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The Procedure, by Peter Clement
PDF Ebook The Procedure, by Peter Clement
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"Heartpounding suspense," hailed Entertainment Weekly of Peter Clement's first medical thriller, Lethal Practice. Now the former ER physician has done it again--combining his technical expertise with a page-burning plot to create a chillingly plausible novel of suspense.
With authentic detail and a surgeon's precision, Clement captures the tense, electrifying atmosphere of a big city hospital turned into a flash point. For in Fatal Medicine, one threat is more dangerous than contagion: the threat of human beings deciding who should live and who should die. . . .
Death is a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence at St. Vincent's Hospital in Buffalo, New York. Now, in his pressure cooker career, Dr. Earl Garnet has broken the cardinal rule of modern medicine: he publicly blames a powerful HMO for practicing "no-fault murder" in the death of an eighteen-month-old baby. The HMO swiftly strikes back, igniting a debilitating boycott of the hospital. But after several accidents nearly cost patients their lives, the true bloodletting begins. A doctor is found sprawled out in the parking lot, his throat cut ear to ear.
Blamed for instigating the chaos, Earl Garnet knows that he faces more than a deadly power play. The doctor may have uncovered a conspiracy reaching from the halls of one of the nation's most influential HMOs to a small, experimental clinic in Mexico, where yet another of his patients went for treatment and disappeared. To find answers, Garnet must wade deep into the murky, surreal workings of today's health care industry.
Smart, tough, crackling with suspense, and vivid in its hospital setting, this visionary novel instantly places Peter Clement in the distinguished company of Michael Palmer and Robin Cook. Make no mistake: The Procedure is the work of a first-rate physician and an absolutely brilliant storyteller.
From the Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #641848 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-02-04
- Released on: 2009-02-04
- Format: Kindle eBook
From the Inside Flap
"Heartpounding suspense," hailed Entertainment Weekly of Peter Clement's first medical thriller, Lethal Practice. Now the former ER physician has done it again--combining his technical expertise with a page-burning plot to create a chillingly plausible novel of suspense.
With authentic detail and a surgeon's precision, Clement captures the tense, electrifying atmosphere of a big city hospital turned into a flash point. For in Fatal Medicine, one threat is more dangerous than contagion: the threat of human beings deciding who should live and who should die. . . .
Death is a daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence at St. Vincent's Hospital in Buffalo, New York. Now, in his pressure cooker career, Dr. Earl Garnet has broken the cardinal rule of modern medicine: he publicly blames a powerful HMO for practicing "no-fault murder" in the death of an eighteen-month-old baby. The HMO swiftly strikes back, igniting a debilitating boycott of the hospital. But after several accidents nearly cost patients their lives, the true bloodletting begins. A doctor is found sprawled out in the parking lot, his throat cut ear to ear.
Blamed for instigating the chaos, Earl Garnet knows that he faces more than a deadly power play. The doctor may have uncovered a conspiracy reaching from the halls of one of the nation's most influential HMOs to a small, experimental clinic in Mexico, where yet another of his patients went for treatment and disappeared. To find answers, Garnet must wade deep into the murky, surreal workings of today's health care industry.
Smart, tough, crackling with suspense, and vivid in its hospital setting, this visionary novel instantly places Peter Clement in the distinguished company of Michael Palmer and Robin Cook. Make no mistake: The Procedure is the work of a first-rate physician and an absolutely brilliant storyteller.
About the Author
Peter Clement, M.D., is a physician who headed an emergency room at a major metropolitan hospital and now maintains a private practice. He is also the author of Lethal Practice and Death Rounds. He is married to a physician and has two sons.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Five weeks earlier:
Tuesday, October 12, 7:00 a.m.
