Mend the Living Read Online Free Page A

Neutral, informative, the words strike. Male, six feet, 154 pounds, maybe twenty years old, car accident, head trauma, in a coma – we know who’s being summed up like this, we know his name: Simon Limbeau. The call is barely finished when the ambulance crew arrives, the fireproof doors open, the stretcher rolls in, up the central corridor of the ICU, people step aside to let it pass. Revol emerges – he’s just returned from examining the patient admitted in the night after convulsions, and he’s not optimistic: the woman didn’t receive CPR in time, the scan revealed that liver cells had died after her heart stopped, a sign that her brain cells were also affected – he’d been notified and, seeing the trolley arrive at the end of the corridor, he suddenly says to himself that this Sunday shift won’t be easy.
    The doctor from emergency services follows the stretcher. He’s built like a high-alpine surveyor, bald, mid-fifties, skin and bone, a twig; he reveals pointy teeth when he says out loud: Glasgow 3! Then addresses himself specifically to Revol: the neurological exams showed a lack of response to sound (calling his name), visual stimuli (light), or pain; there were also ocular disturbances (asymmetrical movement of the eyes), and respiratory dysfunctions; they had intubated him immediately. He closes his eyes, rubbing his head from forehead toward the occiput: suspected cerebral hemorrhaging following head trauma, unresponsive coma, Glasgow 3 – he uses this language they share, language that banishes the verbose as a waste of time, exiles eloquence and the seduction of words, overdoes nouns, codes, and acronyms, language in which to speak signifies above all to describe – in other words, inform a team, gather up all the evidence so a diagnosis can be made, tests can be ordered, people can be treated and saved: power of the succinct. Revol takes in each piece of information, and plans for the body scan.
    Cordelia Owl is the one who sets him up in his room, in his bed, after which the ES team can leave the department, taking their equipment with them – stretcher, portable ventilator, oxygen tank. Now they have to insert an arterial line, electrodes on his chest, a urinary catheter, and connect Simon to the monitors that will show his vital signs – lines of different colours and forms appear, superposed, straight or broken lines, cross-hatched deviations, rhythmic undulations: the Morse code of medicine. Cordelia works with Revol and her gestures are assured, her movements fluid, easy; her body seems relieved of the viscous spleen that still clung to her movements only yesterday.
    An hour later, death shows up, death announces itself, a moving spot with an irregular circumference opacifying a shape that is lighter and more vast, here it is, it has arrived. Vision sharp as a cudgel blow but Revol doesn’t blink, concentrating on the shots of the body scan on his computer screen, labyrinthine images with legends like geographical maps that he rotates in all directions and zooms in on, getting his bearings, measuring the distances, while on his desk, within arm’s reach, a folder with the hospital’s logo contains a paper copy of the images considered “relevant,” provided by the medical imaging department where Simon Limbeau’s brain was scanned – his head was swept by x-rays to produce these images, and, according to what’s called electron tomography, the data was seized by “slice,” “cuts” of a millimetre thick that could be analyzed on all planes of space, coronal, axial, sagittal, and oblique. Revol knows how to read these images and what they confirm in terms of the state of the subject, what they herald in terms of developments; he recognizes these shapes, these spots, these halos, interprets these milky rings, decrypts these black marks, deciphers legends and codes; he compares, verifies, starts again, carries out his investigation all the way to the end, but there’s