Patient Read Free Page B

revolutionize neurosurgery.
    An hour passed with little conversation. To Jessie, it seemed like a minute. Every microscopic movement of the robot had to be visualized in three dimensions: anterior, posterior, right, left, up, down, and every diagonal in between. She asked the console tech for Scheherazade , one of a dozen or so CDs she had on file to be played while she operated. The slow, hypnotic music instantly softened the hollow, tiled silence. The electronically enhanced tumor as displayed on the monitor was crimson—a deadly hydra, its many tentacles probing deep into the dark blue of normal brain. ARTIE, the defender of the realm, was bright yellow. Delicately, deftly, Jessie directed its snout and the ultrasonic sword it wielded. Bit by bit the crimson receded. Bit by bit the blue expanded—swollen but intact brain, filling the void where the tumor had been liquefied, then aspirated. Another hour passed. Dave Brubeck replaced Rimsky-Korsakov on the sound system. Two of the eight tentacles and a portion of the cancer’s body were now gone.
    Still, to Jessie, ARTIE’s responsiveness in one particular maneuver seemed slightly sluggish.
    “Em, is there anything the matter?” she asked. “I still feel out of sync some of the time. There’s a choppiness when I try to back ARTIE up. Have you checked each of the pods?”
    “I will. ... I don’t see anything striking, although numbers five and six are spinning a bit more rapidly than the others. I’m not sure, but I would think that’s just because they’re moving through liquefied tumor and aren’t actually connecting with solid tissue.”
    “Maybe. I’m telling you, Em, we’ve still got a lot to learn about this little fella.”
    Jessie suddenly stopped humming along to Brubeck’s “Take Five.” Something was definitely wrong with ARTIE.
    “Em, check the pods again, please,” she said with unmistakable concern.
    When she called for ARTIE to move right, forward and posterior, the robot gave a sharp jab to the left.
    “The problem’s in five and six,” Emily replied. “RPMs are staying up. They’re not shutting off.”
    “Jessie, you’re drifting posterior and left,” Hans called in over the intercom, his English perfect although his Dutch accent remained pronounced. “A millimeter ... more now. ... You are closing in on brain stem.”
    Disaster. Jessie battled the controls, but she could see that ARTIE wasn’t responding the way it had been. From beneath her hair guard, sweat beaded across her forehead. Several drops fell onto her glasses.
    “Wipe, please, John,” she said, turning her head briefly so the circulating nurse could dry her with a cloth sponge. “My glasses, too.”
    The image on the screen was devastating. A rim of blue had begun to appear between one of the crimson tentacles and the robot. ARTIE was veering away from the cancer and through normal brain tissue toward the densely packed neurons of the brain stem, where even a millimeter of tissue destruction, properly placed, could be lethal.
    “Jess, you were right,” Emily said. “Things just went haywire on the panel here. Five and six are continuing to spin. And now four is acting strange. It’s like ARTIE’s had a stroke or something.”
    “Damn,” Jessie muttered, tapping rapidly at the key that should have reversed the malfunction.
    Communication between the panel and ARTIE had somehow been disrupted. An overheat someplace? A computer glitch? Jessie cursed herself for not delaying the procedure until Skip Porter returned from having his painfully abscessed molar taken care of. A wizard with electronics, Skip was her lab technician and knew ARTIE at least as intimately as she did. But the truth was, with the robot buried deep in the brain, all the knowledge in the world wasn’t going to salvage the operation.
    The blue rim expanded.
    “You’re well into brain stem now, Jessie,” Hans reported.
    Unspoken was the estimate of the neurologic damage that had already