romance

About Sex, Drugs, and Scrubs

It’s the early 1970’s, and Dave Cameron is soon to start work as an intern at a large university hospital in the South. Before Orientation, he meets Sharon, who his friend Henry swears is his perfect match. Dave and Sharon quickly fall into a passionate relationship that surprises them both in its intensity. Sharon Kelly is a beautiful flight attendant whose looks lead to her becoming a model but they also create problems for her. When she meets Dave, she is running or flying away from those problems and her past. Dave is an unconventional doctor: a music-loving, long-haired idealist who hopes his generation will improve the world. He manages the stress of his internship with a combination of smoking weed and having sex with Sharon. They both go trough life changing metamorphoses over the course of his internship as their relationship evolves into an all-consuming unconditional love.
This is a story about what it took to become a doctor when doctors were physicians, not providers. It is about a young doctor doing his internship in a city/county hospital in the early seventies and the training he went through to become a competent physician. It is about his struggle to find love and maintain hope in the face of the daunting challenges he faced. It is about the wild alcohol and drug fueled parties coupled with the torrid nights of unrestrained passion he needed in order to deal with the pathos of the human condition he encountered every day at the hospital. It is first and foremost a love story about two young lovers, but interwoven into the framework of their love are the obstacles they had to overcome and the transitions they had to go through in order to reach the threshold of a bright future together. It is about one year, the internship year, in the life of a young doctor going through hell, but finding heaven in the love of a beautiful, exceptional, young woman.
However, this novel is about more than a young man becoming a competent, reliable physician, finding love, and maintaining hope in the face of the challenges he encounters. It also addresses the issues that arose out of the counter culture of the 60’s and 70’s along with the problems our society faces today. The young lovers must navigate the lure of excess and self-indulgence, the changing mores and morals of the sexual revolution, racism, bigotry, sexual harassment, and the corrosive effects of poverty and wealth inequality on society, along with the advent of nihilism and existentialism in our culture. It is also about the complexities of life in the ever more rapidly evolving world we live in.

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