Critical Condition - Hardcover

Clement, Peter

 
9780345443397: Critical Condition
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 034544339X ISBN 13: 9780345443397
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Left completely paralyzed and speechless, a fully aware prisoner in her own body, geneticist Dr. Kathleen Sullivan falls victim to Dr. Tony Hamlin, Chief of Neurosurgery for a major Manhattan hospital, who subjects her to a series of sinister experiments, unable to communicate with her lover, ER chief Richard Steele. By the author of Lethal Practice.

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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, The Procedure, and Mutant. He is married to a physician and has two sons.

Aus dem Klappentext

In the heat of a passionate encounter, ecstasy suddenly turns to terror for renowned geneticist and TV personality Dr. Kathleen Sullivan. Stricken by a brain hemorrhage, she is rendered completely paralyzed and speechless . . . but still utterly aware; a prisoner inside her own body.

Kathleen is rushed to a Manhattan hospital, her chances of survival slim. Even if she pulls through, the likelihood that she ll sustain permanent brain damage is near one hundred percent. But neither outcome can compare to the insidious fate in store for her masterminded by the very people entrusted with saving her life. As her lover, ER chief Richard Steele, watches and waits for a miracle, Kathleen becomes a pawn in a clandestine plot that runs deeper than medical politics and reaches into the highest echelons of power at New York City Hospital.

Placed in the hands, and at the mercy, of revered Chief of Neurosurgery Dr. Tony Hamlin, Kathleen descends into a waking nightmare. Powerless to resist the sinister experiments she is subjected to, and unable to cry out for help, she must fight desperately to communicate her tortured, trapped thoughts to Steele before her tormentors can carry their bizarre and potentially lethal work to its completion.

Ruthlessly determined to achieve their goals, the secret cabal of ambitious physicians will go to any length to avoid discovery, defy the law, and make medical history at all costs . . . even the human life they are sworn to preserve.

For anyone who has ever had a mortal fear of hospitals, and the sense of powerlessness that often transpires within their cold, sterile corridors, Peter Clement s Critical Condition will provide chilling new nightmares along with infectious suspense.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Two Weeks Earlier, Wednesday, June 13, 6:45 a.m.

She felt the sound more than heard it. It came from deep within her brain, and in the first few seconds seemed to have no more significance than the tiny popping noise a congested sinus makes when it clears, or the slight creak that even a healthy neck can produce after the muscles and tendons have stiffened from being too long in one position.

So Kathleen Sullivan ignored it, automatically relegating the minute sensation to the background trivia of everyday life, deeming it part of approaching forty, unimportant, therefore not to be heeded, and resumed making love to Richard Steele, whom she sat astride watching his eyes glitter in the gray traces of morning light that had begun to creep into her still-darkened bedroom.

God, she loved him. Their sex seemed always such a celebration of how they matched each other in life.

Then the pain hit her at the base of her skull with the force of a two-by-four. “Oh, my God!” she screamed, clasping the back of her head and freezing.

She felt him initially increase his movements, then slow when she failed to respond, his flushed, smiling features growing puzzled.

A swirl of dizziness sent her reeling to the right as if she’d been slapped. She toppled off him. Nausea overwhelmed her, and vomit arched out of her mouth as if shot from a hose. She flopped down, half on and half off his chest. Blackness came quickly, but it took longer before she lost sensation enough to stop feeling the pain entirely.

And she could still hear.

“Kathleen! Kathleen, what's the matter?” he cried from somewhere far off.

Someone’s prying open my skull from the inside, she tried to tell him just before the pressure squeezed all consciousness out of her.

The pain, like roots, ate deep into her sleep, and tendrils of harsh light ripped her out of the merciful dark. She tried to scream, but no sound came. She could see racks of bottles, bags of fluid, and coils of plastic tubing lining the walls of whatever little room they were in, yet everything looked wrong, as if outlined in double. She blinked to clear her vision; it made no difference. She couldn’t shift her eyes from side to side, but she could look up and down. She tried to move her hands, but not even her fingers would budge. Had they tied her to the bed?

Someone loomed over her and placed a black mask on her face, then pumped air into her mouth and down her throat.

“Her breathing’s labored,” she heard Richard say from a place beyond her line of sight. “Step on it!”

“We’re a minute from the door, Doc!”

