Disease Beyond My Practice: Stories

DISEASE BEYOND MY PRACTICE--Stories

No one can survive a bi-polar world without a healthy dose of madness.

An infectious disease doctor falls in love with a dope addict/real-estate agent patient. A paranoid schizophrenic decides he must render himself sterile. A meth freak tries to destroy a trauma surgeon with a stolen tank. In a crazed universe, sometimes the only way to acquit oneself is through the insanity defense.

In these stories, characters discover the hoofbeats they hear may come, not from horses, but from zebras. A war correspondent with a spleen the size of a football returns home to get his first physical exam in a decade--and his doctor blows the diagnosis. A cardiac surgeon on safari, treating a patient dying from AIDS, finds enlightenment. One of a pair of Siamese twins seduces a psychiatrist, while the other empties his bank account.

Medicine is an art, not just a science. A doctor misjudges his son’s fastball and must learn to live within the limits of his own blind ambition. A man, confronting his checkered family history, must weigh the risks of donating half his liver to his brother. A plastic surgeon alters the appearance of a spy in a witness protection program and loses his clinic in the process.

Sometimes, it is nature itself that heals. A teenager on a magical Minnesota lake confronts both his own mortality and a budding awareness of the opposite sex. A pre-med student finds solace in both music and orb-weaving spiders. A young doctor struggles to keep a child alive high in the Andes, where love can be as scarce as oxygen, or as common as a mystic stone ruin.

The multiple ways people take ill--and become healed--may yet surprise, jaded as streaming media and 24-hour cable news have made us. Fiction, even as it entertains, can still lend insight into the hard-to-fathom depths of human suffering and rejuvenation.