An excerpt from LB Well’s new novel, The White Coat Effect

L.B. Wells is the pseudonym for a very successful Board-Certified Surgeon, an ambitious physician who made her way through the jungle of medical training while overcoming the resistance of the male-dominated world of surgery.

Wells has written a novel that unleashes the ambition necessary for a woman to push through the long road to becoming an esteemed surgeon while discovering sexuality and forbidden love for the first time.

Entitled The White Coat Effect, Wells has created a multicultural story that is often overlooked in today’s literary landscape.  Her protagonist, Rory, a student from a devout Jewish background, is a late bloomer who loses her virginity in her twenties. Her early interactions with men are bumpy affairs that have her wondering what love and sex are all about. With humor and compassion, Wells describes how her mother kept her under wraps and worried more about the upkeep of their elaborate suburban home than her coming-of-age frustrations.

An excerpt from LB Well’s new novel, The White Coat Effect

I remember when I first truly fell in love with surgery. It coincided with my first true love for Amir Hadid, the man who changed my life.
*** 

The first two years of medical school had been primarily book learning. It was boring and seemed to involve tons of rote memorizing. Social life was a non-starter. I was horny and bored. My third year was also a colossal disappointment. 

Now I was entering the fourth year, rounding the corner of my first clinical year. Everything would change, I thought, as we engaged with real human patients. I stood in full uniform—scrubs, ponytail, clogs—ready to be thrown into the icy waters. 

I had reported for duty at City Hospital in Westport without much instruction on what to expect. There were no smiles, no pleasantries. I was briefly introduced to my new surgical team, and I shook hands with Shay Meyer, the intense Israeli man who would be my chief resident for the month. 

We headed toward the first patient’s room. Suddenly, a tall, dark figure in scrubs brushed past me. As our shoulders met, the tattered carpet generated a painful electric shock. 

“Watch where you’re going!” I said. 

“Everyone, listen up.” Shay, the chief resident, was now addressing us. “This is our fourth-year resident, Amir.” 

“Oh shit,” I whispered, head down, my cheeks flushing with embarrassment at having rudely chastised an important superior. 

I took the risk of looking at him. I had to look; we were being introduced. From behind the Clark Kent glasses, his eyes hit me with 360 joules of energy, the maximum setting on a defibrillator. 

It was him, the handsome stranger I had seen in passing a few years prior and once, I confess, in my dreams. He stood well over six feet, with an imperious chest and broad shoulders filling out his short-sleeved green scrubs. His forearms flexed the muscles of a day laborer, his dark skin gleaming. 

All of his kinetic energy pulsed through light-brown eyes with a dramatic touch of emerald green. His face, deep in concentration, seemed to harbor a spiritual and probing intelligence. 

Warning bells from my childhood were chiming insis- tently. With a name like Amir and his coloring, he was almost certainly Arabic, not exactly the ethnic origin that my parents had in mind for a mate. 

I lapsed back into reality. I knew the drill. I had buried my earlier clipboards at the bottom of my closet, under all the unworn stilettos. Clipboards were for meditrons. Surgeons were the cool kids, and we traveled light: one piece of paper, small illegible notes, tiny check-boxes representing orders and tasks. 

Whatever didn’t fit in your pocket was irrelevant.
The nurses were known to be cynical and dismissive. 

Many of them had more practical experience than we did. But I was not going to be outsmarted. I’d arrived at the hospital at 4:30 a.m., a full hour early, and pored over the charts of every single solitary ward patient. 

I was locked and loaded for rounds. 

We started in the room of Mrs. Roberts, a newly postop- erative forty-four-year-old woman who’d had her stomach stapled. The moment we entered, a noxious, fungal odor coming from her bed assaulted us. 

At 450 pounds, she resembled Jabba the Hutt of Star Wars fame. A candida infection had developed under one of her massive breasts. Her stringy hair was cut short at the neck, her face badly acne-pocked. 

When she saw us, she bellowed a hearty greeting: “Good morning, team! The food sucks, and I’m pent up as hell, but I ain’t seen nothin’’round here worth fuckin’!” 

A naughty smile sliced across her scarred face. 

We calmed her down, checked her vital signs (all relatively normal except for elevated blood pressure), and communi- cated to each other in Surgeon Speak. This conveyed the numbers in a lifeless monotone. No time for emotion or improvisation. 

I felt confident; I had already learned the lesson of seeing the patient as faulty software. I looked up at Amir again, my breath quickening. 

No one noticed my eager reaction. No one except Amir, who looked up from the patient’s records and said urgently, “I need you.” 

“Yes,” I thought. “Shall I go down on you right here, or wait for a more private moment?” 

“You come with me,” he said. “We have a patient requiring manual disimpaction.”

Not what I had in mind. Unplugging a clogged bowel was not quite like a romantic jaunt in the park. 

Amir began walking briskly, several steps ahead of me. He opened the door to the stairwell and started climbing, two stairs at a time, fully expecting me to keep up with him. And keep up with him, I did. I wasn’t going to give this handsome mofo any rope to hang me with. 

Three floors later, at the patient’s bedside, he spoke. “I assume you have disimpacted patients before . . .” 

“Of course,” I said bravely, “but maybe you’d better give me a few pointers.” 

Thus began our first “date,” and my life would never be 

the same. 

Not what I had in mind. Unplugging a clogged bowel was not quite like a romantic jaunt in the park. 

—

THE WHITE COAT EFFECT

Sometimes, even a doctor isn’t good enough for some parents.

Meet Rory, a young Jewish medical student “making the rounds” in search for the love of her life. After a series of bedroom mishaps, she decides to pursue surgery where she meets Amir, her Arabian prince.

Hot, passionate love ensues and transcends all mundane concerns until her past heritage catches up with her: she’s in the middle of a forbidden romance.

Tradition or love? It’s an age-old question.

The hot love between Amir and Rory doesn’t cool down. Now she is forced to choose between acceptance in her community—and the parents she loves—or give up the erotically charged cinematic love story she never thought she could find.

What will Rory do?

About LB Wells: 

For more information, visit: www.drlbwells.com

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing