Pandora's Curse - v4 Read Online Free PDF

away at the accident site, and even without X rays, she knew he’d lose both legs below the knees. One leg was held on by only a few ribbons of flesh. Tourniquets around his lower thighs were keeping back the blood and turning his skin a deathly gray. She imagined the gushes of blood that would pour from the ragged limbs when they’d release the thick rubber bands.
    “He’s crashing again,” a nurse said.
    Anika didn’t need to ask for epinephrine in a cardiac needle. Another nurse had it ready without being told.
    The needle was long, an instrument better suited for a nightmare than a hospital, but Anika slid it between his ribs without pause, pressing it directly into the patient’s heart muscle.
    Once she’d injected the drug, she removed the needle. “Shock him again.”
    For the third time Heimann greased the paddles and applied them to the man’s naked chest, upping to 360 joules. At this stage, the dangerously high current couldn’t hurt him any longer.
    “Clear,” he said with less anxiety. They all knew the outcome of this battle.
    The jolt of electricity arched the patient’s back as though he was a bow being drawn taut. He fell back to the table, and somehow, miraculously, his heart began beating with an anemic rhythm. Anika and Petr began to work on the other injuries.
    Checking his eyes, she discovered the pupils were pinpricks and did not respond to the penlight she flashed into them. He was in a deep coma. She ran her gloved hands through his hair and discovered a knot the size of an egg on the side of his skull. Closed head injury. They needed a CAT scan to determine the amount of brain damage. Judging by the other injuries, she believed it was safe to assume his head had taken a brutal pounding.
    Anika crushed down her suspicions. Her job was to keep the patient alive long enough for the surgeons to take over. Once he left the ER, the future of the young joyrider was out of her hands.
    “Tell radiology we need full trauma series X rays and a CT,” she told a nurse. “What do you think, Petr?”
    “He’ll lose the legs even if he has enough mind left to control them.”
    “The arm?”
    Dr. Heimann glanced at the shattered limb. “Hamburger.”
    The two doctors looked at each other, both silently thinking that maybe they should have called the patient when they had the chance. Was the Hippocratic oath meant to cover saving the life of a brain-dead triple amputee?
    “Surgery is ready anytime we are,” a nurse announced.
    “Okay, thanks.” Anika opened the tourniquets to allow blood to seep to the open wounds, returning natural color to the skin. Before the flow turned into a torrent she retightened the bands.
    The patient’s heart rate was steady but shallow, and no matter how much saline they forced into him, his pressure remained low. He had internal injuries. Knowing the violence of the accident, Anika felt that some of his organs had likely detached, and that was where the bleeding was. A ruptured spleen was common with this type of crash. She sounded his abdomen and found it tight with the stress of blood filling the cavities.
    She was about to confer with Heimann about a chest tube when the patient went into cardiac arrest for the third time. No matter how heroic the efforts, there was nothing they could do but watch him die. After a further ten minutes of frantic work Anika felt a touch on her shoulder. Petr’s stern eyes said enough.
    “Call him.”
    Angered, she looked at the wall clock, stunned to see they’d been working for a half hour. “5:18 P.M.” Her shift had ended eighteen minutes ago.
    Anika stripped off her latex gloves and yanked the cloth cap from her head. More than anything she wanted to wash the sweat from her spiky black hair but there would be police outside the ER waiting to speak with her. The patient had been a criminal, after all.
    As an emergency doctor, she knew the importance of distancing herself from her patients, yet losing even one pained her in