Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story of a Doctor Who Got Away With Murder by James B. Stewart

Author:James B. Stewart [Stewart, James B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Current Events, General, Medical, Ethics, Physicians, Political Science, True Crime, Murder, Serial Killers
ISBN: 9780684865638
Google: uaRr-yGF9VkC
Amazon: 0684865637
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2000-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

SIOUX FALLS, located on a bend in the Big Sioux River close to the Minnesota border, is a city of about 100,000 people, the largest in South Dakota, with modest houses, small, well-tended lawns and shady trees, a small historic district near the downtown, and a low crime rate. People there tend to be polite, unassuming, inconspicuous about their wealth, and accustomed to the long, harsh winters. Kristin Kinney quickly became one of the most popular nurses in the intensive care unit at the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Memorial Hospital, where she began working as soon as she and Michael moved to town. She was vivacious, cheerful, full of greetings and encouragement for the patients and irreverent comments for the doctors. “Did someone piss in your Wheaties?’ she asked one doctor. “My God, you are so grumpy,” she told one of the most dour surgeons. Word of these remarks brought visits from nurses on other floors, curious about the newcomer willing to stand up to the medical staff. Just about everyone called her by her initials, K.K.

Though she was by nature talkative, Kristin initially said nothing about her engagement to Swango or the reasons she had moved from Virginia to South Dakota. Not even Lisa Flinn, a nurse who conducted Kristin’s orientation and often worked the same twelve-hour shifts as she did, knew that Kristin had any connection to Dr. Swango, the new resident who was doing a rotation in internal medicine at the VA hospital. But one day Swango responded to a code on the floor, and after the patient was stable, Flinn noticed that Swango stayed around and chatted with Kristin. “Who is that guy, anyway?” Flinn asked. “I don’t think I’ve met him.”

“Oh, that’s Dr. Swango,” Kristin replied. Only several days later did she tell Flinn that she was engaged to him. Flinn thought Kinney was just being modest, trying not to impress anyone with the fact that she was soon going to be married to a physician, something likely to set her apart, both socially and financially, from the other nurses in the unit.

Flinn and Kinney became close friends, and gradually Kristin confided more about her life to Lisa, who was older and more experienced. Beneath the vivacious surface, it was obvious that Kristin suffered the lingering effects of a difficult childhood. Her mother had taken refuge, with Kristin in a shelter for battered women before her parents divorced. But Kristin had gone to live with her father in order to finish high school with her friends. A heavy drinker, prone to violent outbursts, her father was someone she both loved and feared, and after graduating, she had moved back with her mother. Kristin had suffered a disastrous first marriage, then a bout of Crohn’s disease, a digestive malady characterized by cramps, diarrhea, and weight loss and thought to be brought on by stress. Kristin spoke mostly in generalities about her past, but Lisa knew enough to recognize the symptoms of child abuse. Thank goodness, she thought, that Kristin had finally met someone like the nice new resident, Dr.

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