It’s the early 1970’s, and Dave Cameron is soon to start work as an intern at a large university hospital in the South. Before Orientation, he meets Sharon, who his friend Henry swears is his perfect match. Dave and Sharon quickly fall into a passionate relationship that surprises them both in its intensity. Sharon Kelly is a beautiful flight attendant whose looks lead to her becoming a model but they also create problems for her. When she meets Dave, she is running or flying away from those problems and her past. Dave is an unconventional doctor: a music-loving, long-haired idealist who hopes his generation will improve the world. He manages the stress of his internship with a combination of smoking weed and having sex with Sharon. They both go trough life changing metamorphoses over the course of his internship as their relationship evolves into an all-consuming unconditional love.
This is a story about what it took to become a doctor when doctors were physicians, not providers. It is about a young doctor doing his internship in a city/county hospital in the early seventies and the training he went through to become a competent physician. It is about his struggle to find love and maintain hope in the face of the daunting challenges he faced. It is about the wild alcohol and drug fueled parties coupled with the torrid nights of unrestrained passion he needed in order to deal with the pathos of the human condition he encountered every day at the hospital. It is first and foremost a love story about two young lovers, but interwoven into the framework of their love are the obstacles they had to overcome and the transitions they had to go through in order to reach the threshold of a bright future together. It is about one year, the internship year, in the life of a young doctor going through hell, but finding heaven in the love of a beautiful, exceptional, young woman.
Targeted Age Group:: 25 – 65
What Inspired You to Write Your Book?
The United States is not even ranked in the top ten among industrialized nations in healthcare, yet the cost of healthcare in this country is the highest in the world and double the cost in France, the country with the highest ranking. There are multiple reasons why Americans pay more and get less, but one major factor is physician quality. Healthcare quality is tied to physician quality and this country once had the best healthcare in the world, because it had the best physicians in the world. They were trained with methods that went back to Dr. William Osler, the Father of Modern Medicine, but those methods damaged many doctors during their training and left some with a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Reforms were instituted to protect them but the reforms led to deficits in their training process. The medical profession needs to find ways to replicate the previous training experience without damaging the physicians in the process in order to improve the quality of health care in this country.
The US ranks twenty seventh in the world in education and medical education falls somewhere in that dismal ranking. Postgraduate medical training begins with an internship. The term “intern” is derived from the fact that the doctor was interred in the hospital for a period of one year. By being present in the hospital constantly, the intern was exposed to the maximum number of cases and training experiences possible. If a physician specialized, then a residency was done in that specialty. The term “residency” is derived from the fact that the physician lived in the hospital or was a resident of the hospital during the training period.
By the time of this story things had already changed. The intern was no longer interred in the hospital and the resident no longer lived in the hospital, although both spent the majority of their time there. Straight internships were leading directly to residencies because the number of cases necessary to become proficient in a field had increased to the point where another year of training was needed. The internship year was appropriated by the specialties and broad-based rotating internships were phased out.
Then reforms were instituted that reversed this trend and markedly decreased the number of cases and training experiences doctors were exposed to during internship and residency. This resulted in interns and residents not seeing the number of cases or doing the number of procedures necessary to become well trained and competent in their field. The problem was further exacerbated by medical schools becoming businesses in order to stay financially viable. Their focus shifted away from producing well-trained, competent physicians toward being successful healthcare plans with good patient retention and earnings. Medical schools began to follow a business model instead of a teaching model.
Next, the advent of technology changed the practice of medicine. Order the right test and imaging studies to get the correct diagnosis then use the best practice guidelines to institute the proper treatment. The role of the physician was diminished to that of a provider who practiced medicine by algorithm. But what about critical thinking and clinical judgment? What about the art of healing? They are not in the computer program; they have to come from the physician. Healing is and always has been an art as well as a science. The human factor, the art of healing, has been lost in the technology. If this cookbook method of one-shoe-fits all and the current training methods worked, why is the US ranked so low in the world in health care?
