Second Opinion Read Online Free PDF Page B

appropriate or not, but even now, she often wasn't certain.
    The twins knew that she had gone to work for Doctors Without Borders to avoid the pressure-cooker medicine and politics of a major academic medical center. Yet without consulting her, they had encouraged the powers at the Beaumont Clinic to offer her the practice and position that had belonged to their father, and to spring that offer on her when she was totally unprepared.
    Had they meant to put her in a situation where she would humiliate herself as she had just done? Did they want to ensure that the hospital bosses knew that regardless of her intellect, Thea Sperelakis was most assuredly not her father's daughter? If so, they had most assuredly succeeded.
    Thea entered the unit and stood on the other side of the glass sliders, breathing deeply, but unable to keep herself from trembling. She had come a long way in dealing with stressful situations, but obviously not far enough. Her difficulty handling pressure should have led her to a specialty like pathology or radiology or public health. But she loved people and wanted to feel she was directly helping them, much as she had watched her father do from her earliest awareness. In addition, her intellect and powers of deductive reasoning made her a natural for diagnostic medicine. To her, having to deal with an occasional true emergency was worth the trade-off to be an internist, and most of the time, especially if she had enough warning to ready herself for the situation, she could manage most emergencies quite well.
    She had largely composed herself and started back toward Petros's high-tech, glassed-in cubicle, when the sliders opened again and Niko entered, followed by Selene. Through the glass Thea could see CEO Karsten and nursing supervisor Musgrave standing quietly by the waiting area in the corridor outside. Scott Hartnett was probably off someplace, she mused, implementing a switch to someone other than a Sperelakis to head up the institute.
    'Thea, wait,' Niko said.
    Thea continued to the bedside, at once embarrassed and still somewhat angry.
    'You didn't have to do that, Niko—certainly not just a few hours after I got here.'
    'We didn't say anything,' Selene said, 'except to agree with what Hartnett and the others had heard from Father, that you were a very brilliant doctor.'
    'The name Sperelakis is worth millions in referrals,' Niko added. 'They asked us if we thought you'd agree to take over Petros's practice, and all we could tell them was to ask you, but that you were a great doctor. We had no idea they'd charge in and bring it up right after you've stepped off the plane.'
    'You know I'd never succeed in this setting, Niko.'
    'I'm not so sure,' Selene said. 'You've managed to succeed in almost anything you've ever done. Please don't be angry with us, baby. We've got enough to deal with right here.'
    Thea looked over through the forest of tubes. Petros, his raccoon eyes and battered face making him a grotesquerie of the powerful man who had ruled their home, was lying peacefully on his back, being attended to by a tall, young unit nurse named Tracy. Vernice, the nurse who had volunteered to help with his bed care, was gone.
    His splinted hands were restrained to the sides of the bed against the remote chance that he might suddenly wake up and pull out his arterial line or IVs or his tracheotomy tube. The top bedsheet had been pulled aside, exposing him and revealing his penis and urinary catheter. One indignity piled on the next.
    High on the wall, the monitor protruded on a mobile arm, displaying various parameters as continuous tracings and numbers in different colors. Blood pressure and mean arterial pressure were red; heart rate yellow. Central venous pressure, indicating the volume of blood returning to the heart, was blue. Oxygen saturation, core body temperature, respiratory rate, and spinal fluid pressure were being continuously recorded as well. Many times over her years in medicine, Thea