No More Patients
Chapter 1
Nothing comes easy in medicine. Not even leaving it.
This was my last year. Soon to turn sixty-five, that felt like enough. I grew weary of the
endless challenges I once embraced. I craved freedom from those startled awakenings at three in
the morning, when I twitched upright wondering if Franny Wilson's painful, puffy big toe, which
I diagnosed yesterday as gout, might possibly be metastatic bone cancer instead and why didn't I
think of that then?
Medical dreams never involve doing something right, never capture a cure.
Yet something inside me flinched at walking out the door of our clinic for the last time. This
feeling caught me out, since I had wanted to quit for five or six years. At least. Apparently I'd
become attached to my routines.
Reviews and endorsements
Dr. Norah Waters, approaching her 65th birthday, is planning to officially announce her impending retirement, which is scheduled to commence at the close of the year. The stress of caring for and worrying about patients has become exhausting … Meanwhile, over in Sun City, a sprawling retirement community outside Phoenix, Norah's feisty 91-year-old mother, Vivian Waters, is becoming restless with her sedate life… she becomes quite enamored with the process of recording herself, resulting in a charming narrative device that allows Vivian to speak simultaneously to the machine and to readers. … Norah narrates her own tale of professional frustrations … A bit of medical infighting, a painful backstory, and an unexpected romance add poignancy and welcome zest to the leisurely paced drama. Miller's prose is breezy and sharply witty, vividly portraying the troublesome mother-daughter dynamics that have plagued the two leads over the years. Vivian is … a retired anatomy professor who's now a delightful, curmudgeonly elder convinced that her reclusive neighbor has killed her husband.
Entertaining and tender, with a vivacious nonagenarian protagonist. -- Kirkus Review
"I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was a delight to read!"
—Leslie Greenberg, MD, family medicine physician, associate professor, University of Nevada, Reno, Department of Family and Community Medicine