Debauchery on Faculty Row

Abby was crying, leaning with her hand against a bent and filthy locker door.

"Abby. I'm sorry. And believe me, that wasn't a set up."

"What was it then?! Some sort of twisted performance review?! I suppose I'm fired?!"

"No, no, no. Quite the opposite, actually. Can we talk for a minute?

She wiped her beautiful eyes on the sleeve of her starched lab coat and gave him a long, evil, stare. Those light beams that he'd earlier equated to rays of sunshine were now daggers flying from those amazing eyes. She shrugged her tiny shoulders in capitulation.

"I suppose. But it better be good." The look of total sadness on that beautiful face was breaking his heart.

"Let's go outside. If what I think is going on around here, is going on around here, I don't want to blow my conveniently acquired cover if we're overheard."

He finished buttoning his shirt, put on his socks and shoes and smiled at the beautiful Abby as he stood.

Holding his finger over his lips to signal for her to remain silent, he looked up and down the hall. When he saw it was clear, he gently placed his hand on Abby's shoulder and led her the rest of the way down the dingy hall, opened the back door quietly and led Abby outside.

"Listen, Doctor Brandt, I know I screwed up back there."

"That's not why we're talking, Abby. And it's Chase."

"Actually, I want to commend you for the way you dealt with me. Yes, it was a little unorthodox, and it was against standard protocol, but you thought I was in a bind and you took the patient's needs into consideration. I only hope the rest of the medical staff are as conscientious and considerate as you are."

"And, for the record, your exam skills are head and shoulders above most of the MD's I know," he laughed. "Relax. This isn't a dressing down."

"Well I have to say; you make one hell of a grand entrance." Abby was exasperated. She was still wiping the tears from those beautiful eyes. He handed her his handkerchief. She took it briskly without a word. She was obviously still mad.

"It wasn't intentional." He went on to explain what he'd gone through to get into that exam room.

"Oh, boy! No surprises there. Sadly, that's the way things are run around here, Doctor Brandt...Chase. That witch at the front desk has somehow usurped the keys to the kingdom from somewhere. No one knows how. If you complain, not only is nothing done about it, but she gets a detailed report on who told on her and what the complaint was. I'm currently reigning queen on her shit list."

"Well I can assure you that will change expeditiously. Along with the filthy condition this disgusting clinic is in. All I ask is that you keep who I am to yourself for now until I get a better handle on things-or I get caught."

"Well, sure. I mean; I want things to change around here, too. It's gotten to the point where I can't even stand coming into work anymore."

"Trust me. Things will get better."

"Now. I want to slip in there and see what more I can find out before I get found out. I'll be calling all the staff in to talk with them individually before long so we'll talk again soon. And wipe that sad frown off of that beautiful face. You done good, Kid." He winked at her, rubbed her shoulder and snuck back inside.

***********************

The main hall was deserted as he cautiously looked up and down the dank, poorly lit, filthy corridors. He could smell various food aromas mingling with the mold and mildew smell and heard raucous laughter coming from far end of one of the numerous passages. He assumed it was coming from the break room. It angered him. Given what he'd seen so far, they had nothing to be cheerful about. He had a feeling the nurse who'd corralled him in that exam room rushed him in because she was in a hurry to join the frivolity. He'd deal with her later.

He went in the opposite direction and started going down random halls, opening doors and pulling back curtains.

He was utterly appalled. The entire clinic was a pigsty. He knew they'd hired him specifically, to do damage control and to clean the place up; but from the look of things, he'd be starting from ground zero. If the health department were to come in they'd close the place down in a heartbeat and hang a condemned sign on the dirty glass entrance door. He went from angered to enraged. And enraged was an emotion he rarely, if ever, experienced.

He found the lab and the trauma areas appalling. His anger was festering. He should have probably taken his tour of the shithole before he signed on to that obviously sinking ship. Unfortunately, if he had, they'd have been expecting him. Coming in a week early, unexpected and unannounced, achieved the desired result. He'd definitely caught them with their pants down. This job was going to be one hell of a challenge. But Chase loved a challenge.

The patient rooms in the infirmary smelled like feces. Unmade beds, filthy floors and privacy curtains that looked like they'd been used as hand towels in an auto repair shop.

