St Matthew's Passion - By Sam Archer Page 0,49
to illuminate them.
Beside her Prof Penney peered at them through his glasses. The radiologist had already telephoned through the result but Melissa and the professor, who as trauma surgeons were both skilled at interpreting scans of this type, wanted to see for themselves.
Fin had already undergone an X-ray of his head, an early investigation that had been performed soon after he’d been wheeled into the ‘majors’ room at the Accident & Emergency department. The bleeding from his head was the result of a scalp wound, a ragged laceration that proved relatively easy to suture closed once it had been cleaned and the tiny blood vessels had been tied off. Melissa had wanted to see to the wound herself but once again had been pushed to one side by the A&E consultant, who’d done the suturing.
The X-ray revealed no fracture of the skull. Fin was lucky. The boat’s railing had struck him on the crown of the head, where the bone was dense. A few inches lower and to the side, on the thin plate of the temple, and the bone would have been shattered.
The absence of a bony fracture was only a small piece of good news, however. A bleed might have occurred inside the head as a result of the impact, between the skull and the brain. Worse, there might be a haemorrhage within the brain itself. Fin might end up partially or wholly paralysed, or without the power of speech or swallowing. He might never recover, but rather live on in a PVS, a persistent vegetative state, kept breathing artificially with a ventilator and kept nourished by an assortment of infusions, conscious but utterly unable to communicate with those around him, to interact with the outside world in any way.
Or - and to Melissa this was the worst possibility, worse even than the notion of Fin’s living the rest of his life shut into himself - he might die.
Melissa had forced these morbid thoughts out of her head like a gardener scything through knots of malignant weeds, but every time they’d grown back with frightening speed. Realising she was wasting her time, Melissa had focused on the practical. She had sent the order for the MRI scan herself, and while the arrangements were being made for Fin to be transported up to the scanner she’d recognised that she herself needed at least a minimum of attention if she were to stay upright in the hours ahead. So she’d allowed herself to be examined by one of the A&E registrars, and had then gone upstairs to the staff bathrooms and subjected herself to a scalding shower, realising only when she was towelling herself off afterwards just how numbingly, inhumanly cold she had been for the last hour.
Warmed, and in clothes someone had found for her that fitted approximately, she wandered the corridors of the hospital, finding it unfamiliar for the first time since she’d arrived, until she saw Professor Penney emerging from the radiology room with the results of Fin’s scan.
They studied the pictures in silence. The films showed sequential ‘slices’ of Fin’s head, horizontal snapshots of different planes through his brain.
There were no tell-tale areas of whitening, no indications of fluid accumulating where it didn’t belong.
Nor were any of the structures distorted, as though some mass were pushing them sideways.
Melissa and the professor gazed at the pictures for a full five minutes without exchanging a word. Occasionally they stepped around one another to get a better view of the pictures at the other end of the viewing box, or moved closer to put their noses almost against the screen to make sure of something that wasn’t clear from further away.
At last she glanced sideways at Professor Penney. He returned her look.
Melissa was the first to speak. ‘Nothing there.’
He raised his eyebrows and gave a small nod, but the relief in his face was plain, and mirrored hers.
It meant a non-specific brain injury, then, Melissa thought as she headed back towards the lifts that would take her to the Intensive Care Unit where Fin had been moved after the scan. He was unconscious, was still unresponsive to pain. A gloomy sign. And the neurosurgeon who’d examined him shortly after they’d reached the hospital had commented on the slight blurring of Fin’s optic discs, meaning oedema around the brain. He was being infused with steroids in an attempt to reduce the swelling. There was no tell-tale sign on the MRI scan of oedema, no crowding out of the dips between