The richest country in the world is twenty-seventh in education and eleventh in health care! The most important thing a human being has is their life. Our country was founded on the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; good healthcare prolongs life; there is no liberty without good health to enjoy it; there is no happiness in the face of poor health. Healthcare should be a priority for our society and relieving suffering, preventing disability, and prolonging life should be fundamental sociological premises. In order to fulfill those premises, well-trained, dedicated, intelligent physicians are needed.
Today, our medical schools aren’t training institutions; they are businesses like Harvard Medical and Stanford Medical. They are not producing physicians; they are producing Dr. Feel Good, a provider following an algorithm, concerned about patient retention and profit, who will do whatever it takes to meet those goals, including over-prescribing opioids. The prescribing behavior of doctors in conjunction with the immoral corrupt business practices of drug companies led to the opioid epidemic.
Adding to the problems with medical education and training, drug companies now fund drug trials and research. They are no longer funded by impartial government grants. Medical schools need these funds so Big Pharma has leverage over the outcome. Profit drives a drug company’s behavior, not concerns for humanity. They have co-opted medical schools and training institutions into their business model. This country needs to wake up to the fact that money and material goods are not the most important things in life; one’s life and health are the most valuable things one possesses. You can’t take money and material things with you if you die due to poor health care.
How Did You Come up With Your Characters?
They are composites of people I knew during my internship and are fictional, but the events and cases are all real and true.
Book Sample
The good news was his service was small; the bad news was the children were very sick with a variety of ailments. Dealing with sick, suffering children was hard for Dave, but at least he did not have to take care of children with cancer because they were on the Pedi Oncology service. He only saw them in their rooms as he made his rounds. Children dying with cancer caused the old questions with the elusive answers he thought he had gotten past these last few months to come back to haunt him again. What was the purpose of suffering and death in a child? Where was a benevolent, caring God in all this? What kind of a God gives a child cancer? Why did loving parents have to be tormented by seeing their child suffer and die?
The Pedi ward rotation allowed for down time, time to sleep, and time to eat, but Dave found it difficult emotionally. The staff from the attendings down to the nurse’s aides were kind, gentle, caring people and he found more women in Medicine. His supervising residency was a smart, knowledgeable, slightly overweight woman with a cheerful disposition and a warm, open personality. She was patient and engaged in helping Dave supervise his studs and manage his service.
But it was the oncology staff that really impressed Dave. He respected all oncologists, but pediatric oncologists were a breed apart. To him being an oncologist was the toughest job in medicine, but being a pediatric oncologist required dedication, commitment, and a special kind of empathy beyond the capacity of many physicians. To face each day knowing most of your patients were going to die, while continuing to strive to fight for their life and remain positive was a challenge, but to do it with children was beyond anything he could imagine.
If Dave was awed by the Pediatric oncologists, he saw the Pedi Oncology nurses as saints. Oncology nurses in general are special people, but the Pedi Oncology nurses were the most dedicated, caring, resilient women he met during his internship. Every day they dealt with suffering and dying children, knowing all they could do was make the day as pleasant as possible for them. The Pedi oncologists bought the children time and the Pedi Oncology nurses tried to make that time as meaningful as possible. Both knew they could lose in the end and fail, but they never stopped trying, no matter how tough it got.
A lot of the Pedi Oncology nurses were young. He talked to the Pedi Oncology charge nurse about why. She told him a lot of them burned out after about five years and had to move on to another service, but some like her just couldn’t walk away knowing how needy the children and their families were. She said it took hold of her, wouldn’t let go, and she had to keep working with children with cancer no matter how hard it was on her. Dave could not imagine the courage it took to walk in to those rooms smiling, happy, and cheerful every day doing everything in your power to make one more day fun and pleasant for a child you knew was dying. He was affected by the pathos of Pediatric Oncology, but he was lifted up by the knowledge there were people in the world like the Pediatric Oncology nurses who demonstrated to him what caring, love, and empathy could do in the face of the worst of circumstances.
During his summer jobs in medical school, Dave had learned that the real work of health care was done by nurses. As he progressed through his internship, his respect and admiration for nurses continued to grow. Doctors gave the orders, but it was the nurses who carried those orders out and many times good nurses stopped bad orders or saw good orders were instituted. Dave had learned there was no substitute for a good nurse, and patient outcomes often depended on the quality of nursing care rather than the physician. The work of the Pedi Oncology nurses further bolstered his opinion that nursing was a calling that required as much dedication as a physician and a depth of empathy that exceeded that of many physicians.
