Second Opinion Read Free

called Asperger syndrome.
    The decision to allow his younger daughter to undergo neuropsychiatric testing and therapy did not come easily to Petros. In the lexicon of his life, there was no such word as can't and no such concept as psychotherapy. If he had any weakness at all as a diagnostician, it was in the area of psychosomatic illness and the mind-body connection.
    'I think he's comfortable,' Vernice ventured from across the bed.
    'I'm sure he is,' Thea replied, managing with some difficulty to swallow her belief that if Petros was feeling anything, then he was certainly not comfortable, and if he was feeling nothing at all, then trying to equate that void with comfort was a stretch.
    'Your brother Dimitri said that if your father was in as deep a coma as he appears to be, it was a futile exercise to wonder if he was comfortable or not.'
    'Sometimes, Dimitri says things just for the shock effect,' Thea replied, smiling inwardly at the number of times and situations in which her eccentric sibling had done just that. Vernice had gotten off relatively easily.
    'Well,' the nurse said, 'at least we have the comfort of knowing that Dr. S. is being taken care of in the greatest hospital in the world.'
    'Yes,' Thea said, wondering where Vernice, and Newsweek, and the countless others who believed as she did about the Beaumont, could have gotten such quantification about something so unquantifiable.

    A T VIRTUALLY the same instant, in the Susan and Clyde Terry Cancer Center, on the far side of the broad campus of the so-called greatest hospital in the world, the treatment nurse was doing her job, injecting a cutting-edge experimental drug into the central IV port of a burly man named Jeffrey Fagone.
    Fagone, a trucking magnate from western Pennsylvania, had his rapid accumulation of wealth interrupted by an unusual variant of the blood cancer known as Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia. His presenting symptom had been lower-back pain. The referral by his primary care doctor had been to the expert in the disease at the Beaumont, where Fagone went yearly for his five-day spa pampering and executive medical checkup. Now, he was part of a cutting-edge treatment protocol—the sort of protocol that the doctors at the Beaumont were renowned for establishing.
    Fagone flew up to the Terry Center weekly on his Gulfstream G500 corporate jet. Now he was about to receive the third in a series of ten treatments. The first two had been absolutely uneventful.
    This injection, however, would be different.
    The vial from which the medication was drawn had been skillfully switched during its journey from the research pharmacy to the cancer center. The new vial, with the same ID number as the old one, now contained enough concentrated bee venom to turn Fagone's bee sting allergy, duly noted in his medical record, into an anaphylactic reaction—a fearsome medical emergency, equivalent to the Fourth of July fireworks on the Charles River Esplanade.
    The eruption did not take long to begin. The first few molecules of the venom instantly began mobilizing mast cells from all over Fagone's body. The cells released huge amounts of histamine and other sensitivity chemicals. More venom, more mast cells, more histamine. In less than a minute, Fagone's tongue, cardinal red, had swollen to the size of a golf ball, and his lips to violet sausages. The muscles in the walls of his bronchial tubes went into vicious spasm. Seconds after that, his larynx, also in spasm, closed off altogether. His entire body became scarlet, and his fingers became nothing more than nubs protruding from softball-sized hands.
    The team in the Terry unit acted quickly, bringing out a stretcher and hoisting the two-hundred-and-seventy-pound former teamster onto it, then wheeling him to an area that could be screened off from other patients.
    But they were paddling against a medical tsunami.
    The IV port was available, but the oncologist covering the unit, a young woman less than half