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

and smaller, with no sign of a rhythm. Dayne found no pulse.
“Nothing. She’s in V-fib now. Give her a dose of epi, and if that
doesn’t work, we’re going to shock her at two hundred.”
Mary injected a drug that sometimes caused the heart to restart.
It didn’t work this time, though, and she warmed up the paddles to a
higher voltage. “Clear!” she yelled, and again everyone stood back.
“Why are we doing this, Dayne?” the supervisor asked. “She’s
decerebrate.”
“Her pupils are blown, too,” Dayne said. “But she’s Batskold’s. He
made her a full code—we’re to do everything we can.”
“Speak of the devil,” the respiratory therapist said, as the doctor
walked into the room.
“Where are we on this?” he asked.
Dayne gave him a quick rundown of all the steps she’d taken,
ending with the summation that the old woman had not responded to
anything.
“Shock at three hundred joules,” he told Mary.
The paddles whumped again, and the room filled with the
unmistakable odor of burned flesh. The old woman’s heart rhythm
remained absent.
“Start CPR.”
Dayne climbed onto the edge of the bed, locked her hands
together with her fingers raised and her right hand over her left, and
began pressing into Mrs. Paulley’s sternum with the heel of her left
hand. “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three . . .”
Everyone in the room heard the crunch as Mrs. Paulley’s sternum
cracked and her ribs broke. Dayne shuddered. Dr. Batskold said,
“Keep going. If she lives, we can heal the ribs. We can’t do
anything for her if she’s dead.”
Dayne kept on compressing, forcing blood through the old
woman’s body. The ribs crunched beneath her hands with every
push—a sound and a sensation she would relive in her nightmares.
Meanwhile, Dr. Batskold pumped his patient full of drugs, tested the
amount of oxygen in her blood, tinkering with the titrations of the
drips he’d put her on. . . .
“There! You see?” he suddenly yelled. “We have a rhythm! Stop
CPR!”
Dayne pulled back and automatically felt for a pulse. A thready
one slipped beneath her fingers—but it was definitely there. Poor
old woman.
“We won!” Dr. Batskold said, and grinned cheerfully around the
room. “Good work, everyone. Okay—Dayne, standard orders. Let’s
get a chest X-ray and hourly ABGs and . . .” He rattled off a long list
of orders, which Dayne wrote on the chart.
“Code status?” Dayne asked when he’d finished.
“Oh, definitely let’s keep her a full code. Definitely. We don’t
concede defeat until we have to.” He turned and, whistling, walked
to the nurses’ station to begin charting the annals of another of his
victories over death.
“We won?” the nursing supervisor asked with a lift of her