I wrote
Personal Baggage
because I enjoy the escape that reading gives me--to sit down with a book and
be transported into a more exciting situation than the one in which I live and
to read about characters who are very different from the people I know.
I wanted to paint pictures with words,
to introduce unusual characters and behind-the-scene events that intrigued me,
and to pull readers into the exciting world of nursing. I had a wealth of material, gathered
over a long period of time, so when I retired and one of my children gave me
Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by
Bird, and my sister
introduced me to David Starnes, and he offered to help me, and my husband bought
a beautiful computer desk and a Hewlett-Packard machine for me, I ran out of
excuses for not trying, at least, to work on a manuscript.
As a child, I was taken with
Cherry Ames and her adventures in different nursing situations. My ambition had always been to become
a nurse and, although marriage and starting a family took me off course, when I
needed to make money, I chose to work toward an associate degree in nursing at a
nearby community college.
I was a registered nurse for
thirty years: working as a floor nurse, as an emergency room nurse, in
obstetrics, in home health, in critical care, and in Oncology. I found that the same basic skills
were required wherever I worked, but I added new skills and new friends each
time I changed settings.
Book Blurb
Personal
Baggage: A Tale of Marriage,
Medicine, and Murder (ISBN
1461156440) by Margaret McMillion shares the story of a dedicated nurse
who, while employed at a big city hospital, uncovers a dangerous game of abuse
and profiteering made possible by a broken health care system.
When
Penny Pewitt decides to take on a
second nursing job at a large hospital, she hopes to secure extra
income for her family. Instead, she discovers exploding
changes in health care and resulting illegal practices that endanger not only patients, but also anyone
threatening to expose the system. Meanwhile, Penny’s
relationship with her husband,Johnny, is disintegrating. She blames him for her
unhappiness while his time is consumed with
the pursuit of other interests. As Penny encounters patients, colleagues,
family members, and medical
duplicity, she gains the confidence and maturity needed to see things in a new
light. In an effort to defuse Penny’s
growing obsession with hospital intrigue, Johnny arranges a visit to her
great-grandparents’ hometown. As past meets present with shocking results, the trip comes to
mean much more than he intends.
“I
was inspired to write by my life experiences and my
delight at becoming immersed in stories by great authors,” McMillion says. “Set against a background of Medicare fraud,
this is an
exciting story about one nurse's adventures in her profession.”
Excerpt
SUMMER
CHAPTER
ONE
Summer sunlight sent a
golden glow through the outstretched wings of a hawk floating on currents of
air above Dixiana, Mississippi on an afternoon in the year 1991. Without warning, the flier plunged
straight at a house cat lying on the roof of a small red car. Springing up from her nap, the
long-haired calico hissed and slashed as the powerful
predator swept past.
From a weed patch in the
center of the driveway circle, a woman rushed to rescue her pet. Comforting the animal, she stumbled
past a bed of yellow zinnias and sank into a Pawleys Island hammock beneath the
protecting arms of a live oak tree, whose leafy canopy danced softly on a
honeysuckle breeze. The
kitty kneaded Penelope Augusta Nichols Pewitt’s stomach and purred while the
hawk circled slowly overhead. two strands converged in the middle forming a
Y. Disrupting the
shimmering letter, Penny placed her daughter’s cat on the ground as a small
mutt with the high bellowing.
“I think you scared it,
Callie.”
At the sound of Penny’s
alto voice, the fluffy feline looked up. Under usual circumstances, a small
droplet of moisture rested at one corner of the animal’s mouth, but happiness
accelerated her salivation rate and she had drooled from both corners until the
bark of a beagle joined them to announce that their neighbor was waving from
her front yard.
Like her father and
grandmother before her, the older woman lived in the temple style house in
which she was born: Oakden, with tall ceilings and three layers of bricks
between the walls of rooms unaltered for generations. If the truth were known, she had
preserved her heritage by permitting thousands of strangers to walk through her
home and gawk at her family’s possessions.
Misty Vanlandingham shaded
her eyes. “I need to ask
you something,” she called.
Penny climbed out of the
hammock, sauntered down her driveway, and crossed Oakwood Street, where heat
waves rose from the pavement into air thick with the watermelon fragrance of
freshly mown grass.
Misty spoke in a tone
Jackie Kennedy might have used in a comment about the Rose Garden, while her
glistening face bore witness to the temperature in massive Oakden on one of the
stickiest summer days Mississippi had dished out. “A brand-new pair of black lace undies
disappeared from my laundry basket and I think your dog might be the culprit.”
