• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1365 0

this was his first moment of peace since early that morning. Just after midnight, he had received an urgent call at home and returned to the hospital for emergency surgery on a male patient who was bleeding badly two weeks after receiving a new heart valve. Aaron opened the man’s chest, drained the blood, and stopped the hemorrhaging; afterward, he caught some sleep on a hospital cot. Next he performed a five-hour coronary bypass operation, followed by two hours of rounds, during which he checked on his patients.

Despite a grueling schedule of surgeries and clinical work, Aaron didn’t look or feel the worse for wear. While serving as a surgeon in the U.S. Navy for twenty-two years, he had become superbly disciplined. He had honed his body into the human equivalent of a surgical machine: he jogged at least four miles nearly every day and, by willing himself not to be tired, he could work for forty-eight straight hours without sleep. He had conquered hunger in much the same way. A few years earlier, Aaron had realized that although he was always famished at lunchtime, he never had time to eat. His solution was to simply force himself to forget about lunch, and he was never again hungry for a midday meal.

Now, as Aaron worked on his reports, he turned on a small radio on his desk and heard an announcer say that there had been a shooting at the Washington Hilton involving the president, but that Reagan had not been hurt. Aaron wondered whether some of the victims might be coming his way; sure enough, he soon heard sirens and a few minutes after that his pager started beeping. When he called the operator, she told him he was needed immediately in the emergency room.

Aaron threw on a lab coat, took the elevator to the ground floor, and strode across the street to the hospital. Entering the emergency room, he found pandemonium. Walking down a narrow hallway toward the trauma bay, he turned to his left and spotted a man being treated in Room 3. Even from a distance of ten feet, Aaron could see a neat bullet hole in the victim’s right chest. Ahead of him and to his right, in Trauma Bay 5B, he saw a second victim lying quietly on a gurney, his head wrapped in bandages. His years in the military had trained Aaron to quickly triage patients; he gave this one little chance of survival.

A surgeon grabbed Aaron’s arm and steered him toward Bay 5A. Secret Service agents stepped aside as he slipped through the bay’s curtains. Glancing at this third victim, Aaron recognized him right away.

Aaron could see that the president was in a good deal of pain. Joe Giordano told him that Reagan’s blood pressure was improving and that they had inserted a chest tube a few minutes ago.

“He’s responding very nicely,” Giordano said—but, he pointed out, Reagan was still bleeding profusely. Checking the Pleur-evac, Aaron saw that it held 1.2 liters of blood.

As Aaron surveyed the situation, he thought of the doctors who had treated President Kennedy in Dallas. He also thought about the physicians of the three earlier presidents who had been shot and who had died, either from a devastating wound or from appallingly poor care. A born-again Christian, Aaron believed that everything happened for a reason, and now, as he studied the president, he uttered a silent prayer. He didn’t ask for a miracle or ask God to spare Reagan. Instead, he simply asked for a chance to save the president’s life. God, he prayed, please don’t let the president be irretrievable.

* * *

AS THE TRAUMA bay buzzed around him, Aaron watched the blood pouring from Reagan’s chest. He touched the tube leading to the Pleur-evac; it was warm. He looked up and exchanged a knowing glance with David Gens: the blood was obviously coming from deep within Reagan’s chest. And the blood was not only warm but also dark. That meant it was probably streaming from a pulmonary artery. These arteries, which directly connect the heart with the lungs, are large and if breached tend to bleed until surgically repaired.

Since the president was stable and responding well to fluids and transfusions, Aaron