Robin Cook - Coma

At the elevator there was momentary confusion and delay. Bellows repeatedly pushed the “down” button as if manhandling the plastic object would bring the elevator more quickly. The floor indicator above each elevator door suggested that the elevators were taking their own sweet time, slowly rising from floor to floor, obviously discharging and taking on passengers in the usual slow motion. For such emergencies there was a phone next to the elevators. Bellows snatched it off its cradle and dialed the operator. But the operator didn’t answer. It usually took the operators at the Memorial about five minutes to answer a house phone.

“Fucking elevators,” said Bellows striking the button for the tenth time. His eyes darted from the exit sign over the stairwell back to the floor indicator above the elevator. “The stairs,” said Bellows with decision.

In rapid succession the group entered the stairwell and began the long twisting plunge from the tenth floor to the second floor. The journey seemed interminable. Taking two or three steps at a time, constantly turning to the left, the group began to spread out a bit. They passed the sixth floor, then the fifth. At the fourth floor the whole group slowed to a cautious walk in the dark because of the missing light bulb. Then down again at the previous pace.

Fairweather began to slow and Susan passed him on the inside.

“I don’t know what the hell we are running for,” panted Fairweather as Susan passed.

Susan managed to brush her hair from her face, hooking ft behind her right ear. “As long as Bellows et al. are in the lead, I don’t mind running. I want to see what goes on but I don’t want to be the first one on the scene.”

Fairweather assumed a comfortable walk and was quickly left behind. Susan was nearing the third floor landing when she heard Bellows pound on the locked door on two. He yelled at the top of his lungs for someone to open the door, and his voice carried up the stairwell, reverberating strangely, taking on a warbling quality. As Susan rounded the final landing, the door on two was opened. Niles kept the door open for her and she entered the hall. The constant turning to the left in the stairwell made Susan feel a bit dizzy, but she did not stop. Following the others, she ran directly into the ICU.

In sharp contrast to the former dimness of the room, it was now brightly illuminated with stark fluorescent light that provided a shimmering aura to objects within the room. The white vinyl floor added to this effect. In the corner the three ICU nurses were engaged in giving closed chest massage to Nancy Greenly. Bellows, Cartwright, Reid, and the medical students crowded around the bed.

“Hold up,” said Bellows watching the cardiac monitor. The nurse giving the closed chest massage straightened up from her efforts. She was kneeling on the edge of the bed on the right side of Nancy Greenly. The monitor pattern was wildly erratic.

“She’s been fibrillating for four minutes,” said Shergood watching the monitor. “We started the massage within ten seconds.”

Bellows moved rapidly over to the right of Nancy Greenly and while watching the monitor, he thumped the patient’s sternum with his fist. Susan winced at the dull sound of the blow. The monitor’s pattern did not alter. Bellows began closed chest massage.

“Cartwright, feel for a pulse in the groin,” said Bellows without taking his eyes from the monitor. “Charge the defibrillator to 400 joules.” The last command was directed to anyone. One of the ICU nurses carried it out.

Susan and the other students backed up against the wall, acutely aware that they were mere observers, and although they wanted to, they could not help in the frantic activity occurring before them.

“You’ve got a good pulse going,” said Cartwright with his hand pressed in Nancy Greenly’s groin.

“Was there any warning for this or did it drop out of the blue?” said Bellows with some difficulty between compressions of the chest. He nodded his head toward the monitor.

“Very little warning,” answered Shergood. “She began to have a suggestion of increased excitability of her heart by having a few premature ventricular beats and a suggestion of a mild atrioventricular conduction defect which we picked up on the recorder.” Shergood held up a strip of EKG paper for Bellows to see. “Then she had a sudden run of extra systoles, and wham… fibrillation.”

“What has she got so far?” asked Bellows.

“Nothing,” said Shergood.

“OK,” said Bellows. “Push an amp of bicarbonate and draw up 10 cc of a 1:1000 epinephrine in a syringe with a cardiac needle.”

One of the ICU nurses injected the bicarbonate; another prepared the epinephrine.

“Somebody draw blood for stat electrolytes and calcium,” said Bellows, letting Reid take over the massage. Bellows felt the femoral pulse under Cartwright’s hand and was satisfied.

“From what Billings said at the complication conference on this case, the same thing is happening here that happened in the OR to cause all her troubles in the first place,” said Bellows thoughtfully. He took the 10 cc syringe with the epinephrine from the nurse, holding it up to let the last traces of air escape.

“Not quite,” said Reid between compressions. “She never fibrillated in the OR.”

“She didn’t fibrillate but she did have premature ventricular contractions. Obviously she had an excitable heart then as now. All right, hold up!” Bellows moved along Nancy Greenly’s left side, brandishing the syringe with the cardiac needle. Reid straightened up from his resuscitative efforts so that Bellows could feel along Nancy Greenly’s sternum for the landmark called the angle of Louis. Using that as a guide, he located the fourth interspace between the ribs.

The needle on Bellows’s syringe was three and a half inches long and a sparkle of reflected light danced off its stainless steel shaft. Decisively Bellows pushed it into the girl’s chest, all the way to the hilt. When the plunger was pulled back, dark red blood swirled up into the clear epinephrine solution,

“Right on,” said Bellows as he rapidly injected the epinephrine directly into the heart.

Susan’s skin crawled with the vivid thought of the long needle tearing its way down into Nancy Greenly’s chest and spearing the quivering mass of cardiac muscle. Susan could almost feel the coldness of the needle in her own heart.

“Go to it,” said Bellows to Reid as he stepped back from the bed. Reid immediately recommenced his cardiac massage. Cartwright nodded, indicating that there was a strong femoral pulse. “Stark is going to be pissed when he hears about this,” continued Bellows, eyeing the monitor, “especially right after his lecture on vigilance in these cases. Shit, I really don’t deserve this kind of headache. If she croaks, my ass is grass.”

Susan had trouble comprehending that Bellows had actually said what he did. Once again she was faced with the fact that Bellows and probably the entire crew were not thinking of Nancy Greenly as a person. The patient seemed more like the part of a complicated game, like the relationship between the football and the teams at play. The football was important only as an object to advance the position and advantage of one of the teams. Nancy Greenly had become a technical challenge, a game to be played. The final, ultimate result had become less important than the day-to-day plays and moves and ripostes.

Susan felt a strong surge of ambivalence toward clinical medicine. Her nascent female sensitivities seemed to be a handicap within the mechanistic and tactically oriented atmosphere. She silently longed for the old familiar lecture hall and its abstractions. Reality was too bitter, too cold, too detached.