Long past the puppy stage,
Penny’s dog Zac seized any opportunity to swipe the neighbors’ papers. He dug up flower beds with joyous
barking and pilfered trophies from all over town: a cell phone which rang
incessantly, several hats from a baseball cap to a bonnet, and innumerable
shoes from the porch of their Japanese friends. In fact, until his masculinity was
removed, he had distributed his DNA all over town.
Penny attempted to imagine
her neighbor in black lace undies. “I’m
sorry. I really try to keep
him out of your yard.”
Misty acknowledged the
apology with a wave of her hand, collected mail from her box, and smiled at
Penny. “How are things with
you?”
Avoiding a direct reply,
Penny shifted her gaze to the mailbox. “Did
you see in the paper that the county has sold River Park Hospital to the
corporation that built Jacksonville Medical Center?”
“No, but I know many
hospitals are struggling because Medicare and insurance companies have cut back
reimbursements.”
Penny faced her
neighbor. “I’m changing
jobs: I am going to work full-time at the Jacksonville hospital.” She paused, afraid her friend would
disapprove. Jacksonville Medical Center, a new 300-bed hospital,
was 75 miles northeast of the town of Dixiana. Penny would begin her new job the next
morning.
Misty nodded and Penny
continued. “Three
twelve-hour night shifts or thirty-six hours a week will qualify me for
full-time benefits, and I can still work day shift in Dixiana every other
Saturday and Sunday on the Baylor Plan, which pays time and a half for each
hour of weekend work.”
Misty widened her eyes and
smiled. “That hospital in
Jacksonville is larger and more progressive than ours. You’re wise to make a change before
the situation here grows any worse. It’s
a long commute, though. Be
careful driving home in the mornings!”
More than a profession for
Penny Pewitt, RN, nursing was her avocation yet something was missing. Neither nursing, with its multiplicity
of demands, nor the animals her children, Tom, Dick, and Harriet, had abandoned
to her care filled the emptiness they had left behind.
Tears stung Penny’s
eyes. Her steps in deciding
had been littered with second thoughts, but Misty
agreed with her. Recently
named Dixiana’s Citizen of the Year, Misty managed the Garden Club and organized
pilgrimage house tours for the entire town. God knew Misty understood business!
Her decision validated,
Penny looked both ways before stepping into the street. A shiny black car was slowly
approaching from the left, allowing her ample time to cross, but after she had
taken a few steps, the vehicle accelerated, its motor roaring as it surged forward. Startled, Penny raced for her front
yard, jumped the curb, and reached grass only a few steps ahead of the speeding
compact, which scraped against the concrete curbing before swerving back into
its proper lane.
Unnerved, Penny felt every
heartbeat like someone was kicking her in the chest again and again. Had the driver tried to run her
down? It was lucky that
both she and Zac had escaped injury! She
sprinted over her lawn while Zac scampered ahead of her. His short hair was mostly white, but in
places the white faded to a brownish tan, making him appear perpetually
dirty. She collected her
yard gloves and kneeling pad and coaxed him into his pen. Reaching far
back into his little house, she discovered several dog biscuits, a chewed-up
bone, and a large pair of black-lace panties. Zac met Penny’s glare with silent
adoration.
Entering the house from
the garage, Penny undressed in the laundry room and tossed her muddy yard
clothes into the washer. Yesterday’s
rain had made the weeding job messy. She
envisioned her immaculate, stylishly-dressed mother. As a child and even later, Penny had
thought that when she grew up, she would live in heels like her mother, a
minister’s wife who wore gloves more often than Michael Jackson.
The jangling phone called
her into the kitchen, where she snatched up the receiver and plopped into a
chair. She braced her
elbows on the table. “Hello?”
“Penny, something bad has
happened here!”
The urgent sound of her
sister Faye’s voice sent Penny’s blood racing.
“Reva phoned from Westview
to tell me Dad knocked her down and yelled at her, that he’d call the police if
she didn’t leave, but she said she would stay until I got there, if I came
quickly.”
“Oh great!” Penny stood up, barely able to listen
to what might come next. Her
mother’s mental status had declined at an alarming rate since coronary by-pass
surgery two months ago, and her father, a retired Presbyterian minister, was
unable to manage his home. Reva
Ryder was their most recent housekeeper.
Faye continued, “I drove
out there as fast as I could. Reva
said she had taken issue with something Dad was doing to Mom, and when she
interfered he told her to get out. Then
he pushed her and she fell.”
After a pause Penny’s
voice quavered, “So...what happened next?”
“Well, I assured Reva that
we know she did her best and that she’s a wonderful person and I apologized for
Dad’s acting like that.”
“And then Daddy asked her
to forgive him?”
“Are you kidding? No, he was very agitated, even after
Reva said she’d never be back and left, he still looked really mean. So I have just now come back to my
office.”
