Out of Patients: A Novel

After practicing medicine for over thirty years, Norah Waters MD is weighing her options, and early retirement looks better and better. At age fifty-eight, who needs midnight calls, cranky patients, and business headaches? Fighting burnout and workplace melodrama, Norah gives herself one last year to find her way back to enjoying her once-cherished career. In her final effort to make a meaningful difference, Norah takes on two medical students who both make and break her resolve to persist. One seems a hopeless introvert, the other a toxic egotist; supervising them makes her downright dizzy as she labels them the yin and yang of med students.

Norah also tries to support her elderly mom, a feisty and irreverent eighty-six-year-old living in Sun City who once rejoiced at Woodstock and recently partied at Burning Man. Never exactly the perfect parent, Norah’s mom keeps her staid neighbors stirred up and has her eye on her mailman, a mere youngster at seventy-five. At utterly different points in their lives, troubled by a shadow in their past, both women find themselves on a quest for worth in their shifting worlds.

Supported by her steadfast dog, a misfit veterinarian, and a thoughtful radiologist, Norah wrestles her way through a surprising assortment of obstacles, sometimes amusing and sometimes dreadful, to make a final decision about her future.