Cover Girl Nurse

By Patricia Libby

“The surgeon’s deft fingers could incise her heart even as they did a patient.”

The tragic death of her doctor fiancé forced glamorous model Merridy Martin to realize that her career was a glittering world of selfishness, while his had value and honor. So she dedicated her life’s work—and her broken heart—to Bob’s memory, becoming a nurse at an Oahu hospital. And when intern Jay Flemming puts the moves on, she puts the brakes on: “So you think that kissing is the kind of therapy I need to loosen up a crippled heart?” she snaps. “Yes, that’s my prescription,” the handsome, confident young doctor declares, adding, “And Dr. Flemming will be glad to fill it personally.” But Merridy’s insistence that Jay knows nothing of her true feelings proves only too accurate—when, after convincing him that she does not care for him and watching him walk away, she learns with a shattering jolt that she had been lying to herself all along.

“Working in the swank Moana Kai Hospital has its problems: overly demanding patients, a suspicious martinet of a superintendent of nurses. There are warm characters in the story, too, and in the drawing of her cast, author Libby has shown how she has grown in her work, and we are pleased at her progress. Nurse Martin and author Libby find pretty much what they are looking for by the final chapter.” Independent Star-News, October 1963