The Final Diagnosis (6 page)

Seddons did not believe in God and he found it hard to understand how educated people could. Knowledge, science, thought—the more these advanced, the more improbable all religions became. But he did believe in what, for lack of better phrases, he thought of as “the spark of humanity, the credo of the individual.” As a surgeon, of course, he would not always deal with individuals; nor would he always know his patients, and even when he did he would lose awareness of them in concentrating on problems of technique. But long ago he had resolved never to forget that beneath everything was a patient—an individual. In his own training Seddons had seen the cocoon of personal isolation—a safeguard against close contact with individual patients—grow around others. Sometimes it was a defensive measure, a deliberate insulation of personal emotions and personal involvement. He felt strong enough himself, though, to get along without the insulation. Moreover, to make sure it did not grow, he forced himself sometimes to think and soliloquize as he was doing now. Perhaps it would surprise some of his friends who thought of Mike Seddons only as a buoyant extrovert to know some of the thoughts that went on inside him. Perhaps it wouldn’t, though; the mind, brain—or whatever you called it—was an unpredictable machine.

What of McNeil? Did he feel anything, or was there a shell around the pathology resident too? Seddons did not know, but he suspected there was. And Pearson? He had no doubts there. Joe Pearson was cold and clinical all the way through. Despite his showmanship the years of pathology had chilled him. Seddons looked at the old man. He had removed the heart from the body and was scrutinizing it carefully. Now he turned to the student nurses.

“The medical history of this man shows that three years ago he suffered a first coronary attack and then a second attack earlier this week. So first we’ll examine the coronary arteries.” As the nurses watched intently Pearson delicately opened the heart-muscle arteries.

“Somewhere here we should discover the area of thrombosis . . . yes, there it is.” He pointed with the tip of a metal probe. In the main branch of the left coronary artery, an inch beyond its origin, he had exposed a pale, half-inch clot. He held it out for the girls to see.

“Now we’ll examine the heart itself.” Pearson laid the organ on a dissecting board and sliced down the center with a knife. He turned the two sections side by side, peered at them, then beckoned the nurses closer. Hesitantly they moved in.

“Do you notice this area of scarring in the muscle?” Pearson indicated some streaks of white fibrous tissue in the heart, and the nurses craned over the gaping red body cavity to see more closely. “There’s the evidence of the coronary attack three years ago—an old infarct which has healed.”

Pearson paused, then went on. “We have the signs of the latest attack here in the left ventricle. Notice the central area of pallor surrounded by a zone of hemorrhage.” He pointed to a small dark-red stain with a light center, contrasting with the red-brown texture of the rest of the heart muscle.

Pearson turned to the surgical resident. “Would you agree with me, Dr. Seddons, that the diagnosis of death by coronary thrombosis seems fairly well established?”

“Yes, I would,” Seddons answered politely. No doubt about it, he thought. A tiny blood clot, not much thicker than a piece of spaghetti; that was all it took to cut you off for good. He watched the older pathologist put the heart aside.

Vivian was steadier now. She believed she had herself in hand. Near the beginning, and when the saw had cut into the dead man’s skull, she had felt the blood drain from her head, her senses swim. She knew then she had been close to fainting and had determined not to. For no reason she had suddenly remembered an incident in her childhood. On a holiday, deep in the Oregon forest, her father had fallen on an open hunting knife and cut his leg badly. Surprisingly in so strong a man, he had quailed at the sight of so much of his own blood, and her mother, usually more at home in the drawing room than the woods, had become suddenly strong. She had fashioned a tourniquet, stemmed the blood, and sent Vivian running for help. Then, with Vivian’s father being carried through the woods on an improvised litter of branches, every half-hour she had released the tourniquet to keep circulation going, then tightened it to halt the bleeding again. Afterward the doctors had said she had saved the leg from amputation. Vivian had long since forgotten the incident, but remembering it now had given her strength. After that she knew there would not be any problem about watching an autopsy again.

“Any questions?” It was Dr. Pearson asking.

Vivian had one. “The organs—those that you take out of the body. What happens to them, please?”

