Preview of: Touch Me Doctor

CHAPTER ONE

Matt

“Things are coming together,” I said, looking around my new office. “Still not perfect by any means, but it’s in good enough shape to start seeing patients on Monday. Wouldn’t you agree, Janelle?”

“Of course, sir,” she said, standing in the doorway of my office. “It’s been ready for a while now. You just can’t see it because you’re too hard on yourself, Matt. You have been since I began working for you.”

“That’s not true,” I said, frowning. “Well, maybe I am. But maybe that’s what it takes, right? That’s what it takes to get things done the right way. High standards and an exacting eye are what it takes to succeed.”

I sat down behind my new desk and ran my fingers over the rich mahogany wood. Janelle hovered anxiously in the doorway. I bit my tongue to keep from saying something I shouldn’t. Sitting behind this desk gave me all the power when it came to the relationship between doctor and receptionist. Taking advantage of that power dynamic was wrong. I would never do it, but sometimes Janelle made it so damn difficult. She’d been my receptionist for almost four years now and still didn’t seem any more comfortable with the role than on the day she’d started. It frustrated me, and I had to force myself not to take those frustrations out on her, just because she was my subordinate.

She was so jittery all the time, always wringing her hands in front of her or else tucking her hair compulsively behind an ear. She always told me exactly what I wanted to hear, and although that was something every man wanted some of the time, no man wanted it all day, every day. It bored me and exhausted me, all at the same time.

“It’ll be fine, at least for now,” I said in answer, standing and stretching before moving to my office window and peering out at the perfect mid-June San Diego day. “It’s all we’ve got to work with for now.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean what I said. What else could I mean?” My patience with her wore thin. I couldn’t keep the edge of annoyance from my voice.

“I’m sorry,” she answered hesitantly, using that wounded bird voice that always made me cringe a little. “I can see how that sounded like a stupid question. I only meant—”

“The study?” I interjected.

“Well, yes, Dr. McCormack. The study was exactly what I was thinking about.”

I nodded, not bothering to turn from the window and acknowledge the conversation Janelle tried to start with me. Of course she wanted to know about the study. As of late it seemed that the fucking study was all anyone wanted to talk about when it came to a conversation with me. Even the bartenders in my favorite restaurants asked me about it every time I came in, which only made me want to find new places to drink. I’d worked on nothing but the study for the last six months or so. Despite everyone’s interest in my work, the actual substance of my research would undoubtedly bore the piss out of 99 percent of the population. But for me, it was everything. I put all my efforts and passion into it after my life started to go to shit.

The study in question was a pilot study on a cheaper sepsis-control protocol I’d been developing, and it had very much been my baby. It was an unusual protocol the seemed to go against the current thinking on the subject. Because of that, other doctors and researchers in the medical field were simply unwilling to get involved. They worried about tarnishing their academic reputations. That was where I and many of my colleagues differed, much to their closeted disdain and my chagrin. Many of them were all about the academia. They cared about it more than they did anything else and based many of their professional decisions on that fact.

Unlike them, I was a private clinician and couldn’t care less about my academic reputation, whatever it may be. More than a few of my colleagues called me crazy, but all I cared about was developing a better, more effective treatment, and I wanted to make that treatment available to as many people as possible. It was the reason we became doctors, or so I had always believed, to help people, to make their lives better, and to save lives. It was my job to do that, and as far as I was concerned, getting my study off the ground was currently the best way for me to do that very thing.

The problem was, the same thing that gave me the freedom to pursue studies like the sepsis-control protocol was also the thing that made it impossible for me to continue without the aid of outside funding. I wasn’t a part of some corporate, money-making machine. I wasn’t teamed up with a pharmaceutical company that would take my treatment and jack up the price. And I wasn’t one of those doctors with more money than God.

I ran a small office, and I did so on my own. Obviously, I made more than the average working man, but a lot of that money went back into my research. What was left over wasn’t close to the kind of money required to fund my own project. That got into sums of money I could never hope to earn, given the choices I had made for my practice. And the bitch of it was, this situation was a sort of catch twenty-two. The only way I’d ever earn enough money to fund the study would be by completing the study successfully. Even by selling my treatment cheaply, it would still bring in massive amounts of money. But I didn’t have the money to get there.

“I don’t have time for this,” I said, almost under my breath.

“I’m sorry? What did you say, sir?”

“I said I don’t have time for this,” I repeated more loudly, even though I’d only been talking to myself the first time. “I said I don’t have time for this, and I don’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she answered uncertainly, trying my patience with her timidity yet again. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I—”

“I didn’t mean you,” I interrupted. My fists clenched and unclenched at my sides to keep from unloading on her. “I was talking to myself. I don’t have time to worry about the pilot study or its funding. Not right now. If I can’t get that project off the ground, and it looks like I’m not, I’ll need to put all my focus and concentration into this practice. I’ll need to take on new patients, right? And I’ll need to expand my hours. If I have to spend day and night here working, then so be it. I’m not afraid of hard work, after all.”

