The Last Word Read Online Free PDF Page B

said.
    “What’s her EEG look like?” Mark asked.
    “What you’d expect with these test results,” Jesse replied. “There are no sparks at all. Her pupils are blown, her reflexes are shot. We’ve got her on a ventilator in the ICU.”
    Mark nodded. There was nothing more that could be done for her. She was brain-dead, with no hope of recovery.
    “Is she a good candidate for organ donation?”
    “One of the best I’ve ever seen. Young, fit. She didn’t smoke or drink. She’s even got a donor card,” Jesse said. “It’s like her whole life was leading up to this.”
    “Maybe it was,” Ramin said. “Maybe she was put on this earth for the sole purpose of saving the lives of a dozen other people.”
    The actual number of sick and injured people who could receive organs or other parts of her body, like corneas, tendons, and bones, was far higher than a dozen. Both Mark and Jesse knew there could easily be three times that many people whose lives could be saved or made markedly better by recycling Corinne Adams.
    “I believe in fate,” Ramin said.
    “Does she have a family?” Mark asked Jesse.
    “She was single, no husband or kids, if that’s what you mean,” Jesse said. “Not even a boyfriend.”
    “Fate,” Ramin repeated to himself.
    “Her sister Lurline is downstairs,” Jesse said. “I spoke briefly with her. I didn’t have much to say at the time.”
    He still didn’t. The situation was pretty simple, just painful to share with a loved one.
    She had a donor card, so at least that spared him the uncomfortable task of convincing her grief-stricken sister to let him harvest her organs. Corinne had already given her consent.
    Over the next twenty-four hours, Jesse would have a lot of work to do. First, he’d have to find out who was next in line for each organ and work with the pathology lab to oversee the battery of tests to determine their compatibility with the donor. At the same time, he’d have to schedule the operating rooms and recruit surgical teams, as well as keep the brain-dead patient’s body alive and healthy until the operation.
    “Would you like me to talk to the sister?” Mark asked Jesse.
    Grateful and relieved, Jesse nodded. “That would free me up to start making calls.”
    Mark could have offered to take over all the other work, too, so Jesse could return to the ER. But he knew how much Jesse wanted to coordinate the complex organ transplantations.
    It wasn’t Jesse’s first time. In fact, he’d harvested kidneys and a liver from a donor only a week earlier. But each new experience further honed his skills, both administratively and surgically. Even so, Mark would keep his eye on the process, helping out where he could and smoothing over any wrinkles that emerged.
    The first wrinkle was the grieving family. Although they didn’t need the sister’s permission to proceed, Lurline could make things a lot harder than they had to be if she disapproved of the procedure.
    Mark found Lurline in the cafeteria, eating a piece of banana cream pie. Eating was clearly how Lurline dealt with stress and, judging by her obesity, there was a lot of it in her life. He introduced himself and sat down across from her. She was silent for a moment, shoveling more pie into her mouth. Her cheeks were big, round, and red.
    “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked him.
    Mark nodded. “She cracked her skull and there’s bleeding in her brain.”
    “Can’t you stop the bleeding and put a plate in her head or something?”
    “I’m afraid not. If the bleeding had been around her brain, we could have relieved the pressure by drilling a hole in her skull.”
    Which is exactly what Jesse did to Mark only a few months ago. Mark rubbed the spot on his head where a piece of bone from the cadaver of an organ donor had been used to plug the hole.
    It was pure luck Mark hadn’t ended up like Corinne and that his bones weren’t being reused today to fill gaps in other people’s bones. He was a