A Challenge for Nurse Melanie

By Isabel Moore

“Nurses nurse, Melanie. They don’t doctor. And above all, they don’t make public spectacles of themselves.”

Melanie Woods, a student nurse, has saved a man’s life in the Blue Ribbon bar by giving him an emergency tracheotomy with a jackknife and a key. When it’s all over, the bar patrons are looking at her with something close to distaste if not actual dislike, and her roommate Sally says to her, “As far as your superiors are concerned, you’ve simply broken every rule in the book.” Even her fiancé agrees Melanie crossed a line, and soon they’ve decided to end the relationship.

When Dr. Steve Conroy sees her ringless hand, he is oddly pleased, but he is engaged to a New York socialite, and when his residency is up in six months, he plans to move to the big city and establish a cushy uptown practice. But he approves of Melanie’s spirit, how she stands up to the head nurse, and even thinks her quick action in the Blue Ribbon was courageous. When Melanie’s instinctive compulsion to do the right thing regardless of consequences finally gets her tossed from nursing school, she runs out the hospital door and straight into Steve’s arms. He takes her out for coffee and, putting the final nail in her heart, tells her that though he loves her, he cannot marry her because he doesn’t want to spend his life in their small, podunk hometown. Can Melanie pull her own heart from the ashes of all the blazing fires in her life?