Read Online The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber - Free Book Online

concerns. And as I said yesterday, we’re struggling with these same questions and what our responses need to be.”
    Now Ruck jumped in. “And there’s supposedly two other patients with very strange glucoses, as well?”
    “Um, yes. I think Nancy discussed these with you?”
    Ruck had promised Nancy Doherty that he would protect her, and so instead of giving up his source, Ruck answered Lund’s question witha question, one he already knew the answer to. “Did you guys ever run C-peps and insulin levels and all that on these patients?”
    Again, there was a protracted silence. Ruck had asked the critical question. The C-pep tests would have indicated whether the insulin in their patients had come from their own bodies, or from some other, outside source. If it was an outside source, they obviously had a real problem.
    Finally, Cors and Lund both answered, barely audible:
    “Yeah.”
    “Yep.”
    “And…?” Ruck led.
    Silence.
    “Um, did they come back in correlation?”
    “Yes,” Lund said finally. “They did.”
    “Well,” Cors began, “the endocrinologist on the case… he, um, felt that, um… at least in one of the cases… um…. I’m trying to remember which one, I don’t have the charts just right in front of me, but um… he would be hard-pressed to explain what happened to the patient, absent an….” Cors paused to think, then finally remembered the word he was looking for. “… an exogenous source of influence.”
    “Well, hey!” Marcus said. Cors had said it. Their own physicians had concluded that someone must have injected these patients with overdose levels of the drug. “That—yeah, that is our worry about this whole thing !” Marcus boomed. “Because my gut feeling is that, they’re all victims of the same thing!”
    “Well, we have gut feelings, too,” Cors admitted. “And what we’re wrestling with is, um, you know, throwing the whole institution into chaos, versus, you know, our responsibility to, you know, to keep patients from further harm. And, um, that’s what, that’s what we’re, that’s what we’re wrestling with, right now.”
    The Poison Control end of the line was silent, waiting to know the outcome of Cors’s wrestling.
    Finally, Cors continued. “We have been trying to investigate this. To get some more information before we made any kind of rush to, you know—judgment. Part of that investigation involves an expert opinion. Which we solicited from you. And now puts you in an unfortunate position.”
    “Yeah!” Marcus snorted. “You see, the problem is that in every single report like this in the literature in years gone by, there was significant delay in the hospitals instituting any sort of a legal investigation. You know, physicians—I don’t care how good your background is, they are really infamously poor at doing forensic investigation. And, the problem, in the past, has always been that somebody then moves on—and, and, you have trouble tracking them.”
    “Yeah,” Cors said. “Who does do good forensic investigation?”
    “This is a police matter,” Ruck blurted. He’s said it a half dozen times over the past two days.
    “Yes, it’s a police matter,” Marcus said.
    “Um, oh-kay,” Cors said.
    “Okay, I mean, quite honestly,” Marcus said, “if you don’t report it to the police, and somebody else dies, and then it comes up that you stonewalled it—you’re really going to look terrible!”
    “Well, oh-kay.” Cors chuckled. “We’re looking at protecting patients .”
    “No no, no,” Marcus said. “Obviously I’m concerned in protecting all of the patients in your hospital as well. But I’m also concerned that, that we’ll all be caught with our pants down, and we’ll all look like morons!”
    Cors listened, then cleared his throat. “One of the reasons we called you was to determine if there’s really any further benefit, at this point, with you coming in and taking a look, um, through the, the actual records,”