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Richard’s advisor at school had been Christie Douglas, the head of radiology at the hospital. Though not familiar enough to call her by her first name, Richard had always referred to her as “Doc Christie”. She had always felt a motherly kinship with Richard. She was nearing retirement age now and referred to the couple as “Liz and Dick”, though she suspected most of the younger workers at the hospital were too wet behind the ears to get the reference. So when Richard was brought in for an MRI, she was more than casually concerned. By the time Richard got to radiology, he had started to complain of a little stiffness in his neck. Never a good sign.
The MRI machine was not as noisy as the older models, but the snap and hum could still be a little alarming. Richard, wearing only a hospital gown, had just started his transit of the machine, only the top of his head inside. Even though a tech was actually running the machine, Doc Christie herself was there to evaluate the images. She snapped on the intercom from the control room.
“You okay in there?”
Rather than answer, Richard gave a hesitant OK sign. The cross sections of internal brain structure began rendering on the computer monitor as Doc Christie looked on. First the meninges, then the cortex, moving on down through the limbic system and ventricles. Everything seemed okay until the machine began scanning past the pons. It was just a black speck at first, nearly unnoticeable. As the machine recorded more frames, the black speck grew from a speck, to a dot, to a smear, until it finally became a full blown blob about halfway through the medulla. Doc Christie’s eyes widened in unison with the growing black smudge that signaled a massive infarction of the medulla oblongata.
“Oh, fuck,” she whispered. She thumbed the intercom again.
“Richard, you alright?”
No answer.
“Richard? Richard!”
On the second non-response, Christie turned to the nervous tech.
“Get him out! Get him out now!”
The machine powered down with a dying hum as the tech switched it off. Doc Christie and the technician both darted from the control room. Richard was in the machine up to the middle part of his chest and the tech pulled the conveyor table out.
Richard’s eyes were open and fixed. Drool had run from both sides of his mouth and pooled on the conveyor table. Doc Christie (not equipped with a stethoscope, she was a radiologist, after all) quickly checked for a carotid pulse and respiration. She found neither. She snapped her fingers in front of Richard’s eyes and got no reaction. The bright lights of the exam room had not one jot or tittle’s effect on his pupils. They remained dilated and staring at something no living soul would ever see. She jammed a thumb hard into his armpit and got no response. She savagely pinched his Achilles tendon and got an equally null reaction.
“Jesus,” she murmured harshly. “Call a code,” she said to the tech, but she was only going through the motions. Non-Cardiac, Sudden Cardiac Death was what would be put on the death certificate. Richard’s medulla oblongata was destroyed and nothing short of Divine intervention would get his heart or lungs going again. He had been dead from the first moments of his head injury as the blood was relentlessly choked off to the medulla. It had simply taken his body forty minutes to catch up.
A mist fogged her glasses as she heard the call for a code blue to radiology go out over the intercom, but she recovered quickly. She would wait for the crash team to go through their motions, then she would pronounce him.
It was going to be a bad day all around.