“Of course not, sir. I don’t think there’s a person alive who would question that. It’s just… well, aren’t you forgetting about one little thing?”

I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell she was talking about, and I got my answer. The moment Janelle spoke the words that were, for her, about as close to a rebuke as she would get, both of us heard a sound rising from the waiting room. It sounded like a siren, and in a very real way, that was exactly what it was. After all, a siren was a beacon of danger, a signal that something in the world was amiss. That was exactly what the noise coming from the front of my offices was. Only instead of coming out of a machine, it came out of a little girl.

I shut my eyes quickly; my hands clenched so tightly now that when I looked at my palms later, I would find little half-moon cuts where my fingernails had done their digging. It was almost like I was living in a movie, or like somebody else directed my life according to their own amusement. I didn’t have these thoughts often. I wasn’t the sort of man to wallow in my own misery, but the timing of this felt like more than simple coincidence.

“Christ, Janelle, why didn’t you tell me she was here?”

“I didn’t realize you would want to know! I was already interrupting you more than I should have been.”

“That’s right, you damn well were! Did you honestly think it was acceptable to interrupt me for these petty things and not tell me that my own daughter was in the waiting room? Seriously, Janelle, sometimes I don’t know why I even keep you on staff.”

I strode to the door of my office and brushed past my secretary roughly, ignoring the expression of horror and shame my words brought to her face. Knowing Janelle, there was a good chance she’d start crying the minute I got past her, and if she did, I would ignore that too. I didn’t give a shit if she was upset. I didn’t give a shit if anyone was upset except for my daughter, whose wailing got more persistent and panicked with every passing second. Panic tried rising in my gullet as I rushed toward the waiting room, the way it always did when I though Anna might be in trouble.

If I hadn’t been a doctor and therefore trained to keep panic in check, I might have given into it, whether I wanted to or not; it was that strong of a force running through me. Instead, I moved as quickly as I could without actually running and found my little daughter crumpled up into a ball on the waiting room floor. For a girl of only six years old, the amount of noise she managed to make astounded me.

After assessing the damage and making sure she wasn’t injured, I fought to suppress a smile. She wouldn’t have appreciated that smile at all, but sometimes it was all a father could do when witnessing his child’s heartbreak. It was either that or cry right along with her, and what good would that do?

“What is it, baby? What’s the matter?”

“Daddy!” She sobbed as she buried her wet face into my shirt. That one word was the only thing she offered in explanation.

“What is it? You aren’t hurt, are you?”

“No, but Mr. Bunny!”

“What about him, baby?”

“He’s hurt!” She wailed, getting louder still. I almost had to cover my ears against the noise. “He’s hurt, Daddy! Fix him, please? You have to fix him!”

I followed her gaze and saw that yes, Mr. Bunny was indeed injured. She’d managed to snag his midsection on the edge of one of my waiting room chairs. His stuffing leaked out in handfuls. It was precisely the kind of thing that could break a little girl’s heart. Fortunately for the both of us, this was a problem I could fix. After a considerable amount of time spent convincing Anna that this could, in fact, be so, I got her up to a standing position and had her retrieve the wounded stuffed animal. She gathered up his fluffy innards from where it littered my waiting room floor. Then she took my hand and followed me back to one of my examination rooms, a grim look on her face.

“Can you do it, Daddy?”

“What do you think, Anna?”

“Dunno. Hope so.”

As she watched, I laid Mr. Bunny out with all the reverence typically reserved for a real live patient and went about the business of healing him. The stuffing went back into the already worn little body, and then I stitched him up, trying not to laugh as my baby girl covered her eyes for the “yucky” part. In no time flat, her beloved animal friend was good as new, and Anna trotted off to play with Janelle. I was sure she’d be much happier playing with my daughter than with putting up with my shit. For my part, I didn’t feel any better than before the almost-crisis. In fact, I felt a hell of a lot worse. My daughter’s meltdown reminded me of one glaring thing on my to-do list I had yet to check off.

Summer had just started, which meant my daughter didn’t have to go to school for the next few months. Back when my wife was still around, Anna would have spent the months of freedom gleefully getting up to mischief with her mom, and on the evenings I had time to be with them, they’d fill me in on the details of all their fooling around. But now? Now there was no Mom to play with. There was only me, and I couldn’t give up all my patients to stay home with Anna, as much fun as it would be. What I needed was a nanny, and I needed one fast. The world wasn’t going to stop in its tracks for me and my daughter, whether her mother had died or not.