“We shall keep them, probably for a week. That is—the heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, and brain. Then we shall make a gross examination which will be recorded in detail. At that time also we’ll be studying organs removed at other autopsies—probably six to a dozen cases all together.”

It sounded so cold and impersonal, Vivian thought. But maybe you had to get that way if you did this all the time. Involuntarily she shuddered. Mike Seddons caught her eye and smiled slightly. She wondered if he was amused or being sympathetic. She could not be sure. Now one of the other girls, was putting a question. She sounded uneasy, almost afraid to ask. “The body—is it buried then . . . just by itself?”

This was an old one. Pearson answered it. “It varies. Teaching centers such as this usually do more study after autopsies than is done in non-teaching hospitals. In this hospital just the shell of the body goes on to the undertakers.” He added as an afterthought: “They wouldn’t thank us for putting the organs back anyway. Just be a nuisance when they’re embalming.”

That was true, McNeil reflected. Maybe not the gentlest way of putting it, but true all the same. He had sometimes wondered himself if mourners and others who visited funeral parlors knew how little remained in a body that had been autopsied. After an autopsy like this one, and depending on how busy a pathology department was, it might be weeks before the body organs were disposed of finally, and even then small specimens from each were kept stored indefinitely.

“Are there never any exceptions?” The student nurse asking the questions seemed persistent. Pearson did not appear to object though. Maybe this is one of his patient days, McNeil thought. The old man had them occasionally.

“Yes, there are,” he was saying. “Before we can do any autopsy we must have permission from the family of the deceased. Sometimes that permission is unrestricted, as in this case, and then we can examine the entire head and torso. At other times we may get only limited permission. For example, a family may ask specifically that the cranial contents be undisturbed. When that happens in this hospital we respect those wishes.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Apparently the girl was satisfied, whatever her reason had been for asking.

But Pearson had not finished.

“You do run into cases where for reasons of religious faith the organs are required for burial with the body. In that case, of course, we comply with the request.”

“How about Catholics?” It was one of the other girls this time. “Do they insist on that?”

“Most of them don’t, but there are some Catholic hospitals which do. That makes the pathologist’s work difficult. Usually.”

As he added the last word Pearson glanced sardonically at McNeil. Both of them knew what Pearson was thinking—one of the larger Catholic hospitals across town had a standing order that the organs of all bodies autopsied were to be returned to the body for burial. But sometimes a little sleight of hand was practiced. The busy pathology department of the other hospital frequently kept a spare set of organs on hand. Thus, when a new autopsy was done, the organs removed were replaced by the spare ones, so that the body could be released and the latest set of organs examined at leisure. These organs, in turn, were then used for the next body. Thus the pathologists were, in effect, always one ahead of the game.

McNeil knew that Pearson, though not a Catholic, disapproved of this. And whatever else you might say about the old man, he always insisted on following autopsy permissions both to the letter and the spirit. There was one phrase, sometimes used in completing the official form, which read “limited to abdominal incision.” Some pathologists he knew did a full autopsy with this single incision. As he had heard one man put it, “With an abdominal incision, if you’ve a mind to, you can reach up inside and get everything, including the tongue.” Pearson—to his credit, McNeil thought—would never permit this, and in Three Counties an “abdominal incision” release meant examination of the abdomen only.

Pearson had turned his attention back to the body.

“We’ll go on now to examine . . .” Pearson stopped and peered down. He reached for a knife and probed gingerly. Then he let out a grunt of interest.

“McNeil, Seddons, take a look at this.”

Pearson moved aside, and the pathology resident leaned over the area that Pearson had been studying. He nodded. The pleura, normally a transparent, glistening membrane covering the lungs, had a thick coating of scarring—a dense, white fibrous tissue. It was a signal of tuberculosis; whether old or recent they would know in a moment. He moved aside for Seddons.

“Palpate the lungs, Seddons.” It was Pearson. “I imagine you’ll find some evidence there.”

