This month, the Catholic Writers’ Guild is touring Guildie Ron O’Gorman’s book, Fatal Rhythm. It’s an SOA winner as well as an award-winning novel. Check out this medical thriller by a fellow Catholic.

Summary: In the pre-dawn hours of the graveyard shift, the ICU at the Houston Heart Institute is quiet, and quietly patients are dying. Surgery resident Joe Morales dreams of becoming a rich heart doctor. First, he must survive his assignment to an ICU rife with land mines–unexplained patient deaths, rival faculty, fellow resident saboteurs, a cost-slashing administrator, a ruthless insurance executive, a seductive head nurse, a jealous wife, a critically ill son, an overprotective mother, and an orderly distraught over his daughter’s death. To salvage the career he thought he wanted, Joe must determine the cause of the suspicious deaths. In the process, he’s forced to re-examine the ethnic and religious heritage that he had rejected.

About Writing Fatal Rhythm – Faith & Fiction: Before an author puts words on paper, he must define a worldview. For me, it is imperative to write from a Catholic perspective, defined as a belief that both good and evil exist, and that in the end good will triumph. Woven throughout my narrative are characters who are both sinners and saints, repeatedly dealing with love, death, temptation, God, belief, friendship and vocation. My protagonist, Joe Morales, confronts the ethnic and religious background that he previously rejected. In addition, he must determine how to integrate his love for family with his professional goals.

Find it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/1tzHRFP

An Excerpt:

Olive green sheets draped the young woman’s body, except for a small area in the center of her chest. There, the sternal retractor spread apart the two halves of the sawed breastbone to reveal the beating heart. Dr. Joe Morales wasn’t assigned to this room, but he had to check on his cousin Lourdes. So, he’d slipped into OR 19, the Mount Olympus of surgery, and staked out a position behind the curtain that separated the anesthesiologist, Dr. Allgood, from the surgical personnel led by Dr. Jacques De la Toure, head of the Houston Heart Institute.

De la Toure closed an abnormal hole between two of Lourdes’s heart’s pumping chambers. Serious stuff, but on the spectrum of procedures, it anchored the low-risk end, and Joe had encouraged Lourdes to proceed with surgery. She was not only his cousin, but his best friend, his only friend from the neighborhood. She respected him, admired him, adored him. So, when he told her she needed the operation, she acquiesced like a gentle lamb. Joe’s mother prayed to the Virgin for Lourdes’s recovery, but Joe did better. He arranged for her to have the finest heart surgeon in the world

As they waited for the heart to improve, Joe noticed a band of sweat start to form across the front of De la Toure’s surgical cap. Joe shivered as the air conditioning evaporated perspiration from his own skin. Finally, the drugs took effect. The heart began to contract vigorously, flogged by the pharmacological adrenaline.

From under his mask, De la Toure offered a deep, low “thank you,” and his scrub nurse chorused with a soft “Amen.”

Unfortunately, he spoke too soon. Joe watched as abnormally wide EKG complexes filled the monitor screen.

“She’s in a sustained V-tach,” Dr. Allgood said as he turned to his drug cart.

“I can see that,” De la Toure said. “Give me the defibrillator.”

The scrub nurse turned to the stainless-steel stand behind the surgeon.

“Now!” De la Toure shouted.

“Yes, sir.” She handed De la Toure the two long metal lollipops, each connected by an electrical cord to the power source. Carefully, he slid them into the chest, and sandwiched the heart between the two paddles.

“Clear,” he ordered. Then, he pushed the red button on the handle.

Lourdes’s body jerked, knocking a tray of instruments onto the floor. A cacophony of metal against metal. The suddenness and volume of the sound elicited an involuntary gasp from the operating personnel, followed by an immediate embarrassed silence, but, like De la Toure, Joe remained focused on the exposed heart, the bloated muscular pump drowning in a pool of its own blood.

Lourdes’s body lay still now. A sacrificial virgin at the apex of the pyramid, her chest split open, her heart exposed. For what purpose? To appease an unseen Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent? The idiocy that Joe’s Aztec ancestors accepted as fact was indeed as logical as any reason Joe could fathom. Whether you believed in the myth of a merciful savior or a vengeful deity, what difference did it make? Dead was dead.

Piercing illumination from the four OR lights bore down on the center of the surgical field. Each one, like a satellite dish with hun­dreds of mirrors, focused its halogen light source into a unified beam that spotlighted Lourdes’s distended heart. As Joe stared into the cavity, he couldn’t prevent his eyes from watering. Beneath him, a crater with a glob of burgundy muscle plopped into a puddle of crimson fluid. Deep, dark, deathly red overwhelmed his vision. Joe couldn’t look at it for another moment.

He raised his head but was blinded by the overhead lighting. A supernova strobed inside his brain. Reflexively, Joe closed his eyes, but within his cranium, throbbing gray matter threatened to erupt like an overdue volcano. He opened his eyes to look at the monitor, frantically searching for signs of life, but the red, green, and yellow tracings from the plasma screen stretched and twisted and twirled around him like a time-delayed photo of the Southwest Freeway during evening rush hour.

Why had he pushed Lourdes to have the surgery? True, the VSD had prompted the beginnings of congestive heart failure, but there were medications. And now, she might die because of his advice.

Joe started to sway. Stepping back from the table, he stumbled over a cable on the floor.

Allgood took hold of his arm, providing support. “Yo, Joe, you all right? Need me to sit you down?”

Joe looked at Lourdes, sweet and pure. Inmaculada. His knees wanted to buckle, but his mind wouldn’t allow it. He felt Allgood tighten the grip on his arm.

“Joe? Man, you OK?”

Joe pulled away. He had to be strong. Professional.

“I’m fine. Look, I have to get to OR 15. It’s where I’m assigned.”

Without turning back, he rushed out of the room, his hand covering his mask in case he couldn’t control the bitter fluid rising in the back of his throat.

About Ron: R. B. O’Gorman obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from Rice University and studied cardiovascular surgery under Dr. Michael E DeBakey. FATAL RHYTHM is a medical suspense/mystery based on his training experience with Micahel E. DeBakey, called the “greatest surgeon ever.”

 

Kathryn is a retired junior high teacher. A convert with a love for the Church she believes that its teachings have a more than viable application for today's world. She writes practical theological for the people in the pews believing that they have as much right to good catechesis as our youth and converts. Her writings appear on Catholic web sites and local Church publications. She has even been published in the diocese of Australia and most recemtly Zenit. Kathryn holds a Master's in Theology and is a certified spiritual director. Learn more about Kathryn at: www.atravelersview.org