He was midway through his rotation when something happened that caused everything inside him to collapse, leaving a vacuum that nothing rushed in to fill as if he had been emotionally hollowed out inside. He was a little sick from the Pedi Clinic because he had been seeing children with cold and flu symptoms. So maybe the fact he was sick had something to do with why it hit him so hard, but he knew it hit all the doctors and nurses on the ward just as hard.
She was simply a beautiful little girl with bouncing curls, an infectious smile, a joyful laugh, an inquisitive mind, and an engaging personality. She was involved in everything, observant and bright, so she had to know everything, constantly asking “What dat? What dat noise? What dat for?” She refused to stay in her bed, dragging her parents all over the ward, clutching her beloved teddy bear in her left arm. The nurses fell in love with her immediately and indulged her every whim. They let her stay in the nurses’ station sitting in their laps while they did their charting or follow them on their rounds, always clutching her teddy bear in her left arm. She was outgoing, talked to everyone and brightened their day with her special glow.
She also had a lump in her left lower leg that was malignant, and she had been referred to University Hospital Pediatric Oncology Service by her pediatrician for amputation of the leg and a work-up for metastasis. It would turn out to be an osteosarcoma, a common type of cancer that occurs in the bones of children. There was a good survival rate if it had not metastasized but only a one in three chance of survival if it had. She had been admitted the day before her surgery for a metastatic work-up and pre-op evaluation before her surgery early the next morning. She went through the work-up without complaint, never letting go of her teddy bear the whole time.
She didn’t just charm the nurses; she charmed everyone on the floor, including Dave and all the doctors. He never knew her name because everyone, including her parents, called her Little One, Sweetheart, or some other term of endearment. She must have been about five. She didn't know she had cancer or that tomorrow they were going to cut her leg off; she just thought the whole thing was a great adventure. But her parents knew. They were heartbroken, but they kept up a brave face, smiled and played with her as if nothing was wrong. Dave was on call the day she was admitted and was making rounds the next morning when she went to surgery.
When she left for surgery, everyone was there to see her off. She was clutching her teddy bear and smiling although he could tell she was a little confused by all the attention. It was when she came back from recovery that she tore Dave’s heart in two. She was sedated but still holding onto her teddy bear as she was wheeled down the hall on a gurney. When he looked at her tiny form lying on the gurney, he saw the outline of one leg under the sheet but on the other side, nothing. He knew that if the work-up showed the cancer had metastasized, she only had a one in three chance of living, and even if she had no mets, she faced a long rehab with PT, pain, and an ever-changing prostheses as she grew. She would never be able to run and play as she had on the ward before the surgery, instead she would face a lifetime of wearing and managing a prostheses. That was a lot to ask of a child, if she survived at all; of course, dying was a lot more to ask of a child.
There was not a dry eye in the hall as they watched her being wheeled into her room. Veteran Oncology nurses who had seen it all and had been hardened by years of exposure to children with cancer were crying, as were the poor child’s parents as they followed the gurney. Seeing her tiny body on the gurney still clutching her teddy bear with only one leg under the sheet hit Dave like a hard punch to the stomach.
As he drove home that day, the same questions kept repeating in his head. How do you tell a child when she wakes up with no leg that the doctors had to cut her leg off? How do you tell a child she has cancer, and cancer is why they had to cut her leg off when she has no idea what cancer is? How does a child process that? How do you explain the pain she has now, and the ghost pain she will have later? She thought she was on a wonderful adventure, but now her leg was gone, and she was in horrible pain. How do you explain that to her? How do you tell her she is dying or may die? How do you explain death to her or why she has to die?
A sickening sadness engulfed him, producing an aura of dark gloom around him that was almost palpable. When he got to his apartment, he laid on his bed gazing up at the ceiling. What kind of a malevolent force does that to a child? What underlying evil caused his sister and this exceptional child to suffer, and for what reason? Does being a doctor make any difference when you are not able to stop or do anything about these types of things? Dave was emotionally exhausted and psychologically drained. It had been a long, hard ten months, and he was at the end of himself, driven over the edge by the heart ache he felt for the little girl.
