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The Falling Away

By Cliff Ball

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Chapter 1
“Okay, now the next items on our list are incoming patients. Our first patient is a man named Will Carson, age seventy-five. Per the paperwork, he came down with a severe case of pneumonia after a double bypass and had to go on a ventilator because he was getting too weak to breathe on his own. The small town hospital who had him previously thinks he doesn’t have much longer to live, so they sent him to our ICU. As with other cases like these, we’ll make him as comfortable as we can, but we’ll not go above and beyond. Are we in agreement, Doctor Kirkland?” asked Gina Dodd, the government overseer for this
hospital.

Doctor Neal Kirkland spent another moment wishing he had retired when the federal government took over the healthcare system over a decade ago, but he liked the money he made and didn’t want to give it up. He continued to wonder if other government overseers at other hospitals were as cold and blackhearted as Dodd was towards dying patients. When she was lit a certain way, she sort of reminded him of the wicked witch in the old Disney cartoon Snow White. Kirkland thought that for a forty-five-year-old, she looked decades older than she was,
and looked used up, probably from all the nicotine and alcohol she’d consumed over the years.

As for himself, although he was a little older than Dodd, many people assumed he was in his late twenties to mid-thirties, which was both an insult and compliment depending on his mood at the time. He figured that he didn’t look his age because it was either from his good genetics or because he was a teetotaler. Not that it mattered all that much to him. His job was now his life since his wife died a few years ago and his adult children were scattered across the country living their lives. From what Kirkland could observe of Dodd, she seemed
to enjoy telling families that the government was not going to spend the money to keep their loved ones alive, even if that loved one was the breadwinner of the family. It was a shame really; decades ago a person could survive a quadruple bypass and be none the worse for wear, but now...

“Doctor Kirkland, can you get your head out of the clouds and care to join me and the rest of your staff in this important discussion that we have every single day?”

Kirkland looked at the obviously irritated Dodd, who was tapping her fingers on the table. He replied, “Sorry, my mind wandered. Uh, we’ll definitely make Mr. Carson as comfortable as we can. I do have a question, if I may?”

Scowling, Dodd asked, “What is it?”

“I know a man his age rarely ever survives the kind of pneumonia he has, but what-if Mr. Carson pulls through? We’d have to get him a bed in the recovery wing, so does he have the kind of insurance that’ll allow him to stay?”

“Well, if the impossible happens, Mr. Carson is a retired government employee, meaning he has the best insurance in the land. So, we’ll drain his medical account dry until we’re required to release him, simple as that,”

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