of time a patient might lie dead yet be successfully revived. Twenty
minutes was common. Thirty was not hopeless. Cases of triumphant
resuscitation at forty and fifty minutes were on record. In 1988, a
two-year-old girl in Utah, plucked from an icy river, was brought back
to life without any apparent brain damage after being dead at least
sixty-six minutes, and only last year a twenty-year-old woman in
Pennsylvania had been revived with all faculties intact seventy minutes
after death.
The other four members of the team were still staring at Jonas.
Death, he told himself, is just another pathological state.
Most pathological states could be reversed with treatment.
Dead was one thing. But cold and dead was another.
To Gina, he said, “How long’s he been dead?”
Part of Gina’s job was to serve as liaison, by radio, with the on-site
paramedics and make a record of the information most vital to the
resuscitation team at this moment of decision. She looked at her
watch-a Rolex on an incongruous pink leather band to match her sock-and
did not even have to pause to calculate: “Sixty minutes, but they’re
only guessing how long he was dead in the water before they found him.
Could be longer.”
“Or shorter,” Jonas said.
While Jonas made his decision, Helga rounded the table to Gina’s side
and, together, they began to study the flesh on the cadaver’s left arm,
searching for the major vein, just in case Jonas decided to resuscitate.
Locating blood vessels in the slack flesh of a corpse was not always
easy, since applying a rubber tourniquet would not increase systemic
pressure.
There was no pressure in the system.
“Okay, I’m going to call it,” Jonas said.
He looked around at Ken, Kari, Helga, and Gnia, giving them one last
chance to challenge him. Then he checked his own Timer wristwatch and
said, “It’s nine-twelve P.M Monday night, March fourth. The patient,
Hatchford Benjamin Harrison, is dead … but retrievable.”
To their credit, whatever their doubts might have been, no one on the
team hesitated once the call had been made. They had the right-and the
duty-to advise Jonas as he was making the decision, but once it was
made, they put all of their knowledge, skill, and training to work to
insure that the “retrievable” part of his call proved correct.
Dear God, Jonas thought, I hope I’ve done the right thing.
Already Gina had inserted an exsanguination needle into the vein that
she and Helga had located. Together they switched on and adjusted the
bypass machine, which would draw the blood out of Harrison’s body and
gradually warm it to one hundred degrees. Once warmed, the blood would
be pumped back into the still-blue patient through another tube feeding
a needle inserted in a thigh vein.
With the process begun, more urgent work awaited than time to do it.
Harrison’s vital signs, currently nonexistent, had to be monitored for
the first indications of response to therapy. The treatment already
provided by the paramedics needed to be reviewed to determine if a
previously administered dose of epinephrina heart-stimulating
hormone-was so large as to rule out giving more of it to Harrison at
this time. Meanwhile Jonas pulled up a wheeled cart of medications,
prepared by Helga before the body had arrived, and began to calculate
the variety and quantity of ingredients for a chemical cocktail of
free-radical scavengers designed to retard tissue damage.
“Sixty-one minutes,” Gina said, updating them on the estimated length of
time that the patient had been dead. “Wow! That’s a long time talking
to the angels. Getting this one back isn’t going to be a weenie roast,
boys and girls.”
“Forty-eight degrees,” Helga reported solemnly, noting the cadaver’s
body temperature as it slowly rose toward the temperature of the room
around it.
Death is just an ordinary pathological state, Jonas reminded himself.
Pathological states can usually be reversed.
With her incongruously slender, long-fingered hands, Helga folded a
cotton surgical towel over the patient’s genitals, and Jonas recognized
that she was not merely making a concession to modesty but was
performing an act of kindness that expressed an important new attitude
toward Harrison. A dead man had no interest in modesty. A dead man did