Page 22 of Booked for Theft

SIX

“Thank you, Janette. We’d lost hope.”

Senator Thaddens rested on the stainless steel table, and a sheet covered him from the waist down. Pen marks on his skin indicated where the surgeons would cut him open to take his organs so that others might live. The intubation process left his face mostly covered with a mask. Delaying wouldn’t help anything, so I donned a surgical mask, snapped on a pair of gloves, and regretted I lacked a set of scrubs.

I would throw the entire outfit out—or lock it away in my closet until the encroaching grief settled to something a little more manageable.

I’d seen more than a few bodies before, but had time been kinder to us, and things gone a little differently, I believed I might have become friends with the politician.

Once in my protective gear, I stepped to his side, took his limp hand in mine, and concentrated.

Dr. Won and Dr. Pilsir followed me, and they waited in patient silence.

I checked for diabetes first, finding no trace of it. After that, I went over my complete list of diseases I could detect in his blood, finding nothing. “He has no diseases, there are no medicinal residues in his blood, and when it comes to the basic fluids in his body, he is healthy.” I took a few extra moments to check the fluids in his brain and spinal column. “If you require cerebral fluids for any reason, his are sound.”

“That’s something that would have taken us a great deal longer to determine,” Dr. Won admitted.

While bittersweet, I accepted the compliment for what it was. Perhaps later, once the sting of death eased, I would allow myself to be proud of my accomplishments. Sighing, I turned my concentration to his heart, numerous oddities with his heart, both outside of it and within it. My brows furrowed. “May I do an exploratory incision?”

“Of course.” Dr. Pilsir picked up a scalpel. “Where would you like the cut?”

I pointed at a spot near his heart, close enough I wouldn’t have to work hard to pull out anything I removed. “I will also need a sterile dish or container.”

“What did you find?” Dr. Won asked, and he accepted a dish from one of the nurses and came closer, ready to gather the sample I intended to draw out of the dying man.

“I’m not sure, but there’s definitely something amiss with his heart. There seems to be additional thickness and formations outside and inside of it. I will scrape a sample from his heart and pull it out through his blood.” I closed my eyes and checked the organ again, and it didn’t take me long to determine he would need a heart transplant to continue to live without the help of machines.

Something made the muscle struggle to beat, and I couldn’t tell precisely what.

I opened my eyes, waiting for Dr. Pilsir to sterilize the senator’s skin and make the cut. Once blood flowed, I went to work, scraping away at one of the odd spots, which appeared to be fused to the heart but not quite the same tissue, until some tore away from the muscle and came free into the bloodstream. I guided it to the incision, forcing it out and using his blood to deposit it into the dish. I removed everything except the contamination, being left with an oddly creamy substance. “This was attached to the interior and exterior of his heart. I didn’t see anything like this elsewhere.”

Dr. Won sucked in a breath. “I’ll be damned.”

I stared at him with wide eyes. “What is it?”

“Unless I’m way off my mark, that looks like the start of a malignant primary cardiac tumor. You said it was on the outside and inside of his heart but nowhere else?”

I nodded. “Wouldn’t your scans pick this up?”

“We could have misread the scans as scarring rather than the start of tumors. That the tumors are in numerous places indicates malignant. Primary cardiac indicates the tumor originated in the heart rather than spreading to the heart from elsewhere. Reading the scans is as much of an art as it is a science—and we were looking for heart attack scarring rather than tumors, malignant or otherwise. But if the start of the tumors are taking the shape of heart attack scarring, we would miss it at first,” Dr. Pilsir informed me, and he lifted the petri dish for a closer look. “How much more of this can you peel off his heart for us? I would need a larger sample to send to the lab.”

“I can take as much as you want when it’s time to start the operation. He would need a heart transplant to survive. As it is, his heart is struggling to beat. I think the scar tissue—or tumor, if that’s what it is—is restricting his heartbeat.” I wrinkled my nose and regretted my lack of traditional medical training. “That’s what it feels like.”

“It’s a sound guess, and I think you’re right. This looks like tumor material. Can you check if this has spread beyond his heart?”

I did as asked, using the senator’s blood as my method of detecting more of the odd scarring. After a few minutes, I shook his head. “His other organs are clear, and I am not sensing any of this stuff anywhere else in his body.”

“If it isn’t anywhere else, we’ll just remove the heart first and make certain the tumors can’t infect the other organs.” Dr. Pilsir sighed. “We did a basic scan checking for cancers during intake, and if you don’t detect any, we’ll move forward with the transplants. It might not be malignant, and it could be one widespread benign tumor of the heart. Most heart tumors don’t tend to be malignant, but the fact it’s outside and inside the heart leads me to suspect it’s probably the early stages of a malignant cancer. We’ll know soon enough, as we’ll send the entire organ to the lab for analysis.”

“He wouldn’t have had any idea he had this, right?”

“Right,” Dr. Won confirmed. “It was early enough we mistook it as scar tissue on the initial scans. We made mistakes in the reading, but the end result is the same.”

It was. “His heart is struggling, and I can’t fix it. It’s not like cholesterol.” I frowned. “Well, it’s not really like cholesterol. I can cut through the tumor and tell the difference in the proper muscle and the bad tissue. But I can’t do so safely. I’m essentially turning his blood into a knife, which I’m using to slice the sample I want.” I regarded the man’s face, grateful he wasn’t aware of anything around us. “His brain is mostly dead, isn’t it?”

Dr. Won nodded. “His brain activity was in decline upon arrival, and it’s only gotten worse. He had minimal brain activity when we put him on life support. Once we start the transplant process, brain death will happen rather rapidly. We’ll be on a timer to get these organs into the recipients. Some of them are dying, and every minute matters. But in good news, all of the recipients are here, the surgeons are on hand, and we’ll be able to work together to get the organs across the hall to where they do our patients the most good. Normally, it’s even more of a race against time. Of the organs we will be transplanting, the lungs normally have the shortest timer. With you here, we won’t be worried about that timer. You can keep the lungs viable. The problem is our recipient, who is already on death watch and could die at any minute.”

In some ways, I wished the prejudices of others hadn’t barred me from becoming a nurse. How many more lives could I have saved?