The surgical resident grasped the lungs, probing with his fingers. The cavities beneath the surface were detectable at once. He looked up at Pearson and nodded. McNeil had turned to the case-history papers. He used a clean knife to lift the pages so he would not stain them.

“Was there a chest X-ray on admission?” Pearson asked.

The resident shook his head. “The patient was in shock. There’s a note here it wasn’t done.”

“We’ll take a vertical slice to see what’s visible.” Pearson was talking to the nurses again as he moved back to the table. He removed the lungs and cut smoothly down the center of one. It was there unmistakably—fibrocaseous tuberculosis, well advanced. The lung had a honeycombed appearance, like ping-pong balls fastened together, then cut through the center—a festering, evil growth that only the heart had beaten to the kill.

“Can you see it?”

Seddons answered Pearson’s question. “Yes. Looks like it was a tossup whether this or the heart would get him first.”

“It’s always a tossup what we die of.” Pearson looked across at the nurses. “This man had advanced tuberculosis. As Dr. Seddons observed, it would have killed him very soon. Presumably neither he nor his physician were aware of its presence.”

Now Pearson peeled off his gloves and began to remove his gown. The performance is over, Seddons thought. The bit players and stagehands will do the cleaning up. McNeil and the resident would put the essential organs into a pail and label it with the case number. The remainder would be put back into the body, with linen waste added if necessary to fill the cavities out. Then they would stitch up roughly, using a big baseball stitch—over and under—because the area they had been working on would be covered decorously with clothing in the coffin; and when they had finished the body would go in refrigeration to await the undertaker.

Pearson had put on the white lab coat with which he entered the autopsy room and was lighting a new cigar. It was a characteristic that he left behind him through the hospital a trail of half-smoked cigar butts, usually for someone else to deposit in an ash tray. He addressed himself to the nurses.

“There will be times in your careers,” he said, “when you will have patients die. It will be necessary then to obtain permission for an autopsy from the next of kin. Sometimes this will fall to the physician, sometimes to you. When that happens you will occasionally meet resistance. It is hard for any person to sanction—even after death—the mutilation of someone they have loved. This is understandable.”

Pearson paused. For a moment Seddons found himself having second thoughts about the old man. Was there some warmth, some humanity, in him after all?

“When you need to muster arguments,” Pearson said, “to convince some individual of the need for autopsy, I hope you will remember what you have seen today and use it as an example.”

He had his cigar going now and waved it at the table. “This man has been tuberculous for many months. It is possible he may have infected others around him—his family, people he worked with, even some in this hospital. If there had been no autopsy, some of these people might have developed tuberculosis and it could have remained undetected, as it did here, until too late.”

Two of the student nurses moved back instinctively from the table.

Pearson shook his head. “Within reason there is no danger of infection here. Tuberculosis is a respiratory disease. But because of what we have learned today, those who have been close to this man will be kept under observation and given periodic checks for several years to come.”

To his own surprise Seddons found himself stirred by Pearson’s words. He makes it sound good, he thought; what’s more, he believes in what he is saying. He discovered that at this moment he was liking the old man.

As if he had read Seddons’ mind, Pearson looked over to the surgical resident. With a mocking smile: “Pathology has its victories too, Dr. Seddons.”

He nodded at the nurses. Then he was gone, leaving a cloud of cigar smoke behind.

Four

The monthly surgical-mortality conference was scheduled for 2:30
P.M
. At three minutes to the half-hour Dr. Lucy Grainger, a little harried as if time were working against her, hurried into the administration reception office. “Am I late?” she asked the secretary at the information desk.

“I don’t think they’ve started, Dr. Grainger. They just went in the board room.” The girl had indicated the double oak-paneled doorway down the hall, and now, as she approached, Lucy could hear a hum of conversation from inside.

As she entered the big room with its pile carpet, long walnut table, and carved chairs, she found herself close to Kent O’Donnell and another younger man she did not recognize. Around them was a babel of talk and the air was thick with tobacco smoke. The monthly mortality conferences were usually looked on as command performances, and already most of the hospital’s forty-odd staff surgeons had arrived, as well as house staff—interns and residents.