Endorphin Conspiracy, The Read Online Free PDF

Cathy. “You’re lucky. You have a great teacher.”
    Geoff smiled, cleared his throat. “Where’s the team? We need to be briefed on recent admissions.”
    “Over by bed eighteen, the little girl with the head injury,” she said, pointing to the opposite end of the ward.
    Geoff looked around the room. It had been a long time. The scene was surreal, not unlike a modern version of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. There were rows of bodies, all ages, shapes, sizes and colors, in various states of consciousness. Most were comatose, having lost control of their bodily functions to machines—machines that did their breathing, filtered their blood, regulated their IV infusions, monitored their core temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. Other machines measured the pressure inside their skulls caused by brain swelling from injuries. Connecting these bodies to each of these machines were tangles of tubes, wires, bolts, and needles protruding from skulls and every natural and man-made orifice imaginable. All of the machines and monitors were linked by cables to a central computer at the nursing station staffed by a team of monitor technicians twenty-four hours a day. No bodily function escaped detection and control.
    Except the brain. Brainwaves had been studied for years with the electroencephalogram, and changes in brain pressure could be followed with intracranial pressure monitors, but the physiology of consciousness had remained a great mystery. Until the PET scan. Geoff and Karen drifted toward bed eighteen, where they joined up with the rest of the team.
    “Ah, Geoffrey, my friend, good to see you back in the saddle,” Kapinsky said. “We almost gave you both up for lost.” He put his arm around Geoff’s right shoulder.
    Geoff stiffened, grabbed Kapinsky’s arm and removed it from his shoulder. “Sore shoulder. Hurt it working out the other day.”
    “Sorry, chief. Hey, let me introduce you to your team.”
    Introductions were made all around, Geoff analyzing the new group of doctors he’d be responsible for. There were two first year residents: Karen Choy, whom he had already spent half the day with, and Brian Phelps, bearded, intense, humorless, and at thirty-two, older than usual for a first year neurosurgical resident.
    Geoff acknowledged the two medical students assigned to the team. Both were women, wide-eyed, uninitiated to a brutal, clinical rotation like neurosurgery. Then there was the gnat, Howard Kapinsky. Short,with thinning, frizzy brown hair, mud brown eyes, a substantial nose, and his perennial, pencil-thin attempt at mustache. Kapinsky, the momma’s boy from Sheepshead Bay.
    The rift between Geoff and Kapinsky had developed over the years, Kapinsky envious of Geoff’s strapping good looks, accomplishments and family background, Geoff disgusted with Kapinsky’s servile behavior and endless brown-nosing.
    Kapinsky had a photographic memory for minutia and could reference obscure journal articles and list differential diagnoses ad nausea . This behavior was nurtured by the system at an institution like the NYTC, but the bottom line was he was an horrendous surgeon, all thumbs in the operating room, even after six years of surgical training.
    It wasn’t as if Geoff hadn’t tried to befriend him early on. Their first year working together Geoff had tried to loosen up Kapinsky’s tight-assed personality, taking him out on the town, to bars and nightclubs, even a foray to Geoff’s favorite Times Square strip joint—The Palomino—a place that would rouse a hard-on even with a eunuch like Kapinsky. But to no avail. For a while, Geoff had wondered if Kapinsky was gay, but he finally wrote him off as just an asexual bookworm with a fudgy nose.
    Mark Jackson, the only black in the program, joined them, having finished his note on the patient in bed seventeen. Mark had a sharp mind and excellent surgical skills. He exuded a quiet confidence, not unlike Geoff in the early years of his