“There’s another aspect of all this that troubles me,” Lynn said, trying to organize her thoughts. She still felt shaky and discombobulated from what she had been through with the Russian goon. “It’s this gammopathy stuff. It keeps popping up. Before that bastard broke in, I learned something curious that I can’t explain. Remember those stats I got down in the IT office about the discharge diagnosis of gammopathy and multiple myeloma from the Mason-Dixon Med Center?”
“I remember,” Michael said. “But not the actual numbers.”
“The actual numbers don’t matter,” Lynn said. “The significant issue is that the number of people on discharge with these two diagnoses is five times the national average. Five times!”
Michael nodded as he considered what Lynn had just told him, but he didn’t say anything.
“Doesn’t that surprise you?” Lynn asked. She couldn’t believe he was seemingly taking it in stride.
“It surprises me,” Michael said. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying that the number of people coming into our hospital with an unrelated illness and leaving with a diagnosis of a blood serum abnormality is five times the national average?”
“That’s exactly what I am saying. And to make it more confusing, most of these patients are relatively young, in their thirties and forties, whereas gammopathy usually appears in an older population, like people in their sixties.”
“And patients with a discharge diagnosis of multiple myeloma is five times more common in our hospital.”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Okay, how do you explain it?”
“I don’t,” Lynn snapped. “That’s why I’m bringing it up, for Chrissake.”
“Okay, keep it cool, girl,” Michael said calmly. “We’re on the same team here.”
“Sorry,” Lynn said. She took a deep breath to calm down.
“Is discovering this gammopathy and multiple myeloma info what had you ‘totally unglued’ and upset when you called me earlier?”
“Oh my gosh, no!” Lynn blurted. She swung back around to face Michael, thumping her forehead with her knuckles in mock punishment. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you my most important discovery. The anesthesia records show that in all three cases the tracing had been looped.”
Michael shot a quick glance at Lynn to make sure she wasn’t jerking him around. “Looped, as in being played over and over?”
“Exactly,” Lynn said, with her voice reflecting her sudden excitement. “From the moment of the frame offset in each record, the records were looped with the minute prior to that point, when everything was normal. It means that from the frame offset until the low-oxygen alarm sounded, the anesthesia machine wasn’t recording the patient’s real-time vital signs. Those signals were interrupted, and the looping was giving the false impression that everything was normal.”
“That’s serious shit,” Michael said.
“The question is, could it be a software glitch?”
“I can’t imagine,” Michael said. “It has to be a hack job, and if it is, who’s doing it and why? Holy shit!”
“It has to be all tied together,” Lynn said.
“What do you mean?” Michael asked. He turned into the hospital grounds and headed for the multilevel garage.
“What’s going on in Anesthesia has to be connected somehow with the protein abnormalities.”
“That seems far-fetched,” Michael said.
“I thought so at first. But remember what we learned last year in diagnostics: even when symptoms seem entirely unrelated, they are almost invariably part of the same underlying disease. My intuition tells me we are going to find the same here with the abnormal proteins and the anesthesia disasters.”
“If they are associated, I can’t think how,” Michael said.
“Nor can I,” Lynn admitted. “I might be delusional, but I can’t stop thinking that I have to get into the Shapiro, even if just to get access to their records.”
“We, white man,” Michael said, again making reference to Ron Metzner’s Lone Ranger joke. “We’re a team, girl. There’s no way I’m going to let you go into Shapiro by yourself. If this is some major conspiracy, the risks go up.”
“It will be your decision if we get to that point,” Lynn said. “There’s still that thumbprint access that has to be overcome.”
They left Carl’s Cherokee in a visitor parking spot and walked across the hospital campus toward the medical dorm, a bit overwhelmed by what they had experienced and what they had been talking about. Neither one spoke, particularly as they passed the dark, nearly windowless Shapiro Institute. Both were now thinking about Carl being locked away in its bowels. It made it personal.
Such thinking was the hardest for Lynn, as it immediately evoked a combination of guilt, benumbing anger, and crushing loss, threatening her life on so many levels. She had to look away from the massive, sinister-looking building and force herself to think of something else. “I guess I’m going to have to make an effort to look like I’m back to being a medical student.”
“Hallelujah, woman!” Michael exclaimed. “If we are dealing with a major conspiracy that’s uptight about us asking questions about Carl, then we gotta believe somebody is going to be keeping tabs on us.”
“Sounds so Orwellian,” Lynn said.
“I hope this means you’re planning on coming to the ophthalmology lecture in the morning?”
“I guess I have no choice.”
As they rode up in the elevator they leaned against opposite sides, regarding each other.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked.
“I’m a basket case,” Lynn admitted. “I’m wasted and I’m still shaky. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired and drained. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck.”
“Will you be able to sleep?”
“I hope so.”
“I might be able to find an errant sleeping pill if you’d like.”
“I’d like,” Lynn said. “And I do have yet another request.”
“Hit me!”
“Would you mind if I dragged my mattress down to your room? I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“Not a problem, as long as you don’t take advantage of me.”
“Under the circumstances, I don’t find that at all funny.”
“Sorry!”
38.
Wednesday, April 8, 9:22 A.M.
Lynn put her pen down on top of her spiral notebook. She had been trying to take lecture notes but wasn’t able to concentrate. She was distracted by the previous night’s horrific experience and what she had learned from the anesthesia records. To make matters worse, the lecturer spoke in an all too typical medical-school monotone. On top of that, the subject matter seemed to her to be truly stultifying. As beautiful as the eye was in its overall structure, this minutiae of the retinal circulation was overkill in relation to what she would need to know once she was a practicing orthopedic surgeon. Even if eye surgery had the benefit of being short and bloodless, she couldn’t understand why her friend Karen Washington wanted to study ophthalmology as a specialty. After spending four years learning about the whole body, it seemed much too narrow in scope from her perspective.
Adding to her inability to focus, Lynn felt groggy, despite having slept for more than six hours. Six hours was about normal for her, but what she had experienced last night had not been entirely normal sleep. She had taken the Ambien tablet Michael had found for her. As she rarely took sleep meds, she was sensitive to them, and when she did use one, she invariably felt a residual hangover.
When she had awakened that morning just before eight on her mattress on the floor of Michael’s room, Michael was already in the shower. It had been the sound of the shower turning on that had aroused her from her drugged slumber. She didn’t get up immediately as it had taken her a few minutes to unscramble her brain and try to put in perspective what had happened the previous evening.