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| Fountain in the park (Photo credit: Wikipedia) "After each attack on a member of her staff, Dr. Katherine Taylor had begged the hospital administrator for better protection. She wanted 24-hour armed and uniformed policemen, metal detectors, "panic buttons" in every room, and male EMTs on every shift. Despite suffering three physical assaults herself and being groped in the ED four times in the past year, Dr. Taylor's pleas to hospital administration had fallen on deaf ears. "There are practical and philosophical obstacles to locking down the ED..."We must accept that the people who lash out at healthcare workers are sick. They are patients. I have to be concerned about the image of the hospital. "Many of our violent patients are high on drugs and alcohol," she usually countered. "Some are demented and psychotic. The point is that they outweigh us and are stronger than we are. We can't handle them alone. "I don't want our emergency department to look like an armed camp. It would scare away customers. There is liability when our security officers restrain patients..." |
The First To Say No
By Charles C. Anderson
You may have noticed that, upon reading the first few pages of this book, I stopped and put out an advance notice and declared it a must-read. I feel even more strongly that it is now that I've finished reading!
I recognize that Dr. Anderson has dramatized his novel by using many samples of what he's seen as an emergency room doctor, within just one novel. (Or maybe not?) The timing is not important, rather it is the fact that I believe that every shocking example case that he has used is real, in this agonizingly realistic story ...
All you have to do is read a newspaper or watch the news! America has become a violent nation! Violence of one type or another happens faster than can be reported!
Dr. Kate Taylor, head of the Emergency Department, in a small Virginia city, had lost her father too early in her life. One of her fondest memories was his walking with her to a local park where a beautiful fountain with fish was her favorite place to spend time with her father, sitting along side, looking down at all the wishes that had been made by visitors throwing in pennies...
It was filled with drug dealers, prostitutes, and a place where anybody who wandered in might be brutalized or worse. It was "owned," now, by the Plagues, a gang of violent criminals...
And they routinely paid off the majority of the police officers to stay away from that once-beautiful park...
Kate Taylor had another memory from that park. When she was 13, a man had tried to rape her there in the park...and he was still trying to hurt her...but, now, as head of the Plagues, he "owned" that park! And the doctor who she had never told she loved, was murdered!
You will start reading this novel as a young doctor is being raped. She has no idea how many have used her, but it was definitely more than one. This was her third gang rape... But, she knew more now, and the man who was raping her did not live after she was through with him... She and the medical emergency worker who now had to talk by holding a finger over a tube in her throat, after she was hurt bringing in a patient, both joined Kate as they began to take back their town!
Did you know that medical care workers can be violated by criminals in an emergency room, and cannot file criminal charges because it happens during the time the criminals are considered patients? Do you know that since many are homeless as well as criminals, they do not pay...for anything...except their drugs or alcohol...or sex (perhaps)...
The author has retired from his medical career. He may never have become a vigilante, but he has become a whistle-blower... One that I admire greatly for having written this book! If you feel right now that there is NO reason why criminals, drug dealers and prostitutes roam the streets of America's towns (Note that the homeless are not necessarily included), then I encourage you to support one man's efforts to reveal what is going on. It may not be so rampant in every town, but I can guarantee you, that similar single incidents are happening everywhere...like I said, just read the news!
This book is not easily read because of the number of violent acts one right after another, although the author has done a wonderful job in writing it as a thriller. I did get bogged down a little with the medical issues terminology that were efficiently described, but that's my own limitation, not the author's.
You will be amazed and excited about what a few people, and then a town did! And I would have been in there, in some way, if it happened somewhere near me! Would you? Enough is Enough... Read this book!
GABixlerReviews
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