Free Deadly Errors by Allen Wyler Page A

long moment he heard only the heart monitor, the respirator, and sniffling. At the head of the bed, the three family members to either side, the priest pulled a long, embroidered sash from around his neck, kissed it, and began uttering words Tyler recognized as Latin.

    S ILENCE AGAIN ENCASED the room. Tyler cleared his throat softly and said, “I’ll show you where the waiting room is.”
    A few minutes later when he returned to Larry a nurse was already turning down the IV drip. She glanced at him. “Time?”
    Tyler nodded, wrapped his fingers around the corrugated plastic hose from the respirator, his other hand gripping the endotracheal tube. He paused to reflect once again on what he was about to do. Once disconnected, air could no longer be pumped into Larry’s lungs, causing his heart to stumble and die. Is there a God? Is he watching? What would he do in my position?
    He pulled apart the tubes and thumbed off the respirator power switch. Over the past hour he’d allowed Larry’s CO 2 blood level to rise to a normal value, just on the off chance some brainstem functions were still there and he’d been wrong and Larry would resume breathing.
    For three minutes Larry made no attempt to breath. Shortly after that Larry’s heartbeat began to slow until it finally stuttered, fought for a minute, then became silent.

    T HE MAN PICKED up the telephone on the third ring. “What!” His voice carried an alcohol slur and a hint of irritation that said he didn’t appreciate being disturbed at night.
    The caller said, “We may have a problem.”
    “At nine o’clock at night we may have a problem? Can’t it wait until morning? I’m busy.”
    The caller wanted to tell the pompous egotistical sonofabitch to shut the fuck up and listen for once. “There’s been a complication. A patient received a radiation overdose.”
    “So? That’s life, shit happens.”
    “For Christ’s sake, listen up a second. This is different. We got us a doctor running around claiming hackers cracked our system.”
    “Well in that case, there’s no problem. No way no how can we have a security breach. You should know that.”
    The caller’s irritation rose. For a smart sonofabitch, the man wasn’t very smart. “That’s not the point. She’s got a wild hair up her ass about it, to the point she wants us to start an investigation. She says she’ll have to report this to JCAHO.”
    He heard no flip reply this time, just a pause. Finally, “Who’s the doctor? We know anything about him?”
    “It’s a her. I looked her up. She’s an anesthesiologist by the name of Michelle Lawrence.”
    “Well? So what’s the problem? Just have to make sure nothing comes of it.”

    T YLER FLUFFED HIS pillow and settled back onto his left side, the cool cotton pillowcase refreshing against his facial stubble. He listened to rhythmic rap music thumps crescendo then fade as an unseen car passed four stories below. Even with his apartment windows closed, the vibrations easily reached his ears. Amazing. He wondered what those thundering decibels of sound energy must be doing to the delicate nerve endings in the driver’s cochlea? Nothing good , he decided, and imagined an entire generation of prematurely deaf—but hip—citizens. Any hearing aide stocks to invest in long-term? Assuming, of course, he ever got out of debt from the student loans his tough-love, pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps father forced him to accumulate. Which wasn’t completely fair, he admitted. Alimony from divorcing his first, alcoholic wife had been a killer on his financial resources.
    He sucked a deep breath and tried to weigh what to do in the morning about Larry Childs’s death. Certainly report it to risk management and the clinical trial principal investigator, Nick Barber. But JCAHO was a different matter. Having been once burned, he couldn’t afford to get involved in something having any potential for severe blowback on his job. What if the root cause