Mutant: A Medical Thriller

Thirteen Months Later New York City Hospital Dr. Richard Steele found today's shift his worst ever in ER. Of course, Mondays were always bad compared to the rest of his week. More people arrived in emergency with heart attacks and every other kind of medical crisis on that daya fact he knew well as a twenty-year veteran and longtime chief of the department. But this Monday's marathon seemed particularly hard, and all afternoon he felt a step behind. One of the nurses slammed down the phone and sprinted toward the resuscitation room. "There's a precode cominga fifteen-year-old asthmatic!" she yelled over her shoulder the way a quarterback calls a play. Everyone within earshot leaped up to help her get ready, instantly understanding what would be demanded of them. Past an overflow of stretcher patients crammed into the corridor, they scrambled after her, briskly navigating the jumble of IV poles, bags, and lines that hung like webs from the ceiling. As he watched them go, Steele knew that not only the protocols for running a respiratory arrest would be flashing automatically into their minds. The patient's age would pump their adrenaline levels higher than usual. The prospect of losing someone so young always exacerbated the fear of failure in ER. It would be his job to make sure that the extra anxiety didn't affect his team's performance. At one time he accepted this added burden as simply another part of his role. These days he found himself dreading it. While his abilities as a resuscitator were as sharp as ever, his people skills had become nonexistent. "Put the MI who's still in resus near the head of the line!" he called after them, making himself heard above the noise of a department already loud from overcrowding. He grabbed the nearest receiver and punched in the numbers for the cardiac care unit. In no time two nurses raced back from the resuccitation room pushing a gurney that bore a frightened-looking elderly woman attached to an armada of portable monitors, intravenous tubes, and a tank of oxygen. By then he'd at least managed to bully the covering cardiologist into giving the woman a bed upstairs, where they could treat her heart attack properly. Years of cost-cutting had made such fights into another of his "routine" duties, but this time the argument left him feeling drained and sweaty. A low rumble of protest broke out from those who were also waiting for beds when the nurses wheeled the woman past their convoy of stretchers and parked her at the front. "Christ, it's warm in here," he complained in an overloud voice to no one in particular, continuing to scribble his clinical notes in her chart. "Would someone call maintenance again and tell them to turn down the goddamned heat? It's too bloody hot to work!" One of the nearby clerks, already wearing a sweater, gave him a curious glance. The cardiac lady, despite being so sick, skewered her face into an expression of disapproval, pulled her covers up around her neck, and muttered loudly enough for everyone in the nursing station to hear, "I'm lucky to make it out of this zoo before I freeze to death." The ambulance attendants rushed in with a tall adolescent who had blue lips, a gray face, and such respiratory distress that beneath his open shirt the muscles between his ribs sucked inward each time he attempted to breathe. Even though they'd given him oxygen, he kept pulling off the mask, frantically rolling his eyes and straining his head in every direction, the way a man trapped in an airless chamber might cast about trying to find a final puff of breath. As Steele followed the stretcher between the rows of patients lining the way, he huddledClement, Peter is the author of 'Mutant: A Medical Thriller' with ISBN 9780345443373 and ISBN 0345443373.