He was just backing out of the infirmary, feeling as if he'd vomit, when he got busted.

"Hey! You! What are you doing in there! Get your fucking ass out of here! I'm calling campus police."

"Good! Call them and tell them there's a new sheriff in town and things are about to get mighty ugly around here. Tell them they'd better bring riot gear!"

"Who?! What?!"

"Surprise! I'm Doctor Brandt. Maybe you've heard of me? I'm the new chief medical officer."

He almost laughed aloud. The shaken, foul mouthed nurse he was speaking to was the same one who'd treated him so rudely when he checked in. The same one Abby just warned him about. The look on her fear-scrunched face when she realized who he was, and the beads of sweat collecting on her pasty brow assured him that she'd need to change her adult diaper when their conversation ended.

"Oh. Doctor Brandt! But you're not supposed to be here until next week. I'm so..."

"Save it! I'll speak with you later. For now, I want to see the entire staff who aren't currently seeing a patient out in that waiting room. Pronto!"

Chase stormed down the long main corridor and went out through the waiting room and locked the outside door. If there was any order at all in that circus, which he doubted, it wasn't scheduled to open for afternoon appointments until one-thirty.

When he stormed back into the waiting room, the staff were filing in, languorously taking seats and chatting in hushed whispers amongst themselves. Every one of them looked lethargic. Defeated. Many unkempt. Like they'd rather be anywhere but there.

He leaned back against a barren, filthy information table that should have been filled with vaccine and medical information pamphlets, counting slowly to himself to calm down; but it wasn't working.

"For those of you who haven't gotten the word yet, I'm Doctor Chase Brandt. I'm the new medical director."

"I had quite a different greeting prepared for my arrival, but seeing what I've seen in the few hours I've been here, that's all gone out the window. To say I was disgusted by what I've seen would be an understatement.

"Well you have to understand..."

"I don't have to understand anything!" He didn't give Nurse Nasty an inch as he barked her into silence.

"All I can gather from what I've seen so far is that the staff of this clinic has no workplace pride whatsoever. And given the look of this clinic, and the way I was treated from the moment I tried to introduce myself at the sign in window, some of you had better go home tonight and start sprucing up your resumes."

"I will not, under any circumstances, tolerate rude behavior toward the patients or the slovenly, disgusting way this clinic looks. This place is a shithole. If the health department were to come through here we'd be shut down in a New York minute."

His initial outburst helped calm him somewhat.

"Now. I had no intention of coming in here and being a hard ass. That's not how I operate. So I'm going to try my damndest to forget what I've seen today."

"Who handles scheduling?" A slight, mousy little woman at the back of the room shyly raised her hand.

"Please go in there and call all this afternoon's patients, and tomorrows patients, and reschedule them for another day. This clinic is officially closed until the day after tomorrow. We're seeing emergencies only."

"As for the rest of you, I want to see nothing but assholes and elbows cleaning and straightening this sewer up going on from now until end of business tomorrow. Everyone from lab techs and office staff to MD's. Everyone! And if this clinic isn't spic and span by five o'clock tomorrow afternoon there'll be some major changes in staffing by five-oh-one."

"From here on out, I don't give a damn whether we're seeing college students, homeless people, junkies or the President of these United States: everyone entering this clinic will be treated with a smile, kindness, understanding and respect. Every one of them is to be given the full attention and assistance from everyone they see from the moment they arrive until the moment they leave. Any deviations from that will be met with immediate and severe disciplinary action."

"I'm appalled. I can't believe I'm talking to medical professionals here. How you could actually profess to be practicing medicine in this festering pustule just makes my skin crawl. Dirty floors, used syringes on the counters in the lab, torn, filthy, exam tables with dirty, wrinkled, paper on them. Nasty exam gowns: the list is endless-and I haven't even been here for a half day yet!"

"Now. If any of you have a problem with what I've just said, there's the door." He pointed intently. No one moved.

"Ok, then. Let's get busy cleaning this petri dish. Who's the clinic manager?" The same shy young lady raised her hand.

"Please call custodial services and have them send over a full cleaning crew with every vacuum, mop and disinfectant they have. Tell them they may need to be wearing hazmat gear."

