Free ADRENALINE: New 2013 edition by John Benedict

didn’t even twitch.
    Stop! Stop! You can’t do this! I’m awake, damn it!
She thrashed as hard as she could, but she might as well have been a statue. The pain intensified. Tears came to her eyes.

    C’mon, Dorothy. Fly right. Ken wanted to stabilize his case and veg out a little. He wasn’t in the mood to tackle any big diagnostic dilemmas or emergencies this morning. He gave several more large doses of Labetalol before he got the pressure under control.
    He sat down and started to draw up his drugs for the next case, but uneasiness still tugged at the edges of his mind. Ken had been doing anesthesia long enough to know that many patients didn’t follow the textbooks. However, he also knew it was generally not a good idea to ignore his sixth sense. More often than not, there was something he had overlooked. He reviewed his anesthetic once again. Nothing amiss. She just runs high, that’s all.

    Oh, sweet Jesus! Don’t let them do this!
The pain was becoming unbearable.
Please, dear God, just let me die. Help me! Help me!
Dorothy continued to sob.

    God, it’s only 8:30, thought Ken.
I’m wasted already. Gonna be a long day
. Ken yawned for the hundredth time. His mind drifted and he imagined himself sitting in his easy chair at homewatching TV with his wife, Lynn. The baby was asleep upstairs and all was so peaceful.
    In his daydream, his black Labrador came over to him and pawed at his arm. “Leave me alone, Trooper,” he mumbled. Ken snapped awake at the sound of his own voice. Something was wrong!
    He sat bolt upright and shook his head to clear it. He scanned his monitors once again and went through a mental checklist, forcing himself to look carefully at each one.
    Was she getting enough oxygen?
    O2 Sat - 99%
    FiO2 - 0.52
    Yes
. Oxygen saturation was excellent and inspired oxygen concentration was a normal 52%.
    Was the tube in?
    EtCO2 - 35 mmHg
    FiCO2 - 0 mmHg
    Again, yes. He had normal readouts showing the presence of carbon dioxide in the exhaled gases and no rebreathing of CO2.
    BP-170/95
    P-76
    All still OK, except for a mildly elevated BP. He couldn’t find anything wrong with any of the other monitors. Ken was baffled.
    He turned to examine his patient. One of the casualties of the hi-tech explosion in anesthesia, he knew, was that recent grads focused almost wholly on their computer screens instead of their patients. For the most part, this worked out well. After all, modern advances in monitoring had largely accounted for the increases in anesthetic safety. But Ken also understood there was a danger to this approach.
    He looked at Dorothy’s face. Her color was good, the tube looked fine—no kinks, disconnects, or secretions. Then he saw something about her eyes, which he had taped shut at the beginning of the case. Wait—she’s tearing. That’s odd.
    Tearing could be a sign of lightness, but he thought he had ruled that out early on when he had turned the Forane to the max.He quickly pulled the tape off one eye and opened the lid. What he saw froze him and a sickly fear gripped him.
    Holy shit!
Her right pupil was hugely dilated. Ken’s adrenals squeezed hard, and he felt the rush of adrenaline slam his tired brain into overdrive. He ripped the tape off the left eye. It’s blown, too! Damn it, she’s stroked!
    Ken suddenly felt ill with crushing guilt; the gut-wrenching sensation spread like wildfire through his body before the analytical part of his mind had a chance to respond. His breathing became labored. No reason to stroke, though, he finally reasoned. He grabbed the flash-light out of his drawer and clicked it on. He opened Dorothy’s right eyelid and held the light about two inches from her eye. He moved it off to the side and quickly brought it back to shine in her eye.

    The flood of light came crashing through Dorothy’s right eye and then left eye. She stopped sobbing for a minute.
That was Dr. Danowski I saw—why, he looked like he had just seen a ghost
. Darkness