Susan Calls Stark example essay topic

The book starts out with a woman, Nancy Greenly, going to the Boston Memorial Hospital because she is having an extra heavy period. After being examined, she is going to have an operation in OR room 8. Something happens during the operation, and Nancy becomes brain dead. Susan Wheeler, a medical student, is waking up for her first day in the field after two years of studying to become a medical doctor. She is very attractive with blond hair. She has blue, brown, and flecks of green in her eyes.

When she and five other medical students go the Boston Memorial Hospital, all that the nurses think of them is that they are nuisances. They find Mark Bellows, who will be watching over them while they were staying at the hospital. Bellows plans to give a lecture every morning, and have one of the students give a lecture every afternoon. After they go to an OR room to see areal operation, they see Nancy Greenly and Susan is shocked at what happened to her. Bellows tells her that the chance of something like that happening is one in one hundred thousand.

When Bellows is talking to them, Susan gets paged and is needed to start an I.V. The patient, Sean Berman is having a minor knee surgery. When Sean is in surgery, the same thing that happened to Nancy Greenly happens to him too, and Susan decides to research the topic for her third year report and find out why these two things have happened in such a short time when the chances are so slim. This is my least favorite part. The first thing that Susan does is go to the hospital library to research coma. She finds out that no one really knows why anyone goes into a coma, and that the subject is so vast it is unbelievable.

She writes down everything she finds out in her notebook. She then finds the main computer of the hospital and fills out a request form for all cases of coma occurring to inpatients which were unrelated to the patients known disease. She didn't sign her name, though, and when someone else put their request in the box she put it under his so that the information would be sent to that person who was Henry Schwartz. When he got his information with Susan's on the bottom, she told him that there was a mix-up and her request was put with his, so he gave her the bottom part of the printout. The printout showed that there had been twelve cases including Berman that had gone into a coma for no apparent reason and their brains had been destroyed. That was one hundred times above the national average.

Two patients also died that day from respiratory arrest, according to Bellows. Susan then went down to the Pathology Lab, where the autopsies took place, to find out about the patients. The next day, Susan woke up very tired. She had already skipped some lectures, but Bellows was covering for her. Susan went to the Chief of Medicine to him tell him about her findings, but he did not support her, and he took the printout away from her. Susan thought the only reason that he did that was because she was a medical student and she was female.

She then went to see Dr. Robert Harris, who is the Chief of Anesthesia, but he did not appreciate her trying to figure this huge problem out. All Harris thinks is that the only reason females become doctors is that it is a fad or something along that line. Susan tells him off, and Harris completely blows up at her. Susan tells Bellows she wants to go the Jefferson Institute to see Berman because that is where he was transferred to. Bellows gets taken off one of his cases to talk to Dr. George Chandler.

Chandler tells him that a locker was found that was filled with drugs and it was the locker that was given to him. Bellows told him that it used to be his locker, but he had a new one now because Dr. Walters gave it to him. Susan went to see the Chief of Surgery, Dr. Howard Stark, to talk to him about the things she had found out. Stark thought that maybe she was a bit young, but is interested in what she is trying to do. He also thinks, though, that Susan should drop the whole thing, just like Bellows does, because it will be a long and hard journey. Susan went and bought a nurse uniform, and then went to the City Hall to get a copy of the floor plans of the Jefferson Institute.

She went back to the Boston Memorial Hospital to talk to Dr. Donald McLeary to see if she could get the charts for the coma victims. Not only does McLeary turn her down, but he also wants her to stop her quest. He calls Dr. Oren in to deal with Susan, and tells Susan to stay put. Since she never goes to the lectures and is making everyone mad in the hospital, she gets kicked out of the hospital. She starts to walk toward the city library, and notices someone is following her.

