Showered and back in my pantsuit, I arrived at the office just before one and caught Sam as he finished morning hours. He looked a little better today—maybe because he knew he had the rest of the day off.
Yesterday I’d told him the news about Marge, but now I filled him in on the details—her treatment and what happened to her. I needed some reassurance.
“That’s a real puzzler,” he said.
“Do you think I should have kept her another night?”
“Of course.”
“Oh.” My heart plummeted. “But—”
Sam held up his hand. “But I’m speaking from the perspective of a Monday morning quarterback. I know she had a second anaphylactic reaction and I know that the best place to have one is in a hospital. So, yes, keeping her another night would have saved her life.”
“But the prednisone—”
“The proper question to ask is, given the information available on Wednesday morning, would I have kept her. My answer to that is a resounding no.”
I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “You just made my day.”
He smiled. “Don’t beat yourself up for not being able to predict the future, Norrie. We have to correlate available data with experience and make the best decision we can.”
“Tell that to Stan Harris.”
I heard Ken’s voice say, “What about Stan Harris?”
I turned and found him standing in the doorway. Oh, hell.
I cleared my throat. “A cop I know says he was making litigious noises about Marge’s death.”
Ken’s mouth tightened into a thin line as he closed his eyes for a few seconds. Then he opened them and looked at Sam.
“You know what this is going to do to her malpractice premium? Two suits in one year? It’ll go through the roof!”
Hey! I wanted to shout. You can talk to me. I’m only a couple of feet away.
Instead I kept my voice steady and said, “There is no suit, just talk. You can’t blame him for being upset over his wife’s death.”
“Blame,” Ken said, focusing on me now. “That’s the whole problem. When something bad happens, people want to blame someone. All you need is Stark the Shark to get wind of it and he’ll be in Harris’s ear promising a big payoff.” He shook his head. “You’re off to a great start, aren’t you.”
And then he walked out—no good-bye to either Sam or me. Just gone.
“Thanks for the support and sympathy,” I said to the empty doorway.
“He’s just upset,” Sam said.
“He’s upset, I’m upset, Stan Harris is upset, Theodore Phelan is upset. What’s happening here? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”
I felt a lump grow in my throat. I didn’t go through all those years of training to upset people. I was here to ease upset and pain and malaise. But it wasn’t working out that way. At least it didn’t seem to be.
Sam rose and shrugged into a tweed sport coat. “What did I tell you about beating up on yourself. Look at these troubles in a wider view. As for Marge Harris in particular, I don’t believe—to use a lawyerly phrase—that you deviated from the accepted standards of medical care.”
“Since when does that matter?”
He sighed. “Yes, well, there’s always that to contend with.”