SYNOPSIS: “Fallible”
by David M. Mokotoff, M.D.

Successful, driven, and talented, RENEE BARNARD KRAUSE appears to the casual observer to have it all. He is the top heart surgeon in the city, lives in a three story Mediterranean house overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, and has a beautiful family. However, on the inside he is a tortured soul, who cannot shake his wife’s obsessive compulsiveness and infidelity. She is suffocating him, and his workload is leading to early burnout. DUSTY BARKER, an old guard surgical competitor, is plotting ways to destroy him, and an operating room disaster is making the hospital administration nervous. Inside, Renee is harboring growing anxiety, restlessness, and depression.

Set in a beautiful ocean community during the 1990’s, Renee weaves from one surgical adventure to another, amidst a gathering storm of medical malpractice, corporate greed, and jealous competitors. Someone has killed one of his patients during routine surgery, and he faces a lawsuit from the victim’s widow, who is a trial attorney. The patient should have sailed through surgery, but dies, and Renee suspects foul play. Frustrated over hospital bureaucracy, he decides to launch his own investigation, and uncovers an addicted operating room aide is the source of the accident.

The surgical challenges of fixing broken hearts and arteries are consuming his energy. He performs an emergency heart valve repair on the hospital CEO, he takes over surgery for an inebriated colleague, and he is faced with an emergency bypass procedure on an overweight doctor who has a heart attack in the middle of a hysterectomy. That’s the easy part. His wife is suing him for divorce, and TACEY CARSON, an engaging nurse, is drawing him to an affair.

Between ruptured aneurysms and artery repairs, he allows himself to be drawn into Tacey’s web. She becomes his salvation from a dying marriage. Free spirited and vivacious, she is like no one he has ever met before. Blinded by love and lust, he completely misses the warning signs of her alcohol abuse. He now must confront an enemy that he can neither control nor cure: alcohol addiction. The enemy is cunning and insidious. It becomes a battle, which can only have one winner, and Renee is in for the fight of his life.

In the process, Renee is transformed. From haughty and overbearing, he evolves into a more caring individual who finally must face his own limitations and humanity. The frustrations of living with an active alcoholic, and the powerlessness of their loved ones, are woven slowly. Tacey not only has liver damage from her alcohol, but she also has contracted a mysterious form of hepatitis, which is only identified too late to treat.

Ultimately, Renee must choose between himself, their daughter, and the disease, which his wife is unable to defeat. He watches as she is slowly transformed from a loving and caring wife and mother, into a functionless, disabled shell of her former self. He discovers that love cannot conquer all.

However, with the struggle, he rediscovers what he lost a long time ago: his own heart.

Click here to Read the first chapter of Fallible