S.I.C. Memorial

S.I.C. MEMORIAL

A family can survive anything, if it can hang on through a hurricane, the founding of a surf religion, and a fungus among us.

Hubert Humperdinck is an anesthesiologist at Sarah Imogene Cunningham Memorial, a hospital in San Diego. Hubert does not like to work, except to earn enough money to take time off to hit the waves or write screenplays. His sons, Razor and Thor, surf circles around him. When they’re not out in the water, they experiment with mice in his garage laboratory. Hubert’s beautiful wife, Delilah, and a pair of geriatric golden retrievers, Darth and Penny, do their best to keep the three under control, but they pretty much fail.

When a marine fungus contaminates the air ducts and patients of S.I.C. Memorial, Infectious Disease fingers Hubert as the source. A billionaire heart transplant patient, an Arab oil sheik, offers $200 million to build a new, uninfected hospital, the offer matched by a Catholic charity. As Muslims battle Christians over naming rights for the new center, a group of terrorists take the existing building--with its patients and physicians--hostage.

Hubert, hospitalized with a fungal foot infection, battles to win over the minds of the brain-washed terrorists. He invents a new religion and succeeds in converting all but one. After a harrowing escape to the wilds of drug-ravaged Mexico, he returns to work on the remaining die-hard, but only an insane neurosurgeon and Hubert’s dying dog, Darth, offer the faintest hope of a plan.

As the California ocean heats to a record eighty degrees, Hubert finds himself caught in a web of hurricane weather, medicine gone mad, and the wrath of a legal system intent on imprisoning him for murder. Will he go to jail? Will Delilah dump him? Will his latest screenplay get made into a movie?
Only a madman can survive these calamities. Dr. Humperdinck, amiable and whacked-out as he is, makes the grade. He’s certifiably nuts. And insanity is the only thing that can save him.