Penny pictured Faye’s
office in the Charleston Chamber of Commerce building, the soft folds of her
sister’s skirt swinging as she paced. “Faye,
did you leave them alone?”
“Well...Mom was in bed and
Dad seemed calm. I’ve got
to find another housekeeper! I
have a couple of leads but I need somebody who can start tomorrow.”
Penny had assumed that
when the need arose she would be the one who would take care of her parents in
the same way in which her mother had cared for her grandparents, but it had
turned out that she and her husband, Johnny, a high school coach and history
teacher, depended on the income from her job at Dixiana’s River Park Hospital
where she had worked for nineteen years.
Penny, torn between
obligations at work and her parents’ needs, walked barefoot through her
kitchen, across the den, and down the hall to the bathroom. She was
standing in the shower running hot water on her head when Faye called
again. Grabbing a towel,
she scurried to the telephone beside her bed while water dripped onto her rug.
“Things are looking
up! I asked two ladies from
the church to carry Mom and
Dad their lunch and check on them tomorrow and the next day, then I can cover
the weekend, and I have the phone number for a young widow who wants to work
while her kids are in school. Let’s
hope she’ll start on Monday.”
Later that afternoon,
Penny was slicing Roma tomatoes with a steak knife when Johnny arrived. Her husband crowded their small
kitchen like a boulder, exuding an earthy odor of dirt and grass.
His deep voice filled the
quiet house. “Sorry I’m
late. What have you been up
to?”
Penny wanted to keep
supper conversation away from her new job. “I made tuna salad.”
“Sounds good. Just give me a minute.”
While
Johnny shaved, showered, and dressed for an Investment Club meeting, Penny, who
was worried about passing Jacksonville Hospital’s qualification tests for RNs,
worked on a practice sheet of drug calculations at the kitchen table. For some reason, math was harder for
her than it used to be, and it had been a while since she had grappled with
problems like these because manufacturers packaged most drugs in individual
portions. The hospital
pharmacists dispensed the others already measured, and nurses only double
checked the doses.
When Johnny came to the
table his face was crimson; sunburn had erased his freckles. He patted down his damp, sandy-grey
hair, pulled out a chair, and sat in front of his plate, pressing a finger
against the wireframe nosepiece of his eye glasses. “Thanks for waiting supper. Peter Puckett came by the field to
show off his trophy wife, and then I had to finish mowing.”
“Did you finish?” Penny
asked, not listening to his reply. Johnny
knew Mr. Puckett, the hospital’s administrator, better than she did. Her husband could say something chummy
to anybody, and he knew everybody because he volunteered for everything; he
volunteered out of sheer habit! He
was a serial do-gooder who could chop down all the telephone poles in town and
still qualify for citizen of the year.
One could say there was
nothing wrong with taking an interest in people, but Johnny, a Dixiana native,
not only wanted to know their names and who their relatives were, but also he
wanted to help them. He
said he must repay the debt he owed his stepfather, a gentle man who had been
his “Pop” since Johnny was ten years old. Before they married, Johnny had told
Penny about his father’s illness, the agonizing six weeks before leukemia
killed him, and the lost little boy he became at the age of seven.
“And hickory dickory
dock,” Johnny said.
Penny looked at him.
“You’re not
listening. Why did you ask
me if you didn’t want to know? You
don’t give a flip about what I do.”
Penny felt hollow in her
abdomen. What he said was
partly true.
Getting up from the table,
Johnny stood at the refrigerator with his glass of iced tea. He looked like he was puzzled about
something, and the solution was written on the linoleum. “I thought you liked sports when I married
you.” He glanced at Penny
with an amused smile. “We
went to the football games and you came to all my baseball and basketball
games. You know?”
“But we were dating then. I loved you, not sports.”
Johnny settled into his
chair and stared at her with alligator eyes, his mouth a tight seam. He started to speak, but Penny needed
to make her point before she forgot what it was.
“You came to my choral
performances, and I didn’t know music made your head ache—not until we went to
Handel’s Messiah and you threw up in the church!”
Not blinking, Johnny said,
“I guess I should have figured it out when you didn’t come to our boys’
games...”
Penny interrupted. “But when the boys played you were
always there and I was at work or washing or cleaning. I guess you remember that none of our
children helped around the house.”
She closed her eyes,
lowered her head, and pinched her nose. Almost
inevitably, she recalled an evening when she had compiled lists of
age-appropriate chores and presented one to each child at supper. The children complained and Johnny
said the lists were a bad idea. She
suffered again the desperation of that rock-bottom moment when he didn’t support her, and
she walked out of the house,
got into her car, and drove all the way to Louisiana. Finally, she turned around at an EXXON
station and returned home.
