I refused to let my patients become another statistic. I knew about addiction firsthand, from my brother. It was a doctor’s job to help people, to assuage their pain, and yet I’d watched other doctors’ patients succumb to addiction. The opioid crisis had made it difficult for doctors to know where the line was, when to prescribe pain medicine and when not to.

“I’ve heard Ox圜ontin is good for back pain.” “Can you give me something for the pain?” she asked. It’s pretty tough on our back and knees, though, isn’t it?” Alice says that occasionally her legs feel numb, so Emma orders an MRI. Emma makes conversation, reaching out to a fellow-gardener: “I have a whole freezer of vegetables I grew this summer. Her loud-voiced husband says Alice’s back is sore from gardening. As such, the lieutenant had recently told his detectives to investigate both fatal and nonfatal overdoses in an effort to trace the drugs back to the dealers.Įmma has a new patient, Alice Jones, a frail fifty-four-year-old. But increasingly, the calls were about opioid overdoses. Nate had been called here for domestic assaults, drug busts, and once a murder. Both Nate and Emma are affected by this modern-day epidemic as when Nate is called out to an overdose scene in the run-down Mill Creek neighborhood. Opioid addiction has infiltrated Skamania, a small town in the Cascade mountain range in Washington state. Keep that in mind when you meet Detective Nate Sweeney, his wife Emma, a doctor at the local hospital, and Josh, their empathetic, adorable, Star Wars-loving five-year-old. The ancient Greek philosopher Solon had a stark antidote to such folly: Call no man happy before he is dead. Some people are so happy with their lives, that for a split-second, they label it perfect.

Do no harm christina mcdonald