Chapter 15

"Kasey Cavenaugh and I went to nursing school together at UALR." Jessica said. "She went to work at a hospital in Little Rock and I went back home. With mom's illness and both of us being busy with work we didn't keep in touch. I decided to look her up and found out she had moved here to Jonesboro.

"So I visited with her for a while this morning. She's been in Jonesboro a while and knows quite a few people in the medical profession. And the gossip, of course.

"The word is, among those who'll talk about it, is that ACCH is bad news. The only people who work there are rejects from the nominally respectable hospitals."

"That explains a lot." Alex said. "How'd I end up in there?"

"I would say bad luck," Jessica replied, "but in this case it's worse. Whatever happened to you at St. Bernards, and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of that, shouln't have happened. Statistically anyway. You go into cardiac arrest, two days after bypass surgery. OK, I can buy that. I'd like to know why though. But then your ventilator stops. Seventeen minutes.

"Coincidence, as someone said, means you weren't paying to attention to the other half of what was going on."

"Any ideas?"

"Only that someone screwed up. Big time. But talking to Kasey, when I told her what happened, she said it was likely that St. Barnyards - apparently that's a popular nickname these days - got scared. Really scared. What happened to you shouldn't happen.

"At about three minutes with no oxygen, some brain damage is extremely likely. Seventeen minutes, use your imagination.

"So they've got an almost certain brain-dead patient, and no good explanation. And you're using an ICU bed."

"So they needed to get rid of me?"

"Pretty much. Normally it could have been a pretty ugly situation. If Charlie and Sam started poking around, and they almost certainly would have... it would have bad to say the least.

"Luckily for them, they had another way to make the problem go away."

"If they could transfer you to another hospital, ostensibly in hopes of a recovery, it would both delay the consequences and distance St. Bernards from the consequences."

"Makes sense," Alex said, "from a business perspective. Save your reputation. And your money. Screw the patient. They were lucky ACCH was there. But I wasn't."

"Something like that. One of the things I learned early was that medicine, whatever it had once been, was purely business. And as cynical as any other business.

"Kasey said the doctor she works for is likely to know a lot more about the situation, as long as he's worked in it. He's out of town until Monday, she's going to call me when he has some time to talk.

"So I'll see what else I can come up with. Let's take a break. Take a drive."