Free Code 15 by Gary Birken Page B

of them.
    “I’ll have a sour apple martini,” Dana said.
    “A Coke for me.”
    “A Coke? What happened to the queen of the margarita?”
    “I’ve kind of lost my taste for margaritas,” Morgan said.
    Dana smiled at her knowingly. “A temporary situation, I hope. Maybe about nine months.”
    “I just found out a couple of weeks ago. I’m not keeping it a secret, but I haven’t exactly scheduled a baby shower at the Ritz either.”
    “Congratulations,” Dana said, reaching across the table and squeezing her hands. “When are you due?”
    “Late October.”
    “That’s terrific news. I’m really happy for you.” Morgan and Dana spent the next fifteen minutes catching up on the latest hospital gossip. Dana was already working on her second martini when she asked, “When were you going to tell me about Kevin?”
    Morgan sighed. “How did you know?”
    “Discretion’s not one of Kevin’s strong suits. A bunch of the nurses have seen him out.” She reached across the table and took Morgan’s hand. “We’ve been friends a long time, and I’m not trying to poke my nose into your affairs, but if you need someone to talk to, call me.” She smiled painfully and added, “It’s not as if half of us haven’t been through the same thing.”
    Morgan spoke to Dana for a few minutes about the divorce but when the time was right, she broached the topic of the Code 15 and Alison Greene’s death.
    “I know you’ve already spoken to Dr. Walters, but as the chair of the Patient Safety Committee, I wanted to talk to you myself.”
    “Sure.”
    “Do you remember what Miss Greene’s condition was when you admitted her?”
    “She was rock stable.”
    “When did she start to crash?”
    “It was about six hours after I got her from the recovery room. Her heart rate suddenly jumped from seventy to three hundred.”
    “Then what?”
    “She dumped her blood pressure. That’s when we called the code blue and began CPR. Dr. Balbuenas was on the floor and he came running. He’s one of the sharpest docs we have, but he couldn’t do anything to restore a normal heart rhythm.”
    “The medical record said you coded her for about thirty minutes before you finally gave up.”
    “That sounds about right.”
    “The committee has been over every aspect of her care—every blood test, X-ray, and medication she received, and we don’t have the first clue what the hell went wrong. Do you have any ideas?”
    “I’ve seen a lot of patients develop heart rhythm problems,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s almost always a reason.”
    “Except in this case.”
    “I wish I could help, Morgan, but I have no idea why she went into ventricular tachycardia or why we couldn’t get her out of it.”
    “Were there any other nurses besides you taking care of her?”
    “I took a dinner break but I don’t remember who I signed out to.”
    Remembering Ben’s advice regarding looking beyond the obvious, she asked, “Forget about the medicine part of this thing for a second. Did anything unusual or unexpected happen?”
    Dana held up her glass while she pondered the question. “The cross,” she answered.
    “What cross?”
    “After her parents left, she had another visitor. He said he was a friend. He was pretty talkative. He must have told me three times he was a professor at Broward College. I was a little surprised because he looked more like a jock than a professor.”
    Nodding from the memory as she put her glass down, Dana said, “Right before he was about to leave, he put a cross around her neck.”
    “What’s so unusual about that?”
    “In the first place he wasn’t a family member, and in the second, he didn’t ask if it was okay. Most people would have. He just put it on, said good night, and left.”
    “I still don’t see what—”
    “Later on, when she coded and we started CPR, I removed it so it wouldn’t interfere with the chest compressions. When Balbuenas called off the code and we started