Coma

With the reassuring warmth of the books about her, Susan felt instantly at home in the library, in sharp contrast to her feelings in the ICU and the hospital in general. She put down her notebook and got her bearings. The center of the room, with its two-storied ceiling, had large oak tables with black academic colonial-style chairs. The end of the room was dominated by a large window that reached up to the ceiling, giving out onto the small inner courtyard of the hospital, which contained a patch of anemic grass, a single leafless tree, and a tennis court. The net on the tennis court sagged sadly from midwinter disuse.

Bookshelves flanked both sides of the tables and were oriented at right angles to the long axis of the room. There was a cast-iron circular staircase which led up to the balcony. On that level the shelves to the right contained books, while bound periodicals were in stacks to the left.

Against the wall opposite the window stood the dark mahogany card catalogue.

Consulting the card catalogue, Susan searched out the books on anesthesiology. Once in the proper area, she went from book to book.

She knew next to nothing about anesthesiology and needed a good introductory text. Specifically she was interested in anesthetic complications. She picked out five books, the most promising of which was titled Anesthetic Complications: Recognition and Management.

As she was carrying the books over to the table where she had placed her notebook, her name came over the page system, gently subdued, distinctly followed by the number 482.

Susan let the books slide from her hands onto the table. She turned and eyed the phone. Then she turned back to the table and looked down at the books and her notebook. With her hands resting on the back of one of the chairs, Susan vacillated. She felt torn between her strongly reinforced compulsion to do as she was told and her newly discovered challenge, the problem of prolonged coma after anesthesia. It was not an easy choice. Following the accepted pathways had served her well in the past. She owed her current position to that. And that position was particularly important for Susan because of her sex. All of the females in medicine tended to follow a rather conservative road simply because they were a minority and hence had the feeling that they were constantly on trial.

But then Susan thought about Nancy Greenly in the ICU and Sean Berman in the recovery room. She didn’t think about them as patients but rather as people. She thought about their personal tragedies. Then she knew what she had to do. Medicine had already forced her to make many compromises. This time she was going to do what she thought was right, at least for a couple of intensive days.

“Screw 482,” she said half out loud, smiling at the rhyme. She sat down deliberately and cracked the book on anesthetic complications. The more she thought about Greenly and Berman, the more convinced she was that she was doing the right thing.

Monday, February 23, 2:45 P.M.

Bellows impatiently tapped the top of the extension telephone No. 482, expecting it to ring any second. He was going to answer it before the first ring was completed. In the background the droning voice of the aging professor emeritus, Dr. Allen Druery, could be heard, extolling the virtues of Halstead. The four students appeared lost within the emptiness of the surgical conference room. Bellows had originally thought that the atmosphere of the conference room would add a positive note to the lectures he had planned for the students. But now he wasn’t so sure. The room was too big, too cold for four students, and the lecturer looked a bit ludicrous standing at the podium and facing tier after tier of empty seats.

From where Bellows was sitting, he could see only the backs of the four students. Goldberg was busy taking notes in a furious fashion, getting every word. Dr. Druery’s lecture was mildly interesting but certainly not worth notetaking. Bellows knew the syndrome, though. He’d seen it in action a thousand times and even suffered from it to an extent himself.

As soon as the lights would dim, and someone would start speaking, many medical students would respond in a Pavlovian fashion by taking notes, madly trying to get every word down onto paper without any thought as to the content. The medical student responded in this utterly unintellectual way because, more often than not, he was asked to regurgitate whatever trivia he had been fed.

Bellows was sorry he had not told Susan that he indeed would be hurt if she missed the lecture. In such a small group, her absence was painfully apparent above and beyond the fact that she was so visually distinctive.

Bellows was nervous that Stark would decide to pop in and welcome the group. Of course he’d wonder where the fifth student was, and what could Bellows say? He thought about saying that she was scrubbing on a case. But so early in the game, that was unlikely.