face and a petite frame, the kind of figure she could easily dress up on a date night.

In fact, Jess had found Caitlyn slightly annoying on the first day of medical school, just because of her attire. She walked into the lecture hall with a midriff-baring tank, low slung jeans, a wide belt, and a scarf tied around her neck. She caught the eyes of every guy in their class and the girls, too. Jess was instantly jealous and slightly repulsed. Then they were thrust together for Anatomy and Cell Biology labs. Four hours a day together gave them time to bond, and Jess began to learn that dress, looks, and style were just a façade for Caitlyn. Her new friend was just as intense and competitive about her work as Jess was.

They began to study together, and Jess developed a deep respect for Caitlyn. Jess was the rapt listener to Cait’s tales and she both admired and encouraged her brave friend. Cait in turn tried to teach Jess how to dress and socialize. It was a great time for Jess as she found in Caitlyn the sister she had never experienced growing up an only child. She learned that girls could dress up and flirt on social occasions and still be serious at their studies.

At the end of the four years, Caitlyn ended up in the AOA, the Alpha Omega Association, which was the highest honor in medical school. Jess, not too far behind, was content to share in her friend’s joy and success. She was sad when they parted to complete different residencies, but happy to know they were only three hours apart. Caitlyn was in San Diego doing her residency in Internal Medicine. She wanted to be an infectious disease specialist. Jess planned to visit her friend the first weekend they had off together, whenever that might be.

They spent their conversation comparing morning reports, attendings, and their call schedules. Caitlyn asked Jess about dating prospects as well; she was more successful than Jess’s mom at getting real information here.

Well, there are a few cute guys in the program but who wants to date another resident, right? That’s a mess I don’t need. How about you?" Jess turned the conversation back to Caitlyn quickly.

Oh, I agree. Two senior’s asked me out during orientation, but they were weird. I’m not that hard up. Now, there are some senior fellows who look promising, but we’ll have to see. It takes time to check everyone out, you know? Cait’s observations seemed couched in advice for Jess.

Jess pondered the two residencies and realized there weren’t many differences in their actual experiences; it was just that in Family Medicine, she