A Case of Need: A Novel by Michael Crichton & Jeffery Hudson

Author:Michael Crichton & Jeffery Hudson [Crichton, Michael & Hudson, Jeffery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Medical, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers, Suspense
ISBN: 9781480400634
Amazon: B00DEU9H3Y
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-07-23T05:00:00+00:00

It took only a few moments.

“How many?” Blake said.

“Nine.”

He smiled. “I’m told it can be done in five. I have seven.” He took the pad from me and wrote:

MOANS

LOANS

LOONS

LOOKS

ROOKS

ROCKS

ROCKY

I reached into my pocket and gave him a quarter. He had won the last three in a row, and over the years, he had beaten me consistently. But then Blake beat everybody.

“By the way,” he said, “I heard another argument. Do you know the DNA template one?”7

“Yes,” I said.

He shook his head. “Pity. I enjoy it. Springing it on people, I mean.”

I smiled at him, barely able to conceal my pleasure.

“You know the latest on Youth in Asia? The one about the right to refuse medication? You can fit it into the fluoride arguments, very neatly.”8

I’d heard that one, too, and I told him so. This seemed to depress him. He wandered off to try his luck with someone else.

Blake collects arguments on medical philosophy. He is never happier than when he is logically demonstrating to a surgeon that he has no right to operate, or to an internist that he is ethically bound to kill every patient he can. Blake likes words and tosses around ideas the way small children play softball in the street. It is easy for him, effortless and amusing. He and Art get along well together. Last year the two of them had a four-hour argument over whether an obstetrician was morally responsible for all children born under his direction, from the time they were born until they died.

In retrospect, all of Blake’s arguments seem no more useful or important than watching an athlete exercise in a gym, but at the time they can be fascinating. Blake has a keen sense of the arbitrary, and it stands him in good stead when working with members of the most arbitrary profession on earth.

Wandering around the party, I heard snatches of jokes and conversations; it was, I thought, a typical medical party.

“Did you hear about the French biochemist who had twins. He baptized one and kept the other as a control.”

“They all get bacteremia sooner or later, anyway …”

“And he was walking around—walking around, mind you, with a blood pH of seven-point-six and a potassium of one …”

“Well, what the hell do you expect of a Hopkins man?”

“So he said, ‘I gave up smoking, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give up drinking.’”

“Sure, you can correct the blood gases, but it doesn’t help the vasculature …”

“She was always a nice girl. Very well dressed. They must have spent a fortune on her clothes …”

“… course he’s pissed. Anybody’d be pissed …”

“… oliguric my ass. He was anuric for five days, and he still survived …”

“… in a seventy-four-year-old man, we just excised it locally and sent him home. It’s slow growing, anyhow …”

“… liver reached down to his knees, practically. But no hepatic failure …”

“She said she’d sign herself out if we didn’t operate, so naturally, we …”

“… but the students are always bitching; it’s a nonspecific response

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