The sight of those tiny human remains spread out before us on the
dissecting tray staggered me despite my knowing what to expect. The pink
unspoiled lungs, a maroon heart, the small ocher-colored liver, and a
spleen the size of a beet—all gleaming under the overhead light—looked new
enough to hold the promise of a lifetime’s use. But the brain, no bigger
than my fist, was covered by a thick mesh of crimson streaks. These fanned
out over its surface and obscured the tightly coiled ridges and grooves
underneath to the point that I couldn’t see their normal beige, gray, and
yellow-white coloration. And the kidneys were so speckled with angry red
blotches that a layperson would have thought someone had spattered them
with paint.
From the silence of the other physicians and residents in the room, I’d
deduced that everyone was struggling as much as I was to remain clinically
detached. Not even the voice of the presenting pathologist, normally our
guide to at least make scientific sense out of a death, could ever begin
to explain why this child had died. Instead the words simply floated over
me, like a Muzak of medical terminology, and consigned themselves to the
back of my mind.
“. . . the inflamed meninges, the characteristic pattern of hemorrhagic
petechiae on the surface of the kidneys, and the rapidity of the
catastrophic process . . .”
When I examined the brain, holding it in the palm of my hand I could
barely feel its weight through the latex gloves that I’d pulled on in
order to inspect the specimens.
“. . . the mother noticed symptoms attributable to an upper respiratory
infection the day before. The baby was irritable, off his food, crying,
and had a mild temperature. She gave him an appropriate dose of
acetaminophen, attempted to keep him hydrated with juice . . .”
His name had been Robert Delany, and it was a week ago that his life had
ended at eighteen months of age in our emergency department.
“. . . she telephoned the after-hours number of her health maintenance
organization, as it was late in the evening, but the HMO’s triage nurse
told her that the child probably only had a cold and could safely wait
until morning to be seen. Yet the boy continued to cry, his fever remained
elevated at a hundred and three despite the acetaminophen, and after a few
hours the mother once more contacted her clinic. Again she was told that
the baby most likely had the flu and that she should bring him over only
in the morning. When the mother suggested taking the baby to Emergency
that night, she was told she could if she wished, but since the illness
seemed minor, payment wouldn’t be preauthorized at any more than the rate
of an office visit. . . .”
The balance of the cost, potentially a thousand dollars if a zealous
resident did a battery of tests, they had told her, would not necessarily
be covered. As a result she delayed several more hours, until the child
had started to seize. The images of what had happened then, after he
arrived in ER, haunted me still.
We’d been like giants gathered around his tiny form while his limbs jerked
with the repetitive rhythm of a grand mal convulsion. He’d had no
respirations, his pressure had been unobtainable, and his heart rate was
slowing into single digits.
“Bag him!”
“His jaw’s clamped shut.”
“Anybody got a line?”
His eyes had kept flicking to one side, keeping time with the grotesque
dance gripping the rest of him. His skin color, already blue from lack of
oxygen, had quickly darkened to purple.
“. . . get an IV in his neck . . .”
“. . . do a cut-down in his foot . . .”
“. . . diazepam up the rectum . . .”
Everyone had been shouting orders, residents had stuck him with needles,
nurses probed him with catheters, but he continued to seize. In the end
I’d had to grab his pumping right leg, encircle it with my thumb and
forefinger to hold it steady, and drive a needle the size of a two-inch
nail into the front of his tibia to access his circulation through the
marrow within. The steel point had given a lurch as it penetrated the
outer layer of bone with a little crunch, but finally I’d gotten a route
through which I’d been able to infuse enough medication to make the
convulsions stop. But victory had been short-lived. After he’d been
intubated, ventilated, and pinked up a bit, what caught my attention was a
red rash breaking out below his eyes and spreading over his trunk as I
watched.
“Oh, my God!” a resident had muttered, peering over my shoulder.
“Meningococcemia!” What he was seeing was also called
Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome, but by whatever name we gave it, we’d
both known immediately what it meant. Meningococcal bacteria were
cascading through the bloodstream from infected meninges at the surface of
the brain and arriving at the skin. Once there, these microbes produced
toxins that attacked the lining of the blood vessels, and it was the
subsequent hemorrhagic leaks that led to the red spots. The same process
was going on in the vasculature of every vital organ in the boy’s body,
especially in the kidneys. He could be dead within the hour.
