Death Rounds Read Online Free PDF

about it all. The losers would remain department directors in their own hospital under the authority of an absentee chairperson. In my case, if I lost out to my counterpart at University Hospital, I’d still be in charge of ER at St. Paul’s and there’d be a whole lot fewer meetings. But without the mantle of being chief, I’d have no way of protecting emergency services from loopy policies adopted in other parts of the hospital. In a time of cutbacks, I’d had my fill of them.
    I hurried through a double set of doors and entered a noisy group of about a hundred people. They were standing, talking animatedly, and balancing paper plates of cocktail wieners and glasses of variously colored juices—the luncheon fare of austerity. Our home crowd was still decked out in their lab coats; the visitors wore suits. Obviously the formal part of the assembly was over.
    I immediately started looking for Deloram. A few of my acquaintances razzed me for being late and joked that I’d already lost my job, but they didn’t seem very merry. I also greeted a few friends of Janet’s whom I’d met at various University Hospital functions, but I didn’t stop to talk. I found Deloram at the edge of the crowd near me stage, conversing earnestly with Sean Carrington, the chief of surgery. Whereas Deloram was medium sized, dark haired, and meticulously groomed. Scan was tall with permanently tousled red hair and a bushy mustache—a sort of Yosemite Sam in a white coat.
    “Earl!” he greeted me enthusiastically. “What say we settle this nonsense like the old gladiator movies. Pair us off right here, using wienie toothpicks—‘We who are about to die’ and all that stuff.”
    In spite of my problem, I couldn’t help but grin. The man always tried to keep us laughing.
    “Sorry, Sean, but I need Stewart here for an emergency,” I announced, stepping up and gently taking Deloram by the arm to steer him toward a nearby doorway.
    “Of course,” said Sean, turning away. “I was just going back to the food table.”
    “What’s up?” Deloram asked as soon as we were out of earshot.
    I hastily explained all about Sanders, and my bungled attempt to talk to her son. “You’d better hurry,” I concluded. “It won’t take him long to get here.”
    “I’ll handle him,” he said curtly, handing me his unfinished plate of wieners and some kind of green juice. ‘Try not to worry,” he called over his shoulder as he rushed out the door.
    I was left eyeing the remains of his lunch, wondering if I should eat something. The increasing tightness in my stomach said no, and I dumped everything in a nearby bin.
    I did rejoin Sean at the food table, where he was busily loading up with brownies. Other people were starting to leave, and thankfully Rossit was nowhere to be seen.
    ‘They should take those out of your pay,” I teased, pretending to grab at Sean’s plate.
    “What pay,” he mumbled, his mouth full.
    “Seriously, what happened here today?”
    He swallowed a few times. “No specific appointments yet. But Hurst made it pretty clear he intended to give up the chair of some services in order to keep anesthesia and internal medicine chaired by St. Paul’s.”
    “Terrific!” I groaned, not surprised. Paul Hurst was a former surgeon and now our VP medical and acting CEO. He pretty well ran the hospital the way he liked. The two chiefs of the departments in question were wimps he could easily control. Sean and I, however, challenged him whenever we felt he was out of line and were right enough times that he couldn’t fire us. “Obviously he’s found a new way to cut us down to size,” I added.
    “Oh, what makes you think that?” replied Sean, pointing to draw my attention to the center of the room. There was Hurst, tall, gray-haired, and pale as always, laughing heartily with Arnold Pinter, the diminutive chief of internal medicine. Arnold usually slouched, and from a distance he reminded me of a field mouse on the lookout