"Yes, Sir."

Calming further, Chase let out a long breath, leaned back against a table, folded his arms and took on a more level tone. He was almost ashamed of his outburst; but there was no other way to deal with what he'd seen.

"Listen, People. Let's drop the Sir, ok? I got enough of that in the Navy. I don't usually even go by doctor. Most people just call me Chase."

"This is definitely not the way I intended on introducing myself. We've gotten off to a very bad start. You'll have to excuse me, but I was rudely stifled and basically ignored when I arrived, I waited over two hours to see a practitioner when the waiting room was empty; and then I was told that I couldn't get a sports physical because it was a half an hour past the time physicals were done when I'd already been waiting for two hours and forty five minutes. Not exactly grounds for me to greet you with a song."

"Ok. Let's get to it. We'll start fresh Wednesday. In the meantime, I'll be reviewing your files and calling you in individually to speak with you."

He heard the grumbling and griping as he went down the hall to his office. Tough shit. In this case, his rare flash of rage and thorough displeasure was justified.

As expected, his office was an unholy, shithouse mess. Clutter, dust and cobwebs as far as the eye could see. It looked like a Halloween haunted house and smelled like a landfill. The regional collegiate medical director told him that his predecessor was a nightmare on wheels who was rarely, if ever, on the property. He'd managed the clinic by phone for the prior ten years. It took a fatal overdose of opioids, with no doctor available, to finally wake someone up enough to realize the dire condition the clinic was in. So much so that they'd unceremoniously fired the last director on the spot and hunted Chase up personally.

"Chase was an active duty Navy doctor who'd been tasked with overseeing a failing base hospital that had suffered a fate similar to the one the university clinic had. There too, umpteen patient complaints went ignored for years. It took a commander, who was the cousin of a congresswoman, dying from a wrongly diagnosed case of meningitis-after he'd been left waiting on a gurney for hours-for someone to wake up and put out the red alert.

Coincidentally, Chase had just put his name in with a medical headhunting service His commitment obligation to the Navy was a month from its' end. The hospital he was tasked with reviving was running pretty much on autopilot and he'd trained his successor well. His work there was done.

Within days after putting his name out there, the regional university medical director contacted him personally to ask him to whip the university clinic into shape. He'd been flown down to the director's office at the state university in the capitol for dinner with some of this university's hierarchy and an interview with the regional director and was hired on the spot.

A university clinic, at least he naively thought, would be far easier to manage than an entire military hospital: although the massive clinic he now stood in could qualify as a small, rural hospital: size and capability wise.

And if that wasn't enough of an incentive, the money was almost triple. Not to mention that he was tiring of military life. He wanted to try his hand in the private sector. Looking around the cesspool he was now tasked with revitalizing, he started seriously questioning that decision.

He grabbed a handful of large trash bags from the almost barren janitor's closet in the dank hall outside his office and just started emptying filthy shelves and book cases filled with nothing but junk into them. Long outdated, unread, medical journals, wank magazines and clutter filled the bags as he angrily ran his stiffened arm along shelves, sweeping them clean, then he dumped out desk drawers. He was tossing it all and starting from scratch. The university was founded in eighteen-ninety-four. It looked like some of the ancient handbills and memos from the clinic's inception were stuck to, and rendered illegible by spilled coffee and God knew what festering inside the filthy desk drawers.

He laughed out loud when he found a wartime, nineteen forty something journal touting the benefits of penicillin and the miracle it was for our boys overseas. That one he saved as a souvenir. The distinct, cloying smell of ancient mold wafted out of every squeaky drawer that he had to literally force or jimmy open.

Three hours in and he was hauling twelve overstuffed lawn and leaf bags to the dumpster a few at a time: and he was nowhere near finished.

No one spoke to him on his many passes through the clinic to the dumpster out back-except for the maintenance guy he asked for some disinfectant and scrub brushes. All eyes dropped to the floor as he passed, ignoring his nods and hellos. Not the good foot he was hoping to start things off on, but he had a feeling moods and temperaments would level off after a few weeks. While he was used to working in the military system, he had no intention or desire to have anyone walk the plank. He was no Captain Bly.

