courage.
The surgeon had long, supple fingers. His hands looked lean but
strong, like those of a concert pianist. She told herself that Jack
could have received neither better care nor more tender mercy than
those skilled hands had provided.
“Two things concern us now,” Procnow continued.
. “Severe shock combined with a heavy loss of blood can sometimes have
…
cerebral consequences.”
Oh, God, please. Not this.
He said, “It depends on how long there was a decrease in the supply of
blood to the brain and how severe the decrease was, how deoxygenated
the tissues became.”
She closed her eyes.
“His E.E.G looks good, and if I were to base a prognosis on that, I’d
say there’s been no brain damage. We have every reason to be
optimistic.
But we won’t know until he regains consciousness.”
“When?”
“No way of telling. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Maybe never.
She opened her eyes, fighting back tears but not with complete
success.
She took her purse off the end table and opened it.
As she blew her nose and blotted her eyes, the surgeon said, “There’s
one more thing. When you visit him in the I.C.U, you’ll see he’s been
immobilized with a restraining jacket and bed straps.”
At last Heather met his eyes again.
He said, “A bullet or fragment struck the spinal cord. There’s
bruising of the spine, but we don’t see a fracture.”
“Bruising. Is that serious?”
“It depends on whether any nerve structures were crushed.”
“Paralysis?”
“Until he’s conscious and we can run some simple tests, we can’t
know.
If there is paralysis, we’ll take another look for a fracture. The
important thing is, the cord hasn’t been severed, nothing as bad as
that. If there’s paralysis and we find a fracture, we’ll get him into
a body cast, apply traction to the legs to get the pressure off the
sacrum. We can treat a fracture. It isn’t catastrophic. There’s an
excellent chance we can get him on his feet again.”
“But no guarantees,” she said softly.
He hesitated. Then he said, “There never are.”
CHAPTER SIX.
The cubicle, one of eight, had large windows that looked into the staff
area of the I.C.U. The drapes had been pulled aside so the nurses could
keep a direct watch on the patient even from their station in the
center of the wheel-shaped chamber. Jack was attached to a cardiac
monitor that transmitted continuous data to a terminal at the central
desk, an intravenous drip that provided him with glucose and
antibiotics, and a bifurcated oxygen tube that clipped gently to the
septum between his nostrils.
Heather was prepared to be shocked by Jack’s condition–but he looked
even worse than she expected. He was unconscious, so his face was
slack, of course, but the lack of animation was not the only reason for
his frightening appearance. His skin was bone-white, with dark-blue
circles around his sunken eyes. His lips were so gray that she thought
of ashes, and a Biblical quote passed through her mind with unsettling
resonance, as if it had actually been spoken aloud–ashes to ashes,
dust to dust. He seemed ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when he had
left home that morning, as if his struggle for survival had taken place
over a week, not just a few hours.
A lump in her throat made it difficult for her to swallow as she stood
at the side of the bed, and she was unable to speak. Though he was
unconscious, she didn’t want to talk to him until she was sure she
could control her speech.
She’d read somewhere that even patients in comas might be able to hear
people around them, on some deep level, they might understand what was
said and benefit from encouragement. She didn’t want Jack to hear a
tremor of fear or doubt in her voice–or anything else that might upset
him or exacerbate what fear and depression already gripped him.
The cubicle was unnervingly quiet. The heart-monitor sound had been
turned off, leaving only a visual display. The oxygen-rich air
escaping through the nasal inserts hissed so faintly she could hear it
only when she leaned close to him, and the sound of his shallow