As a Doctor, I Won't Forgive My Father Who Stole My Work

My father was a professor of traditional medicine at a national university, and he was a gifted physician.

The moment my mother was wheeled onto the operating table, I called him more than thirty times. He never once picked up.

On the thirty-first call, he finally answered, impatient: So she's having surgery, so what? Don't interrupt me while I'm teaching.

"As far as I'm concerned, as long as your mother isn't dead yet, don't bother me. It disrupts my lectures."

To him, my mother's life meant nothing.

Except that in the background, a sweet young woman's voice came through the phone: "Professor Lambert, when are you actually going to come keep me company?"

Later I found out that his so-called lecture was a private date with a female student.

My mother died on that operating table, and after that my father never showed his face again.

Fifteen years later, I made something of myself. By thirty I was the top medical professor in the country, and people called me a Master Surgeon.

Then one day, Nat Lawrence, the dean of the College of Medicine, came to me with a file and asked whether I would grant a doctorate to an eighteen-year-old prodigy named Winifred Lambert.

I refused on the spot.

1.

Dean Lawrence looked baffled. He pointed at the file. "Why?"

I pulled out the doctoral thesis and said, flatly, "This paper doesn't read like something an eighteen-year-old girl could have written."

"And it says here she's completed three years of clinical practice. That's simply not possible."

"A fifteen-year-old treating patients? Working three years? If someone actually looked into it at the hospital, they'd find problems for sure."

But Dean Lawrence gripped the file, frowning. "Maybe she really is a prodigy. Starting to treat patients at fifteen isn't entirely out of the question."

I waved him off. "I'm called a Master Surgeon at thirty, and even I only barely made assistant physician at twenty. It took me four years before I dared treat patients on my own. You think she has more talent than I do?"

Nat bit his lip and tried again. "But what if she does?"

I smiled. "Then how about we just make this prodigy Winifred Lambert a Master Surgeon outright?"

Nat went quiet at once.

After all, I was the ceiling of medicine in the whole country. I was the authority.

He had no grounds left to argue.

I turned and left the university, but something sat heavy in my chest.

Because the father listed on Winifred's file was named John Lambert, and the mother was named Ruby Finch.

She was my half-sister, same father, different mother.

I had never imagined this was how we would meet for the first time.

On the way home, I called Aunt Marla.

"Aunt Marla, do you know what happened to me today?"

She asked what it was.

I said, "Today John Lambert's daughter was up for a medical doctorate, and I turned her down."

She kept saying I'd done well to refuse. No matter what, that heartless man's daughter must never be allowed to become a doctor. She'd never thought the wheel would come around like this, that it was finally our turn to get a little of our own back.

I said, smiling, that it wasn't about getting anything back. Winifred simply didn't deserve to be a medical doctor in the first place.

I thought the matter was over. But the next day, Dean Nat Lawrence walked into my office with John Lambert.

John didn't even knock. He strode straight up to me, his face cold and hard. "Professor Lambert, I'd like to take you to dinner. Will you do me the honor?"

These days John had nothing to do with medicine anymore. He owned a private hospital, and he was a wealthy man.

In his younger years there had still been a trace of the scholar about him. Now he was heavy around the middle, reeking of money.

I shook my head and said only that it wasn't necessary.

John's brow creased, and he slapped a hand down on the desk, his expression darkening. "Hubert, there's no need to take this to such an extreme."

Nat chimed in from beside him. "You're family. Whatever it is, sit down over a meal and talk it out. Isn't that better?"

I gave a cold laugh. "I don't want to eat."

John's face flushed at once. "She's your sister, one way or another. The same blood runs in your veins. There's no reason to block her future."

"If you hold a grudge against me, take it out on me. Don't use your position to settle a private score."

Nat froze on the spot. He'd had no idea John was my father, and his mouth hung open, unable to close for a long moment.

I shook my head again and refused to give an inch.

John pulled a checkbook from his pocket, signed one for ten million, and held it out. His tone was flat. "Consider this compensation for all these years. If you think it's too little, we can talk further."

I took the check and tore it to pieces right there.

I pointed a finger at John's face. "Take your dirty money and go. You know exactly what your daughter is worth. She doesn't deserve a doctorate."

Before I could finish, a girl with her hair in a ponytail burst into the office, grabbed John's arm, and glared, her whole face twisted with anger. "Dad, you don't have to beg him."

"He's just jealous of me. Jealous that the student has surpassed the teacher!"

"He should think about it. We both come from a family of doctors. He's just afraid I'll outshine him someday, so he's deliberately holding me down, keeping me from getting my doctorate."

I actually laughed. Me, suppress her?

An eighteen-year-old brat, and she dared to question me, a Master Surgeon?

I said mildly, "By your logic, you'll be a Master Surgeon yourself one day? You're a genius of the medical world, the rising star of the future?"

