Try Not to Breathe Read Online Free Page B

“Peter, the hospital was kind enough to send your biography over and, of course, I’ve read up about your work. But I’d love to know what drives you to explore this area of medicine?”
    Peter Haynes exhaled and leaned back in his own battered leather chair. He looked Alex in the eyes, breathing deeply before raising both his elbows and cupping the back of his own head.
    Alex knew that the doctor was forty-one, but he looked older. He had deep rivulets under his bloodshot eyes and his eyelids were a translucent dove gray. His sort-of-curly, sort-of-straight hair resembled a guinea pig sitting on his head, digging its paws into his face.
    “The thing is, Alex, I don’t really think about my work as an area of medicine to be explored. I think it’s more about exploring people. It’s important because people are important and you don’t become a doctor if you don’t value human life.”
    Alex nodded and gestured for him to carry on.
    “The stuff I’m doing now fascinates me because it challenges our understanding of the line between consciousness and death.”
    When he spoke, the twitching and awkward grimaces that had punctuated his small talk disappeared. Peter Haynes lowered his hands again and flexed his fingers on the scratched desk.
    Alex wondered if this was a rehearsed monologue. She didn’t care if it was, so long as she got the quotes she needed and could push on to asking about Amy Stevenson.
    “When it comes to our understanding of the mind, we’re doing a poor job. I don’t mean psychology, I mean the nuts and bolts biology of the brain and how that governs behavior, thought and communication. There’s so much we don’t know but as soon as someone loses the ability to communicate in the ways that we’re prepared to accept, they’re lost to us.”
    The fire in Peter’s eyes cooled, he slumped back in his chair and seemed to look through Alex to the door.
    “Is it true that about forty percent of diagnoses of vegetative states are incorrect?” Alex asked, hoping to show that she had done her research.
    “Oh numbers, you journalists are obsessed with headline numbers.” He waved his hand dismissively through the air. “We don’t know. But we do know that a large chunk of people who used to be called ‘vegetables’ actually have functioning minds. Maybe a fifth, maybe more, for every scientist you find that thinks it’s a fifth, you’ll find another who dismisses the whole damn idea.”
    “I’d love to understand how you actually recognize communication. You say they can communicate but not in the way we’re accustomed to, so what does their communication look like?”
    “Well, they have the capacity to think and to want to project those thoughts. It’s a little like a computer intranet, do you know what I mean by ‘an intranet’?”
    “Yes,” Alex said, hoping the explanation only involved a very basic understanding.
    “Okay, so within an intranet you have information moving around and you can interact with that data—or memories, thoughts—but you can’t share that data outside of the intranet, it’s a closed loop, if you will.”
    “Got it,” Alex said.
    The doctor paused. “Have you? Yes, well, these patients have data in there, they have memories, and they have a network of thoughts whizzing around, they just can’t share them outside of that closed loop. So it’s down to us, if you’ll pardon the stretched analogy, to hack into that network and see it working for ourselves.”
    “And how do you do that?”
    “Brain scans, MRIs mainly. We take a look at the patients’ brains at rest and we capture which parts of the brain are lighting up. Very few of them, generally. So then we start to ask things of the brain. We ask it to imagine and to remember. We ask simple things that will be easy for even a mildly functioning brain with some everyday memories to work from. Sometimes, especially in the younger patients who were active more recently, we’ll ask them to