I would never have recommended Cyteen for hospital reading, but looking back, I read a lot of Cherryh while going through some pretty stressful times. Cyteen is brilliant and twisty with compelling (not always nice) characters and interesting ideas.

If you want to know what's going on with Gehenna... actually, I'm not sure reading 40,000 in Gehenna helps that much. It addresses the questions raised in Cyteen from a very different direction.