I’d turned him on his side, curled his tiny form into a ball, and held him
as a resident pushed yet another two-inch long needle into him, this one
between the spines of his third and fourth lumbar vertebrae. Through my
hands, which I’d placed on his little back to keep him from moving, I felt
the give of the needle tip when it punctured the membrane containing the
spinal cord and its surrounding fluid. As the young doctor drew minute
samples of this clear liquid into several tubes for testing, it flashed
through me how the feel of the child against my arms was so much like that
of Brendan, my own infant son. By the time we’d finished the procedure,
one of the surgical residents had dissected open a vein in his foot and
another had inserted an IV line into his jugular at the neck. We’d then
infused a loading dose of ceftriaxone, the indicated antibiotic. With
nothing left to be done, I’d stood away from the stretcher and viewed our
work. The sight of that poor struggling infant, stuck with tubes, needles,
and catheters, had brought
me to tears.
Later, once all our efforts had come to nothing and I’d pronounced him
dead, I cut each one of these lines off at the skin. My leaving their tips
inserted had been in order to verify their position later at autopsy, but
I hadn’t wanted them protruding from the boy’s body, in case the mother
asked to see him. I’d then cleaned away the blood, covered the puncture
sites with small Band-Aids, and placed a blanket over him. I’d had to
concentrate especially hard doing that last simple act. Thoughts of
tucking Brendan in kept rushing to mind, and once more I nearly lost the
fragile hold I’d had on my own emotions. I’d then gone to tell the mother
that her child had died.
Even now, a week after the boy’s death, I could still visualize the
horrible expression I’d seen on her face during the
instant she looked up when I entered the room where she
was waiting. In that second of exchange, before I’d spoken a word, the
light flowed out of her eyes and her face collapsed from a rigid mask of
hope into a fluid swirl of agony and grief.
Later, as I’d supported her, she stood over the already whitening corpse
of her child. “Can I hold him?” she asked. The nurses looked appalled. I’d
swallowed my own alarm, lifted the tiny bundle off the stretcher, and
handed it to her.
“. . . Dr. Garnet, is there anything you wish to add to the presentation
of this case, before pronouncing whether the death was expected or
unexpected, avoidable or unavoidable?” The pathologist’s question pulled
my thoughts back to the present.
It took a few seconds longer before I could collect myself enough to
speak. There were specific lessons I wanted the residents to take from
this, but I wasn’t sure how much of what I was thinking I should reveal.
“I think we have to talk about what happened prior to the infant’s
admission to Emergency,” I began. “In particular, if the mother hadn’t
been put off by her HMO, her instincts about the child being sick enough
to warrant a visit to ER might have gotten him here sufficiently early
that we could have saved him.”
“What did the HMO representatives say when they learned of the child’s
death?” asked a young woman across the table from me. She was planning a
career in ER and was doing a rotation in my department. “I presume you
told them.”
