Natural Causes Read Free

staff—at one time or another, each had run somesort of job action at the beleaguered institution. Today it was maintenance.
    D OWN WITH G LENN P ARIS … M CB = M ORE C OCK AND B ULL … B ETTER M ANAGEMENT , N OT B ETTER P ROMISES … MCB N AY HMO Y EA …
    The placards were, in the main, professionally done. The messages on them ranged from snide to malicious.
    Is P ARIS B URNING? W ELL W HY N OT?… P AY U S OR F IX I T Y OURSELF  … Y OU T RUST T HIS P LACE W ITH Y OUR L IFE?!!!
    Whatever their beef with MCB, Sarah noted, the maintenance workers had some money behind them.
    “Nice day for a demonstration, eh?”
    Andrew Truscott, a senior resident in vascular surgery as of today, fell into step beside her. Originally from Australia, Truscott had an acerbic wit, made even deadlier by an outback accent he could fine-tune from trace to dense. Now thirty-six, he was the only other resident Sarah’s age. He was a difficult person to warm up to—rigidly traditional, opinionated, and too often facetious. But he was also a damn fine surgeon. The two of them had met the day she arrived at MCB and had quickly connected. At first Sarah expected that rapport—that sense of comrades-in-arms—to grow into a true friendship. But comrade-in-arms turned out to be as close as Andrew ever allowed anyone at MCB to get.
    Still, Sarah enjoyed her contacts with the man, and had certainly benefited from his teaching. She also acknowledged to herself that had Andrew Truscott not been married, she would gladly have dusted off her feminine wiles to try and break down his reserve. As things stood, she was still without the solution to the nagging problem of how she was to become a competent surgeon herself without totally suppressing the need for love,companionship, sex, and whatever else of merit went with life beyond the hospital.
    “What would Changeover Day at MCB be like without a few pickets, Andrew?” she said.
    “Ah, yes. Changeover Day at the Medical Center of Boston. At the east wing we have a lineup of professional drug-seekers, duping the new residents with textbook performances of the passing of a kidney stone or the slipping of a lumbar disk. At the west wing, we have a lineup of disgruntled maintenance workers, looking to squeeze a few more bucks from this stone of a hospital. Ain’t medicine grand?”
    “MCB nay, HMO yea,” Sarah said. “Since when are the maintenance workers into hospital politics?”
    “Probably since someone told them they might actually get those bucks if Everwell took the place over.”
    “It’s not going to happen.”
    Truscott smiled. “Try telling them.”
    For several years, the ambitious—some said avaricious—Everwell Health Maintenance Organization had been waiting and watching like a predatory cat as MCB staggered beneath a crippling weight of fiscal problems, labor unrest, and the controversy surrounding its emphasis on blending nontraditional healing with traditional medicine and surgery. By charter, a vote of the hospital trustees, if approved by the state Public Health Commission, would turn the hospital over to the definitely for-profit operation. And each job action, each piece of negative publicity, brought the unique institution closer to its knees.
    “It’s not going to happen, Andrew,” Sarah said again. “Things have gotten better every year since Paris took over. You know that as well as I do. MCB has become one of a kind. People from all over the world come here for care because of the way we do things. We can’t let Everwell or anyone else ruin that.”
    “Look, mate,” Truscott said, his accent deepening, “if you’re going to become impassioned about anything,you’ve got to turn in your surgeon’s merit badge. That’s the rule.”
    “You get just as impassioned about things as I do,” Sarah said. “You’re just too macho to let it show.” She glanced past the demonstrators at the bicycle rack, which was empty save two rusted three-speeds, whose