She felt the room sway hard to the left, and realized they were in an ambulance. Probably on the way to Richard’s ER. But why couldn’t she look at him? Move anything? God, what had happened to her?

“It’s okay, Kathleen,” she heard him say. “We’ve got you. Just relax and let us help you breathe.”

Volleys of air forced their way past the base of her tongue and down into her larynx. Each one felt big as a tennis ball and filled her with the urge to gag, but her pharynx stayed flaccid, refusing to respond. She wanted to shake off the mask and gasp for breath, yet couldn’t.

“If you can hear me, Kathleen, we’ve called ahead to the hospital, and the chief of neurosurgery is waiting for us. You’ve suffered some kind of stroke, probably hemorrhagic from the way it’s affected your eyes, but you’ll make it okay, Kathleen. Count on it!” His voice trembled and broke, leaving her wondering if he’d sobbed. Squeeze after squeeze of air went down her throat. “Hyperventilating you like this blows off carbon dioxide and constricts arteries in the brain,” Richard continued, his words coming in fragments as if they were catching on something sharp. “That’ll slow the bleeding.”

With a squeal of brakes the vehicle lurched to a stop. Instantly she heard the doors at her feet snap open and felt the cool morning air flow into the vehicle. Only then did she realize she was nude under a blanket.

The attendant went on ventilating her and a half dozen men and women in white clustered around to help lift out the stretcher. “Where’s Tony Hamlin?” she heard Richard ask.

“In resus, ready and waiting with his neurosurgical team,” someone answered as they raced into the ER and down a corridor, the sweep of the ceiling past her vertical stare adding to her dizziness. She could feel Richard’s hands against her face as he took over holding the mask tightly in place around her mouth and nose. By straining her eyes upward she could see him. His expression grim, he snapped off orders to his staff as he ran. Even when he glanced down at her and tried to smile it was a miserable attempt to reassure her.

My God, she thought, the poor man. He thinks I’m going to die, just like his wife.

They wheeled her into a vacuous cool chamber filled with a dozen people in green gowns, masks, and surgical gloves. Everyone grabbed a part of her and worked on it as if she was a race car at a pit stop. While IVs went in her arms, a tube was shoved down her throat, and what looked liked tiny spigots were stuck into her wrists. Once more she felt she had to gag, but not even a cough or sound of any kind emerged. She lay as motionless as a corpse, yet aware.

“We’ve got her stable, Richard. Why don’t you let us take it now?” said a man with long white hair standing by her head.

“Right, of course, Tony,” she heard her lover reply, his voice more strained and uncertain than ever.

No, don’t leave me alone, she wanted to cry out.

His face once more came into view, his handsome features as tense and pale as latex stretched over a skull. “Kathleen, our chief of neurosurgery, Tony Hamlin, is right here to take care of you.”

“Hi, Kathleen,” Hamlin said. “Sorry to meet you in such circumstances.”

“These people are the best,” Richard continued. “They’ll get you through this.” He leaned closer and whispered, “I love you.”

Please stay!

He turned, and out of the corner of her fixed field of vision she watched him disappear.

Then a nurse whipped off her blanket and proceeded to insert a catheter up her urethra. “Did the event happen during intercourse?” she asked coldly, examining the secretions she’d picked up between her gloved fingers.

“Isn’t that one of the classic presentations of an arterial rupture?” asked a curly-haired man in a short clinical jacket as he adjusted her IV. He didn’t look much older than her daughter Lisa, who’d just turned nineteen. Christ, Richard had left her in the hands of a kid.

“When you’ve finished what you’re doing, Doctor, why not step outside and get a proper history from Dr. Steele?” said the white-haired man behind her head as he proceeded to shine a penlight into her eyes. Despite the glare, she couldn’t avert her gaze, only blink. His face looked to be in pieces, like a Picasso.

Richard stood in the corridor slumped against the wall. His taking charge in the ambulance had been both critically necessary and a retreat into action, his concentration on technique keeping his terror at bay. Now he had nothing to divert him from facing what had happened, not as a doctor, but as her lover. At the center of the domain where he’d spent his professional life resuscitating others from the dead, he began to tremble with helplessness.

A nurse with closely cropped gray hair and rectangular,...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
034544339X
ISBN 13 
9780345443397
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
329
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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