He realized he was depressed. He had dealt with depression on his Medicine rotation. Mental illness and character disorders made up the majority of patients he saw in the Minor Medicine ER. He had been somewhat skeptical about the symptoms of depression and frankly angered by his encounters with patients with personality and character disorders. Now he understood the symptoms of depression produced real suffering. He reflected on the frightening fact that statistics proved half the population suffered from some form of mental illness, and even more had personality and character disorders. Yet the health care system was geared to handle mainly organic problems with little or no effort made to treat psychosocial issues. That’s why the patients with psychosocial problems clogged up medical treatment facilities.
Dave was empty and flat as he looked up at the ceiling, feeling as if he were sinking into the mattress with the weight of the depression pressing down on him. That is the way Sharon found him when she got to his apartment. She knew something was wrong when she found him lying on his bed fully dressed with his shoes on. He didn’t acknowledge her as she sat on the bed next to him but just kept staring at the ceiling. “Are you alright?”
“It was a rough day, and the kids keep giving me bugs.” He sat up, put his arms around his knees, and looked at her. “I guess I am a little sick from the whole last ten months. It hasn’t been just a rough day; it has been a rough ten months. Something happened that broke my heart today. I can’t tell you about it, I can’t talk about it, I don’t even want to think about it, but I don’t think I will ever be able to forget it. I have about a half-dozen things like that inside me now. Things I can’t talk about or think about, but things I can never forget. Things that hurt my heart and left a permanent indelible mark on my psyche. I don’t know how many more things like that I can take. You just get numb. Maybe that is what has to happen; you have to get numb so you don’t feel the pain anymore, and you can deal with anything without it hurting you.”
“I don’t want you numb. I don’t want your heart hurt, or your soul marked. I want your soul just the way it is and your heart unharmed. I want this internship over. I don’t want you permanently damaged by it.” She knew he was on a raw emotional ledge and she was afraid he was going to fall off. “Dave, you need to get away from this for a while. In a week you have some time off. You are burned out physically, emotionally, and psychologically; you need some down time to recover. You desperately need some R and R.” She sitting on the side of the bed with a worried look on her face.
“It’s warm out even though it is late, and I think you are right. I need some R and R. I haven’t been in the water for months. Let’s go to the pool. Put your bikini on, and let’s go wash these blues away.” There was more sadness in his eyes than she had ever seen before and a feeling of despair that surrounded him she had never felt before.
Sharon fell into his arms. It was bad, really bad, and she knew it. She had never seen him like this. I will pull him out of it, she thought. I have done it before, and I can do it again. She knew just what he needed; he needed her.
Feeling her against him lifted some of the black fog shrouding his soul, but something intangible pulled at him that he couldn't shake. It was a feeling of emptiness, an emotional flatness, a blackness covering his whole being. He needed some way to rejoin the human race, but he didn’t know how to go about it. “Can you wear the white bikini? I know you said you would never wear it again, but I realize I loved you in that bikini.”
Sharon leaned back from him. “I think there is more lust than love associated with that white bikini, but OK, if that will cheer you up.” They put their swim suits on, Dave grabbed a couple of beers, some waters, the towels, and they headed for the pool.
When they got to the pool, Dave threw the stuff he was carrying on a table, kicked his flops off, dove in the pool, and began to swim laps. Sharon stood by watching him for a while, then pulled two lounge chairs together near the table, put the towels down on them, took her cover-up off and laid down on one. She had seen this kind of behavior from Dave before when he was really stressed, but she had never seen him sad like this. Even when he was stressed, he was still usually happy, upbeat, and positive. She opened herself a beer and waited for him to finish his baptismal and purification ritual. It was a glorious spring evening with a clear blue sky, the flowers in landscaping around the apartments were in bloom, and the air was warm, pleasant, and fragrant. The water in the pool was sparkling and transparent. Sharon watched Dave swim back and forth while she sipped her beer. She looked around and saw a few people she recognized from last summer.
