Informed Consent Read Online Free

blank. He sat there for a long time, listening to the mantle clock’s gentle ticking, until Mocha wandered into the room and nudged his leg. He reached down with one hand and absentmindedly scratched the dog’s ears for a while.
    Then, holding the paper by one corner, he headed to the office to make a photocopy.
    His father was alive. After all this time, his father was alive, and Doug Wynn, whoever he was, might know where to find him.

5
    T he room began to tilt . Greta Allstrom gripped the edge of the metal lab table and steadied herself. Heat crept from her hairline to her toes and her vision blurred and then faded, as the corners of the room grew dark. She focused on not panting, forcing herself to take deep, slow breaths until her heart rate slowed and her vision cleared.
    When the moment of lightheadedness passed, she let go of the table and shook out her hands. Then she stood cautiously and walked slowly across the lab room to the metal filing cabinet where she stashed her handbag each day. She opened the bottom drawer and removed a spotted banana, an energy bar, and a bottle of water.
    She wolfed down the bar and banana and tossed the wrapper and peel in the biohazardous waste bin that served as her trash can. Then she drank the lukewarm water in one long gulp and aimed the empty bottle at the recycling basket.
    You can’t forget to eat, she scolded herself as she hurried back to the table. Eating, while time-consuming and inefficient, was an unfortunate, but necessary, interruption to her work.
    She traced the scar that lined her cheek, a reminder of the day last month that she’d passed out from hunger. She’d been about to make a breakthrough and had been working for more than forty-hours in an adrenaline- and caffeine-fueled session, when suddenly she’d grown dizzy. She’d hit her face on a stack of glass specimen slides as she collapsed and had awoken in a slick pool of blood. The resultant stitches and completion of the obligatory OSHA incident report had eaten up more time than a quick meal break would have.
    Ever since, she’d vowed to pay closer attention to her body’s needs and, so far, had avoided a repeat performance. She couldn’t afford to lose any more lab time. Not when she was this close to a breakthrough. Not when the Alpha Fund was waiting for a progress report.
    She adjusted her safety goggles and peered into the microscope. She was scouring the blood smears on the slides for hypersegmented neutrophils. A normal mature neutrophil would typically have three or four segments, or nuclear lobes. If a cell contained six or more lobes, it fit the clinical definition of hypersegmentation, a symptom of coblamine, or Vitamin B12, deficiency. The samples she reviewed often contained as many as eight or even ten lobes.
    She was counting under her breath and didn’t hear the door swing open, so she nearly knocked over her specimen when Troy Norman, one of her graduate students, coughed just over her left shoulder. She started and turned.
    “So sorry, Dr. Allstrom. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He smiled sheepishly.
    “You didn’t,” she lied even though he obviously had. “Do you have the samples?”
    He nodded and passed her a soft-sided cooler bag, like the ones office workers use to keep their lunches chilled. Just knowing that now, at this moment, she held in her hands the tissue samples she needed to test her hypothesis filled her with a warm, pervasive sense of peace and calm.
    “Do you need any help?” he asked with the eagerness of a puppy.
    She didn’t. But she prided herself on being a mentor to the promising students who chose to commit to the grueling schedule she demanded. She’d think of some task that would engage him without endangering her work.
    “Yes, please stay.”
    He dragged a high metal stool across the floor and perched on it immediately, as if he feared she might change her mind if he took too long.
    “What are you doing now?”
    “I’m comparing the