Kindle Edition
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Surgeonwriter
ISBN-10: B00BXZNE90
Type: Fiction
Pages: 40
Copyright: March 12, 2013
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
To save a life, a surgeon has to make the most difficult cut of his career...
The sound was piercing, high pitched, and shrill, but quick and elusive the way a chirp is at once there and not. Irritating too, the midlife equivalent of that old elementary school trick of dragging one's fingernails across a chalkboard. That chirp was a curiously instantaneous sound, lasting, I came to think of it as defining, an instant. And that instant came again (chirp), and again (chirp), and again (chirp). I timed it later—not because I wanted to but because I had no choice—and found it to be exactly thirty seconds. Oh sure, sometimes it seemed shorter, like maybe only fifteen or even ten seconds had elapsed since the last chirp, but then I would watch the second hand of my timex jerk forward and when the counting was done the interval would be those same goddamn thirty seconds. No sir, that lousy smoke detector was never off by so much as a tick.
I guess maybe it was my sanity that was off.
Thus begins this fine 14,000 word novella designed to keep you in suspense.
Excerpt
It was Shock 101, first year med school stuff. Bobby was losing blood, the so-called effective circulating volume. I thought he had arrived to the ER having already lost a good bit of the red stuff, maybe a quart. It couldn't have been much more than that. He had been confused, maybe a little pale. But he had been awake and his heart rate, although fast, hadn't been skipping beats. He'd been in Class I shock when he hit the door, which by definition in a guy his size worked out to a quart of blood, about 15% of his effective circulating volume if I had my figures right.
He was damn sure beyond that now. The tracing on the monitor showed Bobby's heart was doing periodic back flips, meaning it was having trouble keeping up with demand. The folks at the top of the table were trying hard, breaking a sweat and dancing like there was no tomorrow. They were giving him salt water in the absence of blood—which meant they were giving him volume but no life saving red blood cells, a trick that would buy a few minutes tops. Pretty soon Bobby would start bleeding water and before too long he wouldn't even bleed that.
I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well—his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun—and we couldn't begin to stop the bloodletting in that case. "Looking pretty thin down here," I hollered when the stuff coming out his wounds was no more than pink salt water. That baby's heart stopped, started, stopped and started a dozen times before it finally gave up the ghost and we pronounced him. I could have read a newspaper through the watery stuff coming out his veins by then.
Bobby's heart wouldn't last that long. He had probably lost a quart and a half of blood, maybe even two full quarts, by then. Half a gallon of milk. He might survive losing a third quart—though he'd probably have a stroke and speak gibberish for the rest of his miserable life—but he damn sure wouldn't live to shoot another deer if he lost a fourth, which would bring him up to the magic and lethal number of forty percent blood loss. Everybody goes to ground at that number.
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