Finally, Dave got out of the pool, walked over to Sharon, picked up his towel from the lounge chair, and dried off. “I needed that swim desperately. I didn’t know how much I needed it. What I really need is to be sailing on a day like this, but I don’t have a boat or an ocean, or to be spring skiing, but I don’t have a mountain.”
She stood up in front of him smiled and put her arms around his neck. “Poor little boy. You don’t have a boat to sail; you don’t have a mountain to ski; you don’t have any toys to play with.”
Dave scooped her up and fell on the lounge chair with her, burying his face in her breast.
“Dave you can’t molest me in public. Jesus, you are causing multiple wardrobe malfunctions.”
Dave had his hands all over her. “If I don’t have any toys to play with, I will play with you.” Dave stood up, pulled her up, and walked to the side of the pool, as she tried to adjust her top to cover her breasts and get her bottom back in place.
“Don’t you dare. This suit will come completely off if you throw me in the pool.”
“Good. I want to be there when that happens.” He jumped in the pool with her as she protested.
They came up and Sharon put her arms around his neck hugging him to cover her exposed breasts, and wrapped her legs around him to keep her bottom from sliding down further. “You can be such an asshole sometimes. Now I am stuck to you like a barnacle, because that is the only way I can stay covered. This water is crystal clear.”
Dave smiled at her holding her rear with both hands. “I like having a barnacle stuck to me.” She smiled back at him. Sharon felt some sense of relief because she could see the man she loved was starting to return. She knew he was trying to bury whatever it was troubling him with the help of swimming and her body.
“Can you get your hands out of my bikini bottom and put my top back where it is supposed to be?” Sharon pulled back a little from him. “Dave, really. Stop groping me in public and put my top back.” Dave took his hands out of her bikini bottom and pulled her top back over her breasts so she could stand up to pull her bikini bottom up. “If you don’t treat your toys better, they will be taken away from you.” They frolicked around in the pool for a while before getting out. Seeing her get out of the pool in the thin, tiny white bikini reminded him of the day he realized he loved her, a day that seemed so long ago it was like another lifetime. They lay back on the lounge chairs and sipped their beers in the warm glow of the perfect spring evening.
Dave looked around at the glistening clear water of the pool, the half-dozen attractive people sitting around the pool, the cloudless blue sky, and all the vividly colored blossoms in the landscaping. It occurred to him it was Thursday, a sweet Thursday just like Steinbeck described in the book. Dave thought, This can’t be the same world I was in just a few hours ago. He looked over at Sharon lying next to him with one knee cocked up and one arm over her head in the skimpy white bikini that barely covered her.
He was with a beautiful woman playing in a swimming pool, while a wonderful little girl was lying in a hospital bed with only one leg in terrific pain. How could those two things exist in the same space and time? Did all that really happen this morning? Was it real or only a bad dream? Was this sweet Thursday real or just a fantasy? How could they both be real.
Dave’s depression began to lift as he started to see things differently. He thought about the veteran Oncology nurses crying over the little girl and he realized they were reacting appropriately. They knew how to deal with tragedy; they dealt with it all the time. They were dealing with it by getting in touch with their emotions and appropriately expressing them. It was a terribly sad thing, so they cried. By getting in touch with their emotions and expressing them, they were able to cope with it in a healthy, healing way. He choked up, but he didn’t cry. He didn’t grieve; he held his grief inside, unexpressed. He was unable to get in touch with his emotions because that was too painful. He stuffed them and tried to bury them with denial. All the things he had denied were inside him buried in a toxic dump site that corroded his psyche from within and consumed him as he tried to keep the toxicity at bay. He could not continue to deal with tragedy that way. He had to talk to someone, deal with his feelings, and heal. He had to learn to grieve and let the grief cleanse him. He had to have the courage to deal with the pain and accept the reality rather than denying it because it hurt too much to acknowledge it.
Bad things happened to good people. He knew that intellectually, but not emotionally. That is why he had become a doctor, to help good people when bad things happened to them. That is what the Oncology nurses do, they helped good people when bad things happened to them. Understanding this emotionally was like lifting a dark cloud from his soul. He had forgotten his primary directive, try to help, but if you can’t help, at least do no harm.
