Coma

Coma

………Robin Cook

PROLOGUE, February 14, 1976

Nancy Greenly lay on the operating table on her back, staring up at the large kettledrum-shaped lights in operating room No. 8, trying to be calm. She had had several pre-op injections, which she was told would make her sleepy and happy. She was neither. Nancy was more nervous and apprehensive than before the shots. Worst of all, she felt totally, completely, and absolutely defenseless. In all her twenty-three years, she had never before felt so embarrassed and so vulnerable. Covering her was a white linen bed sheet The edge was frayed, and there was a small tear at the corner. That bothered her, and she didn’t know why.

Under the sheet, she had on one of those hospital gowns which tie behind the neck and descend only to mid-thigh. The back was open.

Other than that, there was only the sanitary napkin, which she knew was already soaked with her own blood. She hated and feared the hospital at that moment and wanted to scream, to run out of the room and down the corridor. But she didn’t. She feared the bleeding that she had been experiencing more than the cruel detached environment of the hospital; both made her acutely aware of her mortality, and that was something she rarely liked to face.

At 7:11 on the morning of February 14, 1976, the eastern sky over Boston was a chalky gray, and the bumper-to-bumper cars coming into the city had their headlights on. The temperature was thirty-eight degrees, and the people in the streets walked quickly on their separate tracks. There were no voices, just the sound of the machines and the wind.

Within the Boston Memorial Hospital, things were different. The stark fluorescent lights illuminated every square inch of the OR area. The bustle of activity and excited voices lent credence to the dictum that surgery started at 7:30 sharp. That meant the scalpels actually cut the skin at 7:30; the patient fetching, the prep, the scrub, and the induction under anesthesia had to be all completed before 7:30.

As a consequence, at 7:11, the activity in the OR area was in full swing, including room number 8. There was nothing special about No. 8. It was a typical OR in the Memorial. The walls were a neutral-colored tile; the floors were a speckled vinyl. At 7:30, February 14, 1976, a D&C—dilation and curettage, a routine gynecological procedure—was scheduled in room No. 8. The patient was Nancy Greenly; the anesthesiologist was Dr.

Robert Billing, a second-year anesthesiology resident; the scrub nurse was Ruth Jenkins; the circulating nurse was Gloria D’Mateo. The surgeon was George Major—the new, young partner of one of the older, established OB-GYN men—and he was in the dressing room donning his surgical scrub suit, while the others were hard at work.

Nancy Greenly had been bleeding for eleven days. At first she passed it off as a normal period, despite the fact that it was several weeks early.

There had been no premenstrual discomfort, maybe a vague cramp on the morning the first spotting occurred. But after that it had been a painless affair, waxing and waning. Each night she hoped to have seen the last of it but had awakened to find the tampon soaked. The telephone conversations, first with Dr. Major’s nurse, then with the doctor himself, had allayed her fears for progressively shorter and shorter durations.

And it was a bother, a gigantic nuisance, and as it was with such things, it had come at a most inopportune time. She thought about Kim Devereau coming up to spend his spring break from Duke Law School with her in Boston. Her roommate had fortuitously made plans to spend that week skiing at Killington. Everything seemed to have been falling into beautiful, romantic place, everything except the bleeding. There was no way Nancy could blithely dismiss it. She was a delicately angular and attractive girl with an aristocratic appearance. About her person she was fastidious. If her hair was the slightest bit dirty she felt uneasy. So the continued bleeding made her feel messy, unattractive, out of control. Eventually it began to frighten her.

Nancy remembered lying on the couch with her feet up on the arm, reading the editorial page of the Globe while Kim was in the kitchen making drinks. She had become aware of a strange sensation in her vagina. It was different from anything she had ever felt before. It felt as if she was being inflated by a warm soft mass. There had been absolutely no pain or discomfort. At first she was perplexed as to the origin of the sensation, but then she felt a warmth on her inner thighs and a tickling trickle of fluid run down into the recess of her buttocks.

Without undue anxiety, she recognized that she was bleeding, bleeding very fast. Casually, without moving her body, she had turned her head toward the kitchen and called out, “Kim, would you do me a favor and call an ambulance?”

“What’s wrong?” asked Kim, hurrying to her.