times, like now, she used her height to advantage, casting an
intimidating
shadow, looking down at an adversary with a hard gaze that seemed to say
better-listen-to me or-I-might-peck-your-eyes-out-mister. Jonas was two
inches taller than Kari, so she couldn’t actually look down at him, but
few women were that close to being able to give him even a level-eyed
stare, and the effect was the same as if he had been five-feet-two.
Jonas looked at Ken, seeking support.
The neurologist was having none of it. “In fact the body temperature
could have fallen below freezing after death, then warmed up on the trip
here, and there’d be no way for us to tell. You know that, Jonas.
The only thing we can say for sure about this guy is that he’s deader
than Elvis has ever been.”
“If he’s only forty-six degrees now Kari said.
Every cell in the human body is composed primarily of water. The
percentage of water differs from blood cells to bone cells, from skin
cells to liver cells, but there is always more water than anything else.
And when water freezes, it expands. Put a bottle of soda in the freezer
to quick-chill it, leave it too long, and you’re left with just the
exploded contents bristling with shattered glass. Frozen water bursts
the walls of brain cells-all body cell-in a similar fashion.
No one on the team wanted to revive Harrison from death if they were
assured of bringing back something dramatically less than a whole
person.
No good physician, regardless of his passion to heal, wanted to battle
and defeat death only to wind up with a conscious patient suffering from
massive brain damage or one who could be sustained “alive” only in a
deep coma with the aid of machines.
Jonas knew that his own greatest weakness as a physician was the
extremity of his hatred for death. It was an anger he carried at all
times.
At moments like this the anger could swell into a quiet fury that
affected his judgment. Every patient’s death was a personal affront to
him. He tended to err on the side of optimism, proceeding with a
resuscitation that could have more tragic consequences if it succeeded
than if it failed.
The other four members of the team understood his weakness, too.
They watched him expectantly.
If the operating room had been tomb–still before, it was now as silent
as the vacuum of any lonely place between the stars where God, if He
existed, passed judgment on His helpless creations.
Jonas was acutely aware of the precious seconds ticking past.
The patient had been in the operating room less than two minutes. But
two minutes could make all the difference.
On the table, Harrison was as dead as any man had ever been. His skin
was an unhealthy shade of gray, lips and fingernails and toenails a
cyanotic blue, lips slightly parted in an eternal exhalation. His flesh
was utterly devoid of the tension of life.
However, aside from the two-inch-long shallow gash on the right side of
his forehead, an abrasion on his left jaw, and abrasions on the palms of
his hands, he was apparently uninjured. He had been in excellent
physical condition for a man of thirty-eight, carrying no more than five
extra pounds, with straight bones and well-defined musculature.
No matter what might have happened to his brain cells, he looked like a
perfect candidate for resuscitation.
A decade ago, a physician in Jonas’s position would have been guided by
the Five-Minute Limit, which then had been acknowledged as the maximum
length of time the human brain could go without blood-borne oxygen and
suffer no diminution of mental faculties. During the past decade,
however, as resuscitation medicine had become an exciting new field, the
Five-Minute Limit had been exceeded so often that it was eventually
disregarded. With new drugs that acted as free-radical scavengers,
machines that could cool and heat blood, massive doses of epinephrine,
and other tools, doctors could step well past the Five-Minute Limit and
snatch some patients back from deeper regions of death. And
hypothermia-extreme cooling of the brain which blocked the swift and
ruinous chemical changes in cells following death old extend the length