Synopsis
“Eden never knew she would make such a difference. It was not her choice; her mind was not given to grandiose thinking. All she wanted was to enjoy life, without having to work at it. But life had bigger plans for her and assigned its unwitting agents to see them carried out. Without her knowledge or consent, uncounted people she never met learned her name and what she came to stand for.”
Those words introduce the story of Eden Avery, an unlikely heroine whose fate it was to turn the medicolegal establishment on its head. There are no villains in this story; no one bore Eden malice or even indifference. The principals are good people with common human failings that cause them to make mistakes, ranging from the slowly erosive to the rapidly fatal. Like good people everywhere, they are troubled by the damage they have done. Eden’s death precipitates crises of conscience in her survivors, and it is the painful resolution of these crises that brings about the changes to which Eden’s name is attached.
At seventeen, Eden Avery has personality, a gift for ice-skating, and a love of nature that bonds her to her boyfriend Joshua Rabin. She already knows more than most adults about the heart, in the physical sense. For four years she has lived under the cloud of advancing rheumatic heart disease.
She is also in touch with her heart in the other sense. “I can’t imagine how a person who truly loves another can hate anyone,” she says to Joshua after a weekend at the house on the lake. A month later she is dead, the victim of a horrendous medical blunder. What follows should be a typical medical malpractice suit, but none of the principals reacts to her death in a typical manner, and the outcome is far from what any of them could have predicted.
Karen Avery, Eden’s mother, is a brilliant lawyer on the rise when an unintended pregnancy threatens the achievement of her goal. After agonizing over whether to have the baby, she gives in to her husband’s insistence. Her regret over that decision is never far below the surface, and it bursts forth when Eden’s death leaves her with, in her word, “nothing.” Bereft of career and child, she seeks vengeance through a lawsuit. Her husband, for reasons he dare not disclose, stands in her way.
Alan Avery, a physician, makes a succession of mistakes in caring for his daughter. She contracts rheumatic fever and almost dies after he misdiagnoses her strep throat. She omits her penicillin prophylaxis after an argument with him, then has a life-threatening allergic reaction. A superficial knee infection that he treats too casually spreads to the blood. Although the error that kills her is another physician’s, Alan feels responsible for all the events leading up to it and is convinced that he will be exposed if they file suit.
Calvin McCrae, only two weeks into his internship, orders the ill-fated injection for Eden, neglecting to ask about allergies. It is not the first time that carelessness has got Calvin in trouble. But Calvin is also possessed of an implacable conscience. To satisfy it, he is prepared to quit his chosen career. His confessor and friend, Father Joseph Conley, will not hear of it. Nothing less will do, Father Conley says, than to reach out to the bereaved, to feel what they feel. He thus imposes on Calvin a daunting twofold task, to find the path and to surmount the seemingly insurmountable obstacles in his way.
At Eden’s memorial service Calvin hears Joshua’s eloquent tribute. Quoting Eden’s message of love, Joshua appeals to the mourners in her name, “Let us not be angry.” These words offer Calvin the slender hope of reaching those he has hurt most deeply.
The story shows how the anguished survivors succeed in breaking out of their isolation and, recognizing each other as fellow-sufferers instead of adversaries, join hands to create the vision that brings the malpractice suit to its unprecedented resolution.