Noble Vision

Copyright © 2004 by Genevieve LaGreca. All rights reserved.

Published by Winged Victory Press, P.O. Box 16730, Chicago, IL 60616-0730; www.wingedvictorypress.com.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Holly Smith and Elizabeth Watson

First printing 2005

ISBN for bound editions:

hardcover 978-0-9744579-8-7; quality paperback 978-0-9744579-4-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003113981

Quality discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For information, please contact:

Winged Victory Press, P.O. Box 16730, Chicago, IL 60616-0730;

www.wingedvictorypress.com

Email:
[email protected]

Praise for the print editions of NOBLE VISION

A
ForeWord
Magazine Book of the Year Finalist

and
Writer’s Digest
International Book Awards Winner

A beautifully crafted and completely engaging novel. I read it in one sitting. It made me want to stand up and cheer! ---
JAMES VAWTER
, MD

A gripping story superimposed on today's threats to quality medical care. . . . Admittedly a novel, it is filled with truths of today.
---EDWARD ANNIS
, MD, Past President, American Medical Association

Noble Vision
is a wonderful literary achievement. An extraordinary hero, a tender love story, a fascinating medical discovery, and an intense family conflict are dramatically interwoven in a plot that surprises and delights.
---EDITH PACKER
, JD, PhD, psychologist

. . .
Noble Vision
captivated me from beginning to end. Its grim vision of the near future---or is it the present?---of medicine is all too accurate. Can a few men and women of principle turn it around? One must have hope.
---JANE ORIENT
, MD, Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

The defects of government-controlled medicine are dramatized effectively in this page-turning story of the love of a brilliant physician for a beautiful ballerina who becomes his patient.
---MILTON FRIEDMAN
, Nobel laureate economist

Salutary tale of what can happen to medical breakthroughs if Big Government claws even deeper into our healthcare system!
---STEVE FORBES
, President and CEO, Forbes magazine

Noble Vision
is a suspenseful tale of one surgeon’s heroic struggle to save his work and the woman he loves. It inspires us to search inside ourselves for what we know to be true---and to seek the courage to live by it.
---BETH HAYNES
, MD

. . . an intriguing novel about how unintended consequences of good intentions can have a devastating impact on the healing professions.
---WALTER E. WILLIAMS
, syndicated columnist

Noble Vision
is a chilling suspense story, with an intricate plot that thickens as the author explores deeper and deeper into the lives and minds of the characters. A well-researched . . . sensitively written . . . inherently captivating novel of suspense,
Noble Vision
is very highly recommended reading. ---
MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

The novel deals with some of the most serious issues of the day, lending the story an immediacy and vibrancy. The author's prose is polished and professional.
---WRITER'S DIGEST
magazine

A fiction reader’s delight!
Noble Vision
has villains you will despise and heroes you’d love to meet. Add intrigue, betrayal, romance---you’ll be captured till the end and long for Gen LaGreca’s next novel!
---
KAREN TIERNEY
, MD

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Dr. Gail Rosseau, a Chicago neurosurgeon, for generously
 
answering my questions and explaining neurosurgical techniques to me at the start of my research. I also deeply appreciate the medical editing that the book received from Chicago-based Dr. Robin Wellington, a neuroscientist, and Drs. Kirk Jobe and Juan Jimenez, neurosurgeons. These professionals gave me vital technical information and suggestions. We did not, however, discuss the theme or message of the story, which represents my view and not necessarily theirs.

The manuscript profited from two readings by Dr. Beth Haynes, a physician in northern California, and from the diligence of my excellent copyeditor, Katharine O’Moore-Klopf of KOK Edit. Dr. A.J. Mundt, a radiologist, patiently answered my numerous medical questions. Other doctors, nurses, and hospital staff members kindly assisted me in my research.

A very special thank-you goes to Dr. Michael Schlitt, a neurosurgeon in Seattle, Washington. His technical advice and creative ideas helped me enormously in molding the medical aspects of the plot. Any inaccuracies in the fictional adaptation of his suggestions are my doing.

I am profoundly indebted to Dr. Edith Packer, a clinical psychologist in Southern California. She edited the manuscript, offering invaluable psychological insights into the characterization. And it was she—more than anyone else—who encouraged me to write fiction. When I did, it quickly became my life’s passion.

Contents

Part One: Fire

1. The Dancer and the Phantom

2. The Banquet . . .

3. . . . And the OR

4. The New Frontier

5. Hide and Seek

6. Unnecessary Treatment

7. The Last Chance

8. Payment Due

9. The Threat and the Promise

10. On Shaky Ground

11. The Diagnosis

12. The Treatment

13. The Morning After

14. The Outlaw

15. The Law

Part Two: Thunder

16. The Model Citizen

17. A Light Extinguished

18. The Phantom Returns

19. Abraham and Isaac

20. The Doctor and the Dancer

21. On Trial

22. Trapped

23. The Final Verdict

Part Three: Hope

24. A Colorless Day

25. Close Friends

26. The Unexpected

27. The Raise

28. Approval Pending

29. Meeting Overdue

30. No Deal

31. Everything’s Going to Be Okay

32. The Phantom’s Plea

33. Necessary Treatment

34. The Wake-Up Call

Epilogue: Should a Man Receive Flowers from a Woman?

Part One: Fire

Chapter 1

The Dancer and the Phantom

The bus terminal was a study in gray, with its vertical steel beams, smudged windows, scuffed slate floor. Dusty cones of light descended from metal canisters along the charcoal ceiling. A concrete overhang outside the building kept the sunlight at bay. Lines of people waiting to be processed snaked around silver stanchions near the counters and boarding gates of the hollow station. One person in the crowd, a teenager with a child’s long legs and woman’s budding breasts, was tired of waiting, her restlessness apparent in the constant shifting of her weight and the tapping of her fingers in her folded arms.

As she approached the ticket counter, she saw gray-uniformed clerks boxed inside a row of booths resembling prison cells. The buses outside, pushing back from the gunmetal frame of the building like dead bolts sliding open, filled her with the daring hope of escape, for the destination of one of them was her future.

“Anyone traveling with you?” asked the ticket agent from behind his glass partition.

“No,” said the girl.

“I need to see your ID.”

She slid the driver’s license of an eighteen-year-old under the partition, although she had just turned thirteen.

The agent’s eyes darted suspiciously from the license to her face, making her knees tremble and her hands sweat. Fighting a quiet battle against a familiar enemy, panic, she forced her eyes to hold on the agent’s unsmiling face. She had applied heavy makeup, worn glasses, pulled childlike blond curls into a frumpy bun, and practiced a deep voice so she could buy a one-way ticket across the country—and with it, a new life.

“What’s your name?” The agent’s words ground coarsely through the microphone.

“Nicole Hudson.” The name and the license were one day old.

“Address?”

“Three-forty-three West 18th.”

He waited.

“Here in Manhattan,” she added.

“And what’s your Social Security number?”

She recited the number she had memorized from the phony license.

“Which Motor Vehicles office did you go to for this license?”

Fear pulled her eyes down. Was there something on the license that identified the issuing office, or was the agent bluffing? The man selling her the phony document had not mentioned this matter. She had paid him eight hundred dollars with money stolen from her foster family, money she would repay, for she had never taken anything before.

Her fingers tightened around a small bag curled in her arm. The parcel contained the remnants of her first ballet shoes. She had preserved the tattered slippers like an heirloom in a fine leather purse, although the rest of her belongings hung from her shoulder in a cheap vinyl bag. During the split-second pause in the most important conversation of her life, she clung to the outgrown slippers the way a younger child might grasp a teddy bear.