“Oh, I told them all right, but they’d covered themselves legally. Notice
what their triage nurse said to the child’s mother. She could take him
into ER if she thought he was seriously ill, but if the visit wasn’t
justified, they probably wouldn’t cover the cost of any tests. It’s a
variant of what HMOs always claim—‘We don’t withhold care; we withhold
payment’—and by so doing they make the choice of whether to come into ER
rest with the patient, or as was the case here, with the parent. According
to this usual spiel of theirs, the delay was then her doing. Reminding her
of company policy regarding trivial visits, and their refusing to
preauthorize payment of costly tests, was simply standard procedure, not a
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Murder and Malfeasance Make for Deadly Medicine
By Eleanor V. Miller
Peter Clement's charismatic hero, Dr. Earl Garnet, outspoken chief of ER services at St. Paul's Hospital in Buffalo, has always been something of a maverick. Deeply caring and utterly involved in his profession, he puts his patients before what's politic and his professional ethics before personal advancement. His infinite capacity for outrage in both areas is tested to the hilt when a baby arrives too late and dies in his ER because the mother's HMO had withheld not timely treatment, but their guarantee to pay for it. He subsequently publicly charges powerful Brama Health Care with "No fault murder" and opens a can of worms that rocks the hospital's hierarchy to its core. Dr. Clement's own years of experience and technical expertise in ER medicine coupled with his brilliant flair for suspenseful plotting and and non-stop action make this latest addition to an already best-selling medical series almost impossible to put down. As has been the case with his two previous thrillers, he keeps several plot-lines running in tandem. Shortly after the baby's death, a doctor who might have been associated with Brama is found brutally murdered in the hospital parking lot, and another doctor, an alcoholic friend and former colleague of Garnet's, disappears after enrolling in a secret, experimental drug rehab program which also appears to be linked to the HMO. As the financial stakes increase and pressures to cover-up and deny mount, Garnet finds himself increasingly alone in his attempts to establish a connection between these apparently disparate events that will provide tangible proof of murder, malfeasance and corruption in both the HMO and the medical establishment, bring the real culprits to justice and create the desperately needed mandate for managed care reform which he sees as a personal imperative. In order to do this, he ultimately puts his own life on the line with utterly spine-tingling results.
I believe that Dr. Clement is a 'muck-raker' in the original and most honorable sense of the term. He wields his creative talent like a scapel with devastating power and accuracy to expose the multiplicity of flaws and shortcomings inherent to our present system of medical care, and it is impossible to come away from his fictional world without having some terrible concerns about the real one which we all have to deal with sooner or later ourselves.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A young doctor tries to bring down a villainous HMO.
By E. Bukowsky
What would authors of medical thrillers do without HMO's? In dozens of medical thrillers, the administrators of HMO's and the physicians belonging to them either withhold vital care, engage in ghoulish experimentation, or actively kill their patients in order to reap greater profits.
In Peter Clement's "The Procedure," the hero is Earl Garnet, Chief of the Emergency Room in St. Paul's Hospital, located in Buffalo, N. Y. Garnet is enraged at an HMO called Brama, which has engaged in a deliberate campaign to discourage patients from going to the hospital. The officials at Brama let their patients know that if their ailments turn out to be minor, then the patients themselves will be solely responsible for their hospital bills. Unfortunately, a number of patients die because they delay going to the hospital until their conditions became too serious to ignore. Garnet angrily calls Brama's tactics "no-fault murder".
The HMO decides to boycott St. Paul's in order to punish Garnet, and his fellow physicians are annoyed with him. However, all this takes a back seat to a series of brutal murders that occur on the grounds of St. Paul's. Someone is slashing physicians' throats and the police do not have a clue who the murderer is or what his motive may be.
Gradually, Garnet and Riley, a policeman assigned to the case, realize that the murders are somehow tied to the Brama HMO and to a shadowy facility that Brama runs in Mexico to treat hard-core alcoholics. Garnet risks his life to uncover the truth about Brama and to bring the HMO to its knees.
Clement is very good at describing medical procedures. The scenes that take place in the operating room and in the emergency room are authentic and exciting. His indictment of HMO's, while not a new theme in medical thrillers, does hit home.
However, the characters are the same old tired stereotypes. Garnet is the intrepid hero who is unafraid to go into the lion's den to uncover the truth. He has an equally heroic friend named Jack who also is willing to give up his life to defeat the HMO's. The bad guys practically twirl their mustaches as they perform their villainous deeds. The identity of the killer is obvious long before the end of the book, yet the author springs it upon us at the end as if it is a big surprise.
I give "The Procedure" high marks for the author's medical know-how, but low marks for the contrived plot and the stereotyped characters.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Exciting Page Turner
By Connie Showers
I really enjoyed this book and am glad that there are no HMO's in Quebec. As exciting as the previous ones, couldn't put it down. Dr. Garnett is like a hound following a scent, he never lets up. I anxiously await the next round with Dr. Garnett et al.
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