Yes, you can go home again
Heart in the Right Place
By Carolyn Jourdan
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $23.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
We will be celebrating Father’s Day on Sunday, June 17 and Carolyn Jourdan’s "Heart in the Right Place," a memoir being released for sale Friday, is a love story about a father and a daughter told with tremendous heart. Carolyn Jourdan was a successful attorney serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C. where she was hobnobbing with the politicians, attending important hearings and in her opinion, in a position to change the world.
All that ended when she was called out of a televised Senate hearing by her father, a rural doctor in the foothills of the Tennessee Smokey Mountains, to tell her that her mother had suffered a heart attack." Her mother worked as her father’s receptionist. Carolyn drove home in her Mercedes thinking she’d be there just a few days and then return to her fast-track legal world as far from Strawberry Plains, Tenn. as anyone could imagine.
Her mother was barely conscious in ICU, but grabbed Carolyn’s wrist as she was about to leave and said, "you’ve got to fill in for me for a couple of days. Just till the week’s out. I’ll be back on Monday."
It was Wednesday and in Carolyn’s mind that was only a couple of days, but even being gone that long from her important work in Washington, D.C. made her feel like she had been "trapped…like a possum in the headlights."
She conjured old memories of growing up being squeamish about what went on in her father’s medical office, "characteristics that did not make for a reliable health care assistant." In reality her mother did not return in two days, nor two months, nor six months and one day, Carolyn realizes it has been a year since took over her mother’s duties.
Carolyn discovered quickly how unimportant she was in this rural community where she grew up. It was, as she says "nothing short of cultural shock." No one cared who she had been, but wanted answers to medical questions — and quickly.
In one instant she discovered all the rules she was helping government to create were in fact hindrances. When she grabbed a roll of paper towels to clean up vomit from a patient her father’s nurse stopped her because it up would be in violation of OSHA law since she had not been trained and certified to clean up biohazardous materials.
She quickly discovered the government had allowed its legions of mathematicians, accountants and computer experts to interfere with what once was simple insurance forms. "I had never encountered one as spectacular as the Medicare coding system," she said. She struggled to understand Medicare billing and wondered why Medicare would assign a number to "Decapitation, Legal Execution by guillotine," and thought "What sort of Medicare claim would be reimbursable in connection with being guillotined?"
However, she concluded it was no laughing matter "because if I didn’t find the right code we wouldn’t get paid" and that she could end up in jail for filing a fraudulent claim.
Jourdan doesn’t write like an attorney, but as a down to earth Southern country girl who spins a yarn that will tickle your funny bone, yet it is a story told with wit and tenderness, one that reveals the real heroes in life are the ones living right beside us.
She was running her legal affairs in Washington long distance by phone in between answering her father’s office phone with patients demanding "is the doctor in?" The patients didn’t even care that she drove a Mercedes, so she took to driving an old postal truck, one she took as trade for X-raying a man’s goat.
The more she became involved in the day to day activities of the country doctor, the more she came to like it. But not when patients died, particularly the hired hand at her father’s farm, Fletcher, who she felt was too young to die.
The story she tells is one peopled with characters who have stories and histories to tell that make her suddenly appeciate a lifestyle entirely different from the crushing demands of a Washington political lawyer. She falls in love with the town, its culture, its people and the pace of life.
And in doing so, gets a glimpse into her father’s life that she may never have seen otherwise. How this high powered Washington lawyer discovers her father is an infinitely caring, patient and selfless country doctor is a wonderful Father’s Day story.
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Opinion Page of The News-Review every Thursday.)