Neither world was a fantasy; they were one real world, his world, the world he had chosen. The world he had to become comfortable in if he was going to be a doctor. His naiveté and idealism had prevented him from seeing things clearly in a mature and realistic way. It had taken a little girl losing her leg and some Oncology nurses to teach him how to cope; not by stuffing and denying his emotions in order to avoid the pain, but by having the courage to face the pain, embrace his emotions and allow them to be expressed in a healthy, healing way.
Sharon had finished her beer and was lying back with her eyes closed, enjoying the warm fragrant air and soft caress of the fading spring sun. Dave rolled over on to her lounge chair and put his arms around her. “I want to talk.”
She opened her eyes. “Does what you want to talk about have anything to do with the way you are holding me? If it does, we need to take this conversation inside.”
“No, I want to talk, and I want to hold you while we talk. I want to talk to you about what I do and how I deal with it.”
She looked into his eyes; they weren’t flat anymore and she saw a spark that wasn't there earlier. “I am listening. I am here, and I am listening. I want to help. I have wanted to help for a long time, but you have shut me out.”
He continued, “Like I said, it has been a rough ten months, but I understand a lot that I didn’t until today. Actually, until just now. I was afraid this year was going to change me and it has, just as I was afraid it would, and it has been getting worse. But today I realized I was changing myself by the way I was dealing with the things I encounter. Today, I dealt with something I couldn't stuff or deny, it was too sad and overwhelming. I realized I need to deal with my emotions and I need to talk to someone to get some help with expressing my feeling, healing my wounds, and dealing with the pain. I think every training program should make therapy available to their house officers; in fact, I think house officers should be required to meet with a therapist on a regular basis to keep them from being permanently damaged by the stress and emotional duress they deal with on a daily basis. If I can’t get a therapist to see, I will find one to talk to who wants to do a paper on how fucked-up interns are.”
She reinforced his thoughts. “I agree. Remember, I asked you if you had someone you could talk to about what you dealt with when we first met.”
He went on, “I have difficulty with death, trying to understand it and feeling helpless because I can’t do anything about it. I also struggle with trying to understand why terrible things happen and I can’t stop them from happening. Well, to put it in the vernacular, shit happens and it is my job to help, no matter what happens or why it happens. As a doctor, I need to try to help, to try to help and to do no harm, that means to not do harm to myself as well. Do all you can to help, then acknowledge and move on to the next one, because there is no end to the suffering. There are plenty more that need my help, so I can’t harm yourself to the point I can’t help any of them.”
Sharon felt a sense of relief. This was the old Dave, the Dave she loved, the Dave she wanted to spend her life with. “I am so glad you are yourself again. I was so worried.”
“Don’t think I am the same person I was, because I am not. Before this internship, I was a doctor in name only. I had the degree, but I wasn’t a doctor; now I am. It was one hell of a rough road to get here, but it is also absolutely necessary anyone who wants to be a doctor travel that road.”
“You are almost at the end of the road.”
“I had lost my way on the road; today I found my way again. The road came close to consuming me until I remembered why I was on the road in the first place and that it is a long, hard road that had to be traveled.
I have some thoughts about the road. You have to see the cases, you have to have the experiences, you have to do the procedures; in short, you need to travel the road in order to become a competent well-trained doctor. But the road could be made easier and less damaging. Certainly, having therapy on a regular basis would make the road easier, but I think if you weren’t sleep deprived and exhausted, some things might not affect you so drastically. You have to do the on-the-job training, you have to put in the hours, see the number of cases, handle the problems, and do everything over and over again until it becomes second nature to you. You have to develop the clinical skills and become proficient in the art of medicine as well as the science. That takes a lot of time, a lot of cases, a lot of repetition. I know how to take care of sick adults and sick children now; I know my way around the ED, the OR, and the wards; I can deliver babies, and I can do a number of surgeries and procedures; I know my way around the human body; I know how to approach and work a problem to properly diagnose and treat a patient.”
“You certainly know your way around my body.”
