“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.”
