The Pain Nurse - страница 19

“Thank you so much.” She seemed so young. Was I ever that young? Cheryl Beth asked herself. She also knew how difficult it was to recruit nurses, especially at Memorial. She wrote out the new orders-she always covered her backside-and would get Dr. Ames to sign them.

“No worries,” Cheryl Beth responded, smiling at her and handing back the chart.

“I just didn’t know how her doc would react to changing her dose.”

Well, thought Cheryl Beth, at least she was young enough to be honest. It was the usual chickenshit thing that left patients to suffer. Docs could be inattentive or stubborn, and nurses were afraid to challenge them. Cheryl Beth had never been that way. In this case, she had an added measure of protection because the patient’s main surgeon was one of her fans.

“Do your thing and sign my name,” the surgeon, Dr. Brice, had said years ago. “You know more about this than most docs.”

Cheryl Beth was in the hallway outside recovery, slathering hand sanitizer into her palms, when the page repeated.

In five minutes she was in the spacious, wood-paneled administrative offices. The outer hallways were lined with oil paintings of eighty years of hospital presidents. Not surprisingly, Stephanie Ott made her wait twenty minutes in her outer office. She made conversation with Ott’s secretary, Bridget, a compact, formidable woman with slate gray hair. She intimidated most of the staff, but Cheryl Beth got along fine with her. Halfway into a discussion about artificial Christmas trees, the door to Stephanie Ott’s office swooshed open and a compact young man strode out. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, with fashionably punked-up blond hair and a movie star tan on a face most women would have found cute. He wore black jeans and a French blue dress shirt, open at the collar. His fists were clenched and he stared straight ahead, his mouth set at an angry angle.

“Oh, joy,” Cheryl Beth said. “I’m next.”

“He’s a prima donna,” Bridget said after he had gone. “He’s from California.”

“He didn’t look like he was from Cincinnati. I thought he might be Stephanie’s son, he looks like such a kid.”

Bridget looked over her reading glasses. “That kid is a multi-millionaire and the chief executive of a company in Silicon Valley.” The sarcasm in her voice was barely concealed. “He’s twenty-six.”

Cheryl Beth cocked her head in disbelief.

“Oh, yes. Mister Josh Barnett, the chief executive officer of SoftChartZ. He started the company when he was a graduate student at Stanford. Promises to take the entire health-care industry and ‘digitalize it.’” She made mocking quotation marks in the air with her fingers. Bridget could be fun if you got to know her. She added, “We’re paying him $10 million, you know. I haven’t had a raise in three years.”

Cheryl Beth thought about what Lisa had said, but couldn’t believe Christine Lustig could have slept with the man. She said, “So he was working with Christine.”

Bridget let the statement hang just long enough for Stephanie Ott to open her office door and beckon Cheryl Beth inside.

There are two kinds of nurses: scrubs and suits. Stephanie Ott, RN, MSN, emphatically fell into the latter category. Stephanie was even wearing a suit that day. Combined with her short dark hair and angular features, the suit’s red coat and shoulder pads gave her the appearance of a toy soldier, or, Cheryl Beth thought, a nutcracker.

Suits and scrubs. The best nursing administrators maintained the fine balance. Stephanie Ott, RN, MSN, seemed to have little interest in such esoterica. After five years as vice president for nursing, she had yet to visit many of the wards and departments at Cincinnati Memorial. Most of the nursing staff had never seen her outside the large meetings or video-casts that usually announced an unpleasant new policy or staff cutback. She probably hadn’t touched a patient in years, but her ability to reach out with vengeance was legend. One victim was Cheryl Beth’s friend Denise, who had kicked an obnoxious film crew out of the ICU. Denise was one of the best ICU nurses Cheryl Beth had known, and she couldn’t have cared less that the crew worked for an advertising agency owned by a member of the hospital’s board. Stephanie Ott cared, and the next day Denise was banished to the overnight shift on a patient floor.