Winifred tilted her chin up, all arrogance. "Of course. You didn't make Master Surgeon until you were thirty. I'll be the next one before I'm twenty-five."

"Nothing's impossible in this world. We're both Dad's children, and my talent was always better than yours."

I lowered my head and flipped through her file. I saw that her first internship posting had been in acupuncture, so I asked, "When a patient has a seizure and you're placing needles, which points are appropriate?"

Without a second's thought, Winifred said, "The Baihui point, of course. Put the needle in and the patient recovers right away."

I pressed on. "Epilepsy comes in grand mal and petit mal. The points are completely different. If it's a grand mal seizure, which points do you choose?"

She froze on the spot, her face flushing red, stammering. First she said the Yintang point, then the Hegu point.

Not one answer was right.

I slapped the file down hard on the desk and turned a cold look on John. "So this is your daughter. This is the acupuncture skill she learned at your side?"

"With this level of ability, you still have the nerve to come to me and ask me to bend the rules and promote her to a medical doctorate. Do you really think that's possible?"

John panicked right there. He grabbed Winifred by the arm and hurried out without a backward glance.

Only Nat Lawrence stayed behind, coaxing me from the side. "Maybe the girl was just too nervous and got it wrong for a moment."

My eyes snapped up to him. "Got it wrong?"

"Is medical knowledge something you can just get wrong?"

"Remember a dosage wrong, and what the patient swallows is poison."

"Remember an acupuncture point wrong, and the needle you put in can kill someone."

"Nat, you're the dean of the College of Medicine. Do you want to treat patients like lab rats, let a half-trained fraud like Winifred practice on them, and not rest easy until she costs someone their life?"

Nat had nothing to say. He slunk out.

I'd assumed John and Winifred would back off once they saw how things stood. Instead, barely three days later, the two of them cooked up something new.

First they went to reporters and got it onto the radio: that I was jealous of Winifred's talent and deliberately blocking her doctorate out of spite.

Then Winifred went live, weeping into the camera about how she'd studied medicine under her father since she was a child, and how she couldn't understand why, when it came time for her doctoral review, Ithe Master Surgeonsimply refused to sign off.

John played the wronged father in her stream too, laying out the so-called "truth" for everyone to hear. He said I was Winifred's half-brother, that when he was young he hadn't taken proper care of me, and that I'd nursed a grudge over it all these years.

So now, when it was his daughter's turn to be reviewed for her doctorate, I was supposedly letting my resentment fester and refusing to let her pass.

I hadn't expected the stream to catch fire the way it did, pulling in wave after wave of attention online.

I even traced it back to a bot farm John had hired, churning out a flood of coordinated posts. The gist: that I, the Master Surgeon, was afraid my sister would grow into someone whose skill outstripped mine and threatened my standing.

Reluctantly, I opened the stream. Winifred was right there on camera, tears running down her face.

"Hubert, I admit you're brilliant."

"But we share the same blood. We're both children of a medical family. You shouldn't strangle me in the cradle."

"I know you're a Master Surgeon. But isn't a Master Surgeon's duty to train more good doctors?"

"You can't be this selfish. If you hate Dad for abandoning your mother all those years ago, and you want to take that revenge out on me, fine. I have nothing to say to that."

"But do you understand? I was born to give myself to medicine. I'm the hope of all mankind. My potential could cure so many hard cases in the future. You have no right to stand in my way."

Then Winifred's mother, Ruby Finch, appeared on camera out of nowhere, dropping to her knees and kowtowing to everyone watching, pleading, "Hubert Lambert, I know you hate me. You hate me for coming between your parents back then."

"But your sister Winifred is innocent. You can't destroy her gift. I'm apologizing to you. I'm begging youstop making things hard for your sister."

"And whatever you do, don't shut her out of medicine for good. If you want revenge, come to me. I'm right here."

I watched all of it on the screen, then shut the stream off.

In that moment something in me went cold all the way through. The three of them had made it plainthey were going to trap me with guilt and drag it out in public.

Less than half an hour later, a pack of reporters barged into my office without permission, shoving a forest of microphones into my face and firing questions at me one after another.

"Professor Lambert, is it that you're afraid your sister will surpass you one day?"

Another asked, "Professor Lambert, why can't you set aside a personal grudge? Your sister is extraordinarily gifted. She might work miracles for the whole field of medicine. Blocking her doctorate is a loss for all of mankind."

I didn't answer any of them. I just picked up my phone, quietly, and made a call.

"Hello, is this the Medical Board's Disciplinary Unit?"

"I'd like to file a formal, named complaint against a student named Winifred Lambert. She's committed academic fraud, and her work history is fabricated too."

"More importantly, Nat Lawrence, the dean of the College of Medicine, has been taking bribes on the side."

I paused there. Every reporter in the room was staring at me, unblinking.

"And fifteen years ago, Professor John Lambert embezzled thirty million in hospital public funds. I have solid evidence."