Dave cupped her breast. “I made an A in anatomy in medical school and I received some special training outside the classroom.”
She pushed his hand away. “You know I don’t want to hear about your extracurricular training.”
“I still have two more months of internship, then two years of residency. It takes three years of training for Medicine. If you eliminated the sleep deprivation and exhaustion by cutting the hours and cases, you would have to increase the training period to maintain the current quality of training. The introduction of straight internships is a move in the right direction, but it is not enough. The training periods are long as it is and no one will want to make them longer. How do you eliminate the sleep deprivation and exhaustion but still maintain the necessary number of hours and cases for an adequate level of training without increasing the training period?”
“You could go down to add extra training time by making more years of med school clinical and move the classroom work of the first two years to college; or you could narrow the scope of the specialties and make more of them, so it took less time to become proficient in a narrower field. But I don’t know enough about it to know if either suggestion would work.”
“Jesus Sharon, those are great ideas, but I am afraid what is going to happen is those in charge will take the path of least resistance and just cap the number of hours and patients. That will result in a decrease in the quality of physician training, the quality of doctors the training produces, and a deterioration in the overall quality of health care. I can’t believe how smart you are. How can you be so beautiful and so smart? I am not sure what turns me on more; how smart you are, how beautiful you are.” He nuzzled her neck and cupped her breast again. “OK, it is the perfect body, but the brains are a close second.”
Sharon pushed his hand away again. “Stop groping me in public. You are getting too feisty with all your new-found epiphanies. We went over your inability to deal with attractive women who was smart the night we met.”
“The bottom line is something needs to be done before the politicians fuck it up. They don’t care about anything but their phony baloney jobs and will do anything to keep them. They will turn things over to the pharmaceutical companies, the for-profit medical companies, and the insurance companies. Corporate America's only concern is profit, so people will end up paying more and getting less. The politicians in this country don’t care about the quality of health care or even if people have health care. Frankly, I think they are too incompetent to do anything else so they run for public office, and they will do anything and everything they can to stay in office. It’s disgusting, and the uninformed, uneducated, unengaged masses keep re-electing them. God help us if medicine and health care ever fall into the hands of the politicians and the corporations. The politicians don’t govern in the best interest of the people, but for their own self-interest. They are puppets of the wealthy and corporate interests that keep them in office. Corporations only care about profit and gain.” Dave stood up and held out his hand to her. “Come on, I want to get back in the water.”
“OK, but no groping. Everyone out here can see what you are doing.” She got up and took his hand.
he led her to the pool. “I will settle for watching you get out of the pool in that suit.”
Sharon laughed. “Right, you and all the other guys out here. I can barely keep it on and even when it is on, it barely covers me; when it gets wet, I might as well be naked.”
“So?” Dave jumped in the pool and pulled her with him. They swam and played in the pool for a while, then Dave got out, and stood in front of the ladder to watch Sharon get out again.
She stopped and stood on the ladder looking at him. “You know you are a pervert, don’t you? What is it with you and water? In the shower, in the bathtub, in the pool; you get in water, and you turn into a pervert.”
Dave got a towel, put the towel around her shoulders as she got out, and hugged her. “Water is my natural habitat, and I thrive in it or on it, liquid or frozen. Let’s dry off and go in. I want to listen to some music. We can order a pizza for dinner and later let nature take its course.”
He had her bikini off as soon as they were in the door of his apartment. He stripped his own suit off and put the Moody Blues on the stereo, led Sharon to one of the beanbags and pulled her down with him. They spent what was left of the evening in a lovemaking session that was only interrupted from time to time to change the music or their location from the beanbag to the floor. They devoured each other in an unbridled sexual pas de deux choreographed to their music as the evening spread through the room.
It was dark, they were lying on the floor of the front room and the music had stopped. They cuddled in the dark and silence, letting the night wash over them through the window. Neither of them said anything for some time. There was nothing to say, nothing needed to be said; they had said it all with their lovemaking and they had woven a spell they didn’t want to break. From the very first time they had sex on the night they met, their lovemaking had been overpowering and all consuming; now almost a year later, it had only grown more intense.
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