you were, how could you know for certain from the trunk of a burned-out car that your brother had really died inside it?”
“What’s your point, Michael?”
Prince broke into a self-congratulatory smile. “For the sake of argument, let’s say the blood at the victim’s apartment matches your DNA.”
I knew where he was heading, but I said nothing.
His smile grew. “Who’s to say it’s not your brother’s blood?”
Chapter 11
I headed from Prince’s office back to the ER in a fog. Neither his $75,000 retainer nor his $500-per-hour fees fazed me. Beyond the necessities and my relatively expensive bike habit, I had minimal use for money. Even after my mortgage, the cycling, and half a year’s worth of Emily’s medications, I had enough saved to cover the costs. But the realization that I now shared one of Seattle’s top defense attorneys with the city’s most hardened criminals rattled the hell out of me.
I sleepwalked my way through my afternoon ER shift. Fortunately, none of my patients that afternoon required my “A game.” Unless of course I missed something, which is always the great fear among emergency doctors.
Most of my nonmedical friends assume that critically ill or traumatized patients cause ER docs the most stress. Not so. Resuscitating patients is for the most part cookbook medicine. Challenging and stressful at times, to be sure, but like a pilot landing under emergency conditions, we simulate situations and practice protocols to handle those critical moments. Sometimes, as with Enrique Martinez’s neck stabbing, our protocols fail us; but in those cases death is inevitable, not a mistake. What haunts most ER physicians are the ambiguous cases: the mimickers that most of us have faced, wrongly diagnosed, and sent home to bad outcomes. Such time bombs—which nourish the malpractice lawyers but cause the rest of us sleepless nights—include the patient’s “indigestion” that turns out to be a massive heart attack, the “bronchitis” that is proven on autopsy to have been a huge blood clot, or the “migraine” in the patient who went home and died of a brain aneurysm, to name a few.
As I shuffled out of the ER at the end of my shift, I hoped there had been no mimickers hiding in the day’s mix. Reviewing the mental checklist of patients I’d seen and diagnoses I’d made, I was reminded that, despite its risks, I loved my job. With all the turmoil in my personal life, emergency medicine was the one constant factor. The team at St. Jude’s was my extended family. The variety and bizarreness of the problems and people I faced kept me constantly challenged and stimulated (and provided me an endless supply of cocktail party anecdotes). Once in a while, I even had the chance to touch people’s lives in a positive way, and I never tired of that rush.
But now even my livelihood was threatened.
I’d originally planned to drive straight home from work—maybe even indulge in the unopened bottle of scotch tucked away in the cabinet—but I found myself heading toward a neighborhood in the Capitol Hill district that backed onto Lake Washington.
I had been in Helen’s modern one-bedroom apartment once before. She’d promised to feed me a dinner that she billed as being “whipped together with leftovers and crap,” and which turned out to be a five-course feast that included the best salmon I had ever tasted. Aside from discovering her culinary talents, I learned that Helen was “happily” divorced for years and that her nineteen-year-old daughter was studying drama at UCLA. Consequently, much of the year she had the place to herself, and she liked it that way.
Parking in front of her building, I realized I would likely be far less welcome on this occasion. With little to lose, I trudged up to her door anyway. Her intercom rang twice and then Helen’s voice boomed over the speaker. “Don’t remember ordering pizza or Chinese tonight.”
I cleared my throat. “Helen, it’s
“What’s your point, Michael?”
Prince broke into a self-congratulatory smile. “For the sake of argument, let’s say the blood at the victim’s apartment matches your DNA.”
I knew where he was heading, but I said nothing.
His smile grew. “Who’s to say it’s not your brother’s blood?”
Chapter 11
I headed from Prince’s office back to the ER in a fog. Neither his $75,000 retainer nor his $500-per-hour fees fazed me. Beyond the necessities and my relatively expensive bike habit, I had minimal use for money. Even after my mortgage, the cycling, and half a year’s worth of Emily’s medications, I had enough saved to cover the costs. But the realization that I now shared one of Seattle’s top defense attorneys with the city’s most hardened criminals rattled the hell out of me.
I sleepwalked my way through my afternoon ER shift. Fortunately, none of my patients that afternoon required my “A game.” Unless of course I missed something, which is always the great fear among emergency doctors.
Most of my nonmedical friends assume that critically ill or traumatized patients cause ER docs the most stress. Not so. Resuscitating patients is for the most part cookbook medicine. Challenging and stressful at times, to be sure, but like a pilot landing under emergency conditions, we simulate situations and practice protocols to handle those critical moments. Sometimes, as with Enrique Martinez’s neck stabbing, our protocols fail us; but in those cases death is inevitable, not a mistake. What haunts most ER physicians are the ambiguous cases: the mimickers that most of us have faced, wrongly diagnosed, and sent home to bad outcomes. Such time bombs—which nourish the malpractice lawyers but cause the rest of us sleepless nights—include the patient’s “indigestion” that turns out to be a massive heart attack, the “bronchitis” that is proven on autopsy to have been a huge blood clot, or the “migraine” in the patient who went home and died of a brain aneurysm, to name a few.
As I shuffled out of the ER at the end of my shift, I hoped there had been no mimickers hiding in the day’s mix. Reviewing the mental checklist of patients I’d seen and diagnoses I’d made, I was reminded that, despite its risks, I loved my job. With all the turmoil in my personal life, emergency medicine was the one constant factor. The team at St. Jude’s was my extended family. The variety and bizarreness of the problems and people I faced kept me constantly challenged and stimulated (and provided me an endless supply of cocktail party anecdotes). Once in a while, I even had the chance to touch people’s lives in a positive way, and I never tired of that rush.
But now even my livelihood was threatened.
I’d originally planned to drive straight home from work—maybe even indulge in the unopened bottle of scotch tucked away in the cabinet—but I found myself heading toward a neighborhood in the Capitol Hill district that backed onto Lake Washington.
I had been in Helen’s modern one-bedroom apartment once before. She’d promised to feed me a dinner that she billed as being “whipped together with leftovers and crap,” and which turned out to be a five-course feast that included the best salmon I had ever tasted. Aside from discovering her culinary talents, I learned that Helen was “happily” divorced for years and that her nineteen-year-old daughter was studying drama at UCLA. Consequently, much of the year she had the place to herself, and she liked it that way.
Parking in front of her building, I realized I would likely be far less welcome on this occasion. With little to lose, I trudged up to her door anyway. Her intercom rang twice and then Helen’s voice boomed over the speaker. “Don’t remember ordering pizza or Chinese tonight.”
I cleared my throat. “Helen, it’s
Similar Books
