Mutant - Hardcover

Clement, Peter

 
9780345443373: Mutant
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345443373 ISBN 13: 9780345443373
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

On an isolated stretch of moonlit highway in Oahu, a woman cradles her dying son in her arms. Though a physician, she cannot staunch the flow of foamy blood from his body. In the days that follow, an autopsy draws a shocking conclusion: the boy, his lungs filled with blood, died of a disease previously found only in birds.
On the other side of the globe, a burned-out ER doctor repeats to himself over and over: Physician, heal thyself. For Dr. Richard Steele, a near fatal heart attack in the middle of his own hospital was the last warning he needed. Now Steele is being recruited into a movement to examine the hazards of genetically modified foods, a job that takes him to an explosive conference in Hawaii.
Spearheaded by a charismatic female doctor, the anti-bioengineering movement is gathering steam. While a powerful company is using genetic breakthroughs to create new, disease-resistant super crops, activists warn that new DNA strains will wreak havoc on the environment. But no one suspects that the controversy is making a far more frightening human threat.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Clement, M.D., is a physician who headed an emergency room at a major metropolitan hospital and now maintains a private practice. He is also the author of Lethal Practice, Death Rounds, and The Procedure. He is married to a physician and has two sons.

Aus dem Klappentext

ctor Peter Clement blends electrifying human drama with the suspense of top-notch medical thrillers. Now, in an all-too-plausible story that could have been torn from today's headlines, Clement has written his most gripping, utterly chilling novel to date.<br><br>On an isolated stretch of moonlit highway in Oahu, a woman cradles her dying son in her arms. Though a physician, she cannot staunch the flow of foamy blood from his body. In the days that follow, an autopsy draws a shocking conclusion: the boy, his lungs filled with blood, died of a disease previously found only in birds. <br><br>On the other side of the globe, a burned-out ER doctor repeats to himself over and over: Physician, heal thyself. For Dr. Richard Steele, a near fatal heart attack in the middle of his own hospital was the last warning he needed. Now Steele is being recruited into a movement to examine the hazards of genetically modified foods, a job that takes him to an explosive conference in Hawaii.<br><br>Spear

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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 day—a 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 coming—a 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 huddled with his resident. “What’s your immediate course of action here?” he demanded.

“Albuterol, by aerosol, to dilate his bronchi?” she replied timidly.

“No! At least not first off. This guy’s bronchi are clamped so tight that he can’t inhale air, let alone medication. What are you going to do about that?”

“Give him IV steroids?” she said hopefully.

“Again, later. Right now you’re going to intubate him before he arrests on you.”

She flushed from the neck of her clinical jacket to the tips of her earlobes. “I’m sorry, Dr. Steele, I knew that. It’s just that you’re making me nervous—”

“Knowledge at the ready, Doctor, is the best and only antidote around here for being nervous,” he snapped. With a wave at the boy, he added, “And your apologizing for not having that knowledge isn’t exactly going to cut it with him!”

Her eyes welled up with tears.

Shit, he thought, what an asshole I’ve become! He hadn’t always been so impatient and sarcastic when he taught. The woman on the verge of weeping in front of him appeared young enough to be his daughter, and so far during her rotation she’d proved herself no better or worse than the thousand other novice doctors whom he’d guided through the shoals of ER over the years. With a pang of loss he remembered the heady days when he’d actually adored taking them under his wing and building their confidence. Teacher of the Year, they’d repeatedly voted him before he lost all capacity for the joy of it. Now the phrase made him wince: If any resident had said it of him over the past eighteen months it could only have been in sarcasm. He knew that the sole reason they still put up with him were the skills he could impart. A rotation under his temperamental watch had become known as a trial by fire—a passage to be endured and survived, and then joked about over beer—one of the horror stories that all training programs generate. But causing his charges to cry was a new low, even for him. And if he didn’t make it right with her, she could report him for it. Shit, she probably should, he thought, disgusted with himself. “So how do we do a crash induction?” he asked her a tad more gently.

“Administer IV midazolam for short-acting sedation, give an antifasciculation dose of pancuronium, then paralyze him with succinylcholine . . .”

The answers poured out of her now that he’d adopted a less frightening tone. As they hurried into the resuscitation room, he gladly let her talk. The brisk pace left him out of breath. Damn cigarettes, he thought, wondering if he’d ever regain the courage to quit.

The nurses converged around the teenager, plying him with pressure cuffs, stethoscopes, IV lines, and monitor leads.

“BP ninety over fifty. Pulse fifty-five.”

“O-two sat—eighty-seven.”

“Respirations labored at fifty; minimal air entry at the bases!”

As they measured his agony by the numbers and the resident ordered the meds she’d rattled off before, Steele moved to the head of the bed.

The boy’s eyes were blue rims around pupils wide with terror. He attempted to talk, but issued little more than a barely audible squeak.

“It’s okay, son,” the physician said gently, easily offering the professional comfort he so readily gave to frightened patients but withheld from others around him. With a pang of guilt, he thought of his own child, who was nearly the same age, to whom he’d repeatedly uttered those same words, but never with the conviction that he offered daily to strangers. “We’re going to sedate you and have you breathing right in no time. Just nod yes or shake your head no to my questions. Is your asthma usually this bad?”

The youth shook his head....

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345443373
ISBN 13 
9780345443373
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
326
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