Second Opinion Read Free Page A

Fagone's size, was not skilled in dealing with emergencies of this magnitude. By the time she got the right medications into the man, Fagone's blood pressure had been zero for nearly three minutes. By the time she gave up trying to force an endotracheal breathing tube past the massively swollen, distorted vocal cords, and began clumsily performing her first emergency tracheotomy while waiting for the ENT surgeon to answer his page, there had been no effective respirations for four minutes. She had just sliced a scalpel across her patient's massive throat when his heart stopped. The blood flowing from the gaping laceration was gentle.
    When the oncologist, frustrated and utterly demoralized, called off the resuscitation at the ten-minute mark, a useful airway had still not been established.
    Jeffrey Fagone, who years before had survived two assassination attempts during his rise to wealth and power in the Teamsters Union, had no chance of surviving this one.
    Unlike the other attempts, however, there was no suspicion of anything sinister at work here. Fagone had been done in by a lethal allergic reaction to Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia experimental drug #BW1745. No one present that day thought otherwise. There would be no analysis of the contents of the vial, and the perfunctory autopsy performed the next morning would disclose nothing out of the ordinary.
    The treatment protocol for #BW1745 would be suspended indefinitely, but within just a few months, the principal investigator, supported by a hefty grant from one of the pharmaceutical giants, would roll out another experimental drug to meet the demand of referrals from all over the world.
    The Susan and Clyde Terry Cancer Center closed for cleanup and staff support for an hour after the tragic event, but there were patients to treat, many of whom had come from even greater distances than Jeffrey Fagone.
    Soon, like the surface of a pond disturbed by a jumping fish, the ripples had subsided, and the world's greatest hospital had gone back to being the world's greatest hospital.

CHAPTER 2

    For another ten minutes, Thea stared down at her father, mentally cataloguing his injuries. It didn't take a Petros Sperelakis to discern that given the sort of excellent medical care practiced at the Beaumont, none of them was immediately life-threatening, except the hemorrhage in his midbrain. On the plus side of the ledger, she believed that at almost seventy, the man was in remarkable shape thanks to a disciplined diet, exercise, the right genetics, and the preservative effects of a daily shot glass or two of seven-star Metaxa.
    Thea's eyes were X-ray probes, seeing through Petros's skull and visualizing the intricate folds and contours of his magnificent brain. According to Niko, the hemorrhage had occurred in the center of the middle portion of the brain stem, a tight bundle of nerves connecting the gray matter and the spinal cord and known technically as the mesencephalon. It had been a while since Thea had read a neuroanatomy textbook, several of them, in fact. But it had not been so long that she had forgotten very much. In fact, forgetting material she had read was something that essentially did not happen.
    In just a few seconds, she connected with a vast amount of information concerning midbrain anatomy and function. Her mind's eye saw the information as integrations of a number of texts, but if she had to, she knew that she would be able to quote the actual passages virtually verbatim, with few or no mistakes, along with the page numbers on which they appeared.
    There were curses connected with having the form of autism called Asperger syndrome, but her obsession with the details of what she saw, and her mastery over the printed word, had always been blessings—refuges in the often-confusing world of the neurotypicals. She flashed on Dimitri, never officially diagnosed, but undoubtedly afflicted with abnormal neurology that was similar to hers. The 'autism spectrum' was