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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2000, 304 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2001, 304 pages
The former ER physician returns with the stunning and explosive tale of a gifted neurosurgeon drawn into a world of escalating danger and violence, all because of...The Patient.
With one nerve-shattering New York Times bestseller after another, Michael Palmer has demonstrated his extraordinary ability to create medical thrillers that are at once relentlessly suspenseful and chillingly realistic. And now the former ER physician returns with the stunning and explosive tale of a gifted neurosurgeon drawn into a world of escalating danger and violence, all because of...The Patient.
Dr. Jessie Copeland is exactly where she wants to be: A respected neurosurgeon at Eastern Mass Medical Center, she spends her days waging life-and-death battles in the OR and her spare time holed up in a lab, spearheading the development of a tiny robot that could revolutionize brain surgery.
ARTIE--Assisted Robotic Tissue Incision and Extraction--is an exciting fusion of biomechanics and radiology that, when perfected, will be able to excise tumors now considered inoperable. But it could be months before ARTIE is ready for use on human beings...or so Jessie thinks, until her ambitious department head jumps the gun and uses the robot in a high-profile case that nets immediate worldwide attention.
Suddenly the hospital is swarming with media, vying for a multimillion-dollar grant, and fielding calls from patients desperate for this lifesaving technology. But what no one at the medical center realizes is that the publicity has also reached one of the most malevolent men on earth.
Claude Malloche is brilliant, secretive, remorseless, and without regard for human life--a mercenary willing to bring down a world leader or a jetliner filled with people if the price is right. He is also ill with a life-threatening brain tumor that is exactly the sort ARTIE was invented to treat. Now Malloche must come into the open, and he has set his sights on the hospital that has burst to the forefront of neurosurgery: Eastern Mass Medical Center.
For those caught on the neurosurgical floor, the nightmare has just begun...and no one is more aware of the stakes than Jessie Copeland. In brain surgery there are no guarantees. But that's exactly what Claude Malloche demands, leaving Jessie to face the most harrowing case of her life. Disaster is just a cut away. And the price of failure may be thousands of lives....
Heart-poundingly scary and immensely entertaining, The Patient is riveting, unpredictable, page-turning suspense. It is terror to which no one is immune.
Excerpt
The Patient
They were nearly three hours into the operation and not one cell of the cancer had yet been removed. But by neurosurgical standards, three hours was still well within the feeling-out period--especially for a procedure involving experimental equipment. And despite huge progress recently, ARTIE most certainly remained experimental.
"Let's try another set of images with enhancement of the tumor, please."
To a physician, all growths, benign and malignant, were tumors, although the term "cancer" was generally reserved for malignancies--those tumors capable of spreading to distant organs. This particular cancer, a glioblastoma, was among the most virulent of all brain tumors.
Staring straight ahead at the eight-inch monitor screen that was suspended from the ceiling to her eye level, Jessie Copeland set her gloved hands down on the patient's draped scalp, which was fixed by heavy screws to an immobile titanium frame. The physical contact wasn't technically ...
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