"Holly Lisle - Sympathy for the Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

going to happen; and someday, someone in authority would do
something.
In the meantime, Dayne could do nothing more than she was
already doing. Write down everything, question questionable
orders . . . get written up by Batskold.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a change in the flickering
pattern of light that scrolled across the monitor. The reading was
Mrs. Paulley’s, and it was bad. A run of PVCs—premature
ventricular contractions. The ventricles of Mrs. Paulley’s heart were
pumping irregularly, a sign that could indicate they were going to
quit pumping altogether at any time.
Dayne put the chart down and headed into the glass-walled room
in front of her desk. She had certain things she could do without
notifying Dr. Batskold, and she did them. She increased the amount
of the cardiac medication that was running into Mrs. Paulley’s
veins, she brought in the crash cart, with its heart defibrillator and
drawers full of emergency medications, and she checked to make
sure Mrs. Paulley’s IVs were still putting their medication into her
bloodstream where it needed to be, and that they hadn’t worked
loose to pour it into her flesh, or into the bed. She checked to make
sure the ventilator was working correctly, and that the tube carrying
oxygen into the old woman’s lungs was clear. She slipped a blood
pressure cuff around the old woman’s arm and checked her
pressure—it had dropped.
Dayne looked at the over-bed monitor. She was starting to get
regular runs of those same PVCs. She waved at the ward
secretary. “Stacy! Page Dr. Batskold up here. I need him to take a
look at this.” Stacy nodded and got on the phone.
Dayne increased the dose of the cardiac medication again, and
looked at the old lady lying in the bed, tiny, frail, pale and bruised,
with bandages around her head and bandages over her eyes, with
a huge white plastic tube shoved down her throat and Teflon
catheters shoved into the veins of her neck. The ventilator hissed
and chugged, forcing her chest up and down, the IVs clicked and
beeped, the monitor ticked overhead.
Dayne walked over to the side of the bed and took the old
woman’s hand. Sometimes she sang to her comatose patients while
she worked on them—hearing was supposed to be the last sense to
go, and she wanted them to know someone was there, someone
who still remembered they were human—but she didn’t feel much
like singing at that moment. Instead, she just talked.
“It’s a pretty October day out there, Mrs. Paulley. The leaves are
starting to turn, and the sky is so blue you’d think it was in a
painting instead of real. Out your window I can see a mother and
two little boys sitting on the bench over by the pond. They’re
feeding the ducks and a couple of Canada geese—throwing bread
to them. The littlest boy is sitting on his mother’s lap because one of
the geese came right up to him and it was as big as he is.”
She was watching the monitor—no improvement. She let go of
the old lady’s rigid hand and pulled a pre-filled syringe of the cardiac