itself, which made him a perfect subject for Nyebern. By the time the
air ambulance was touching down in the hospital parking lot, the usual
array of operating-room instruments and devices had been augmented with
a bypass machine and other equipment required by the resuscitation team.
Treatment would not take place in the regular emergency room. Those
facilities offered insufficient space to deal with Harrison in addition
to the usual influx of patients. Though Jonas Nyebern was a
cardiovascular surgeon and the project team was rich with surgical
skills, resuscitation procedures seldom involved surgery. Only the
discovery of a severe internal injury would require them to cut
Harrison, and their use of an operating room was more a matter of
convenience than necessity.
When Jonas entered from the surgical hallway after preparing himself at
the scrub sinks, his project team was waiting for him. Because fate had
deprived him of his wife, daughter, and son, leaving him without family,
and because an innate shyness had always inhibited him from making
friends beyond the boundaries of his profession, these were not merely
his colleagues but the only people in the world with whom he felt
entirely comfortable and about whom he cared deeply.
Helga Dorner stood by the instrument cabinets to Jonas’s left, in the
penumbra of the light that fell from the array of halogen bulbs over the
operating table. She was a superb circulating nurse with a broad face
and sturdy body reminiscent of any of countless steroid-saturated female
Soviet track stars, but her eyes and hands were those of the gentlest
Raphael Madonna. Patients initially feared her, soon respected her,
eventually adored her.
With solemnity that was characteristic in moments like this, Helga did
not smile but gave Jonas a thumbs-up sign.
Near the bypass machine stood Gina Delilo, a thirty-year-old RN and
surgical technician who chose, for whatever reasons, to conceal her
extraordinary competence and sense of responsibility behind a pert,
cute, ponytailed exterior that made her seem to be an escapee from one
of those old Gidget or beach-party movies that had been popular decades
ago.
Like the others, Gina was dressed in hospital greens and a string-tied
cotton cap that concealed her blond hair, but bright-pink ankle socks
sprouted above the elastic-edged cloth boots that covered her shoes.
Flanking the operating table were Dr. Ken Nakamura and Dr. Kari
Dovell, two hospital-staff physicians with successful local private
practices. Ken was a rare double threat, holding advanced degrees in
intern medicine and neurology. Daily experience with the fragility of
human physiology drove some doctors to drink and caused others to harden
their hearts until they were emotionally isolated from their patients;
Ken’s healthier defense was a sense of humor that was sometimes twisted
but always psychologically healing. Kari, a first-rate specialist in
pediatric medicine, was four inches taller than Ken’s five-feet-seven,
reed-thin where he was slightly pudgy, but she was as quick to laugh as
the internist.
Sometimes, though, a profound sadness in her eyes troubled Jonas and led
him to believe that a cyst of loneliness lay so deep within her that
friendship could never provide a scalpel long or sharp enough to excise
it Jonas looked at each of his four colleagues in turn, but none of them
spoke. The windowless room was eerily quiet.
For the most part the team had a curiously passive air, as if
disinterested in what was about to happen. But their eyes gave them
away, for they were the eyes of astronauts who were standing in the exit
bay of an orbiting shuttle on the brink of a space walk: aglow with
excitement, wonder, a sense of adventure and a little fear.
Other hospitals had emergency-room staffs skilled enough at
resuscitation medicine to give a patient a fighting chance at recovery,
but Orange County General was one of only three centers in all of
southern California that could boast a separately funded, cutting-edge
project aimed at maximizing the success of reanimation procedures.
Harrison was the project forty-fifth patient in the fourteen months
since it had been established, but the manner of his death made him the
most interesting. Drowning. Followed by rapidly induced hypothermia.
Drowning meant relatively little physical damage, and the chill factor