To a certain extent, Penny
had enjoyed her children more when they were young: so cuddly, cute, and so
eager to learn. As they
grew older and after she became a nurse, their needs multiplied in the
dark. Penny had once
believed that if she tried hard enough she could be a perfect mother; Dr.
Spock’s falling-apart paperback was her Bible. But as time passed, she became a
survivor, struggling with one day’s catastrophes only to face new obstacles the
next. She remembered working eight-hour night
shifts, ten on and four off, and dragging herself out of bed before the
children arrived home from school. After
supper and baths, when they were tucked in, she sometimes cried as she folded
laundry before returning to the hospital to work again.
Johnny restored the
subject. “Anyway, we’ve got
that field the best it’s ever been. Man,
it’s going to be fun to play on! Big
Time!”
Penny ran cold fingers
through her faded-blond hair, inhaled, gripped the edge of the table, and
shifted in her chair. Her
bare toe touched his shoe, and she jerked her foot back as though it had been
burned. She felt so upset
she couldn’t sit while Johnny explained the hot stock tip he planned to present
to his club. She marveled
at the way he kept his emotions under control and wondered whether he masked
them or never even experienced them in the first place. Johnny’s disinterest in her was
stunning. She felt a twinge
of pressure on her bottom lip and made herself stop biting it. No wonder her lipstick never stayed
on.
She doubted that her
husband would notice the tears standing in her eyes when he told her goodbye:
Johnny was gifted with not noticing. Too
busy to need her, he didn’t see her, not really. Her life was unraveling, and she was
grasping at the threads; all the good times were over.
Surely,
one might agree that when a relationship fell apart there should be a sign to show that
something life-changing had happened—not like this: just keeping on keeping
on. Even lovemaking, which
her mother described as “your privilege to do something for your husband,” had
become just another chore before Penny could sleep.
After cleaning up the
kitchen, Penny fed Callie and Zac and retired to her room. She needed rest to be at her best the
next day, but her thoughts
returned to the week during
which she had agonized over whether to apply for the job in Jacksonville. She had asked Johnny’s opinion, since
he always had one, and the ability to see through a problem to the choices and
to calculate the consequences. Fittingly
enough, he had pointed out the extra driving time involved and the increased
cost of operating her Chevette and then he said, “It’s your call, of course,
but do you think it is wise to change jobs when you’re fifty-three years old?”
Penny’s uncertainties
swarmed in. She must have
been crazy to think she could work in Jacksonville! It took all her energy just to make it
from one day to the next, and yet she was vegetating in Dixiana. At the big hospital, she would learn
to manage Swan lines and assist with pacemaker insertions and she could take
part in new procedures she had only read about. She wanted to work in a larger
hospital, and she had already accepted the job!
She was ready to move on,
done with doing what everyone expected of her. She had attended a small church
college and selected the Bible as her major which failed to prepare her for
the working world. The
realization that she had to work outside their home came upon her like a
locomotive: a tiny speck in the distance which became larger and larger until,
with a deafening roar when Harriet was only four, Penny had left her crying at
day-care and returned to college.
Although starting work
with an Associate Degree in nursing bore no resemblance to the experiences of
her childhood literary heroine, Cherry Ames, Penny stuck with it because there
was no other choice: they had no money for music lessons, no money for braces,
no money for clothes. On
Johnny’s salary, their family of five had met the requirements for reduced
prices on school lunches.
Besides, tomorrow would be
a new beginning when people would not know her. She would be smart and careful and
kind, and wash her hands before and after every patient contact. Yes! This was her opportunity to become a
better nurse.
Determined to make a good
first impression, Penny selected her outfit carefully: black slacks, a silky
gray blouse, and her new Bass flats. With
her clothes laid out and the room tidied, she propped up in bed and scribbled a
letter describing Zac’s panty theft to her parents. They enjoyed receiving mail, and Penny
made her story entertaining.
She turned off the lamp
and lay down, trying to focus on the side effects of commonly-used drugs, but
her thoughts were muddled by little black cars zooming back and forth as she
drifted toward sleep.
On that August evening,
Penny had no idea that she would soon be swept into a realm of greed, intrigue,
and, ultimately, murder.
About the Author
Margaret McMillion, a retired nurse, was born in Conyers, Georgia
and spent her youth in Charlotte, North Carolina and Natchez,
Mississippi. McMillion
earned a bachelor’s degree from Rhodes College and an associate’s degree in
nursing from Columbia State Community College. In addition to her career, she is a
wife, mother, grandmother, and lifelong writer.
Find Margaret online:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1461156440