His normally calm, rational approach to management went out the window that morning: but that too would pass. He'd quickly get over the shock and anger he'd originally experienced. He never stayed mad for long. But in the meantime, his six-foot-four muscular stature tended to intimidate some until they got to know him. He had no problem using that to his advantage-especially with Nurse Nasty. She was obviously a serious problem that he needed to deal with immediately.

The knock on the door startled him. "Come."

"These are the staff files you requested, Doctor Brandt."

"It's Chase. And your name is?"

"Ann. Ann Michaels."

"Any problems rescheduling the appointments, Ann?"

"Ha! Hardly! Um: I mean...no." Her face immediately went from pasty to red and her eyes darted toward the floor. His initial assessment was right. Ann Michaels was obviously the meek and mild type.

"Sit for a minute, Ann. Please," he smiled, standing, pointing to a freshly disinfected chair sitting in front of his desk.

"I'm not interrogating you, Ann. Just curious. What did you mean by hardly?"

"Can I be honest, Doctor?"

"I'm sure hoping so. I find honesty very refreshing." He laughed, trying to ease her obvious discomfort.

"To be honest, I only had to reschedule two appointments. Most of the students refuse to come anywhere near this godforsaken clinic. We don't see a whole lot of kids in here. This place is usually a ghost town."

"As you know, college kids are pretty much indestructible. They don't get sick very often; other than overdoses, hangovers, sports injuries and alcohol poisoning. On the rare occasions when they do, most of them go to the walk-in clinic on Chapman Street outside the stadium gate. They'd rather pay their parent's copay; or have their parents pay the copay," she chuckled "than have to endure the nightmare that is this place. I know first hand. My daughter's a student here. She wouldn't want to, and I wouldn't let her step foot in this clinic if she ever got sick."

"Did you ever mention any of this to my predecessor, Ann?"

"I never met him. And I've been here for five years."

"Never?! In five years?!" Chase was appalled.

"No Sir. Jenny-she's the head nurse-has pretty much run things since I've been here. And, as you can see, she hasn't been doing a very good job of it. The NP's hate her, the doctors hate her, and the rest of the staff avoid her like the plague. Basically, you're walking into a never-ending pissing contest. Please don't tell anyone I said that!"

"Your secret's safe with me, Ann. What's said in this office, stays in this office."

"I'm afraid my bull in a China closet arrival may have ruffled a few feathers. That wasn't my initial plan. But between you and me, who can I depend on? And, again, it stays in this room."

"Oh, Abby for sure. She's one of the NP's. Tony, Barbara, me...the list goes on and on. Most of these people are good, kind, quality people. They've just been forced into submission and browbeaten into mediocrity."

"Abby's probably your best bet if you're looking for an ally. And a very good one. I think she's just gotten a little disheartened lately. She and Jenny go at it like cats and dogs. I just think the poor girl has finally said to hell with it, thrown up her hands and gone with the general, slack assed flow around here. Oops! I'm sorry."

Chase was laughing. "Don't be. I asked, you answered. And I really appreciate your candor. Thank you."

"I better get back out there, Doctor. Jenny's going to start browbeating me to find out what I said in here."

"Ann. Things will get better around here. I promise. Just keep on keeping on and give me a little time. I can assure you that if it's at all within my power, there's going to be a lot of major league changes around here very soon."

"I sure hope so. I was getting ready to turn in my resignation before I heard you were coming. I don't do confrontation well. And this place is as confrontational as it gets."

"You have my word. Thanks for the files, Ann. Have a good night."

"Um, just one more thing, Doctor Brandt." Ann was getting fidgety again, wondering whether to speak or not.

"Shoot."

"Listen. I don't mean to cause any trouble, and I hope you'll keep this between us, but Jenny's file there on your desk is her real file. There's two. The one she keeps, and the one I've been keeping. The one she keeps kinda paints her in a whole lot more heroic, nurturing, Florence Nightingale light than her actual file does."

"Why are there two files, Ann?"

"I just got so angry seeing her shredding the bad things so I started keeping a copy. No one but me and the director are supposed to have access to those files, but she just up and takes it upon herself to clean out any negative things I'm told to add."