SHORTSTORIES

WHEN THE DOCTOR IS A WOMAN What are your thoughts on being called a doctor or nurse? Do you prefer one over the other? Why or why not?

I wear scrubs to work, and I don’t usually wear a white coat over my scrubs. My badge does not have a big bold “MD” on it. In the ICU, I’m usually mistaken for a nurse or a unit secretary.

When someone asks if I’m a nurse, my response is, “No, sir/ma’am. I’m not qualified to be one. But can I help you?” Usually they need something small like an extra blanket or a glass of water for the patient, something I’m always happy to do.

And I don’t mean to be glib when I say I am unqualified to be a nurse. I truly am. Nursing is hard. I continue to be amazed by what nurses can and must do for their patients. I have tremendous admiration and respect for my nursing colleagues.

Medicine is full of antidotes. Afflicted with this? Take that. Accidentally swallowed that? Now swallow this.

This book is 300+ pages of antidote. For what, you ask?

This book is the antidote to the doctor you barely know; the doctor who rarely spends more than five minutes with you; the doctor who doesn’t really know your name; the doctor whose fees can run into the thousands of dollars.

This book is about the only surgeon on a small island. Timothy Lepore (which rhymes with “peppery”) is that doctor, and the island is Nantucket.

Ah, you say. Nantucket. No wonder he has time for every patient. He’s probably rich No wonder he doesn’t bill some patients, and accepts payment in oatmeal raisin cookies from some others. After all, what does he treat? Sunburn? The occasional fish hook caught in some angler’s finger?

It won’t take you many pages to discover that a lot happens on Nantucket Island that requires every skill the most capable doctor could bring to the task: “[Over time] hundreds of people would have died if he wasn’t there, if not thousands,” says another doctor who knows Lepore.

Aside from his serious medical skills —you’ll get to know those both on the island and in his preNantucket days — Lepore has what author Pam Belluck calls “his patient-centered approach, once much more the norm, [which] now strains to survive in towns and cities across the country as health care costs skyrocket, medicine becomes more corporatized and monetized, and extended quality time with doctors is an increasingly vanishing commodity.”

So yes, there is a little bit of sermonizing in this book, but it’s much more like a fast-reading peek into the everyday life of a busy, if somewhat eccentric doctor. Along the way you’ll get to know a number of his more noteworthy patients, from Jimmy Buffet to the titular Underground Tom, and the downright weird Billy Dexter.

Part of Lepore’s duties involve expert testimony in court cases, and being crossexamined by lawyers who know he might have to save their life one day.

There are first-hand accounts of mass casualty fires, open heart surgery, colon obstruction operations, cancer, stabbings, shootings, and ticks, one of the banes of island living.

Yes, Nantucket is just a nice quiet island where nothing ever happens — until it does. All those times are what this book is about.

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Island Practice: Cobblestone Rash, Underground Tom, and Other Adventures of a Nantucket Doctor, by Pam Belluck, M.D., 304 pages, published in July 2013 by Public Affairs

This Examiner crossword has me stumped.

I’ve got the first three letters of the word that I’m stuck on. What do you have? Yeah, they’re hard sometimes.