She gets to the library and thinks she lost him, but then she notices him again. She goes down to the subway and just misses a train. When she sees the man walking toward her, she jumps down by the tracks. She falls a few times, and narrowly misses getting fried by the electrified tracks. When she sees a train coming, she falls again and she almost gets hit, but the train stops a few feet away from her. She's okay but notices that she is uncontrollably shaking and everyone is staring at her.

She finally got off the train at Charles Street and caught a cab. Bellows finds out that day that Walters is sick, which is the first time he hasn't come to work for twenty five years. It seems strange that Walters is sick when they just found the drugs in the locker, so he decides to pay Walters a visit. When the cab driver goes to the address, it was run-down with most of the windows boarded up.

Bellows thinks no one is home, so he goes to the cellar where finds Walters dead from being hung. Susan went to her Dean of Students to talk to him about the whole thing. She is told she is going to be transferred to the V.A. Hospital. After she gets back to her dorm, she is about to get in the shower, a person jumped out from behind the curtain. She recognizes him from the train station. He tells her that if she keeps going on with her quest, her family will die and so will she.

After the intruder leaves she decides to keep going because she is not very worried about her family because they are in Aspen, Colorado on a vacation. Susan calls Stark and tells him everything about the attack. Stark tells her that if she keeps going she will have to be more careful than ever and tells her it might be another medical student who attacked her, because they are jealous of her, but Susan doesn't think that this is the case. Susan's attacker arrived at the airport. His name was Angelo D'Ambrosio. He was the one that killed Walters, also, and made it look like a suicide making Walters write a note saying, 'The drugs were mine.

I cannot face the consequences. ' He then called a Mr. Sandler and told him it was done. Sandler replied by telling him that Susan needed to be disposed of as soon as possible and to make it look like a rape. He was told he would be paid an extra six hundred dollars, so he agreed. Susan went back to the Boston Memorial Hospital to try and get the charts from McLeary's office while he was gone. She was wearing the nurses uniform that she had bought and got one of the security officers to open the door for her.

She had a little trouble finding the charts, but found them in the closet. She went back to the lounge and started to copy down the charts. After that she went to Bellows to show him the charts. He can't believe that Susan is still trying to find out what was going on after she told him that she was assaulted.

She says that it only motivated her even more. Susan is disappointed because the charts don't show her that much. She asked Bellows if taking a tissue sample was unusual, he says that they don't usually take tissue samples, but it probably doesn't mean anything. Susan (still wearing the nurses uniform) manages to slip by the main desk to get into the OR rooms.

She went to room 8 and climbed up into the ceiling panels. On the oxygen line in room 8 she found a high-pressure T-valve. She could tell that another gas could be put in with the oxygen. She then climbed back down. When she got back to her room, she noticed that the wad of paper she put under her door was gone, meaning that someone, possibly the same attacker, had gotten into her room.

Susan raced through a tunnel to get into another building. She heard footsteps behind her. She entered an amphitheater and hid behind a row of seats. She saw a door about twenty feet away from her. She crawled toward the door. She got the fire extinguisher and she fired it into her attacker's face.

He tripped and fell down a few flights of stairs and broke one of his ribs. He got back up and she threw the extinguisher at him and hit him in the left shoulder. She ran into the anatomy room and hid among the frozen bodies. When Angelo came into the freezer, she pushed all of the bodies on him. She ran out and locked him in. She decided to go to Bellows, even though she thought that he might be involved.

She told him about the T-valve, but he didn't think it meant anything, even though he admitted he didn't know a lot about pipes. Susan then thought that maybe it was carbon monoxide that was killing the patients. The carbon monoxide would make blood turn red like it does when it touches oxygen. Bellows agreed that may be what was happening.

Susan stayed in a hotel that night to get a good nights sleep. The next day she called in sick to the V.A. hospital. She then called Stark and he told her that he had been able to get her into the Jefferson Institute. She also tells him about the T-valve and he is very surprised. When she gets to the institute, the nurse shows her around, and she goes into a room with about a hundred patients hanging by wires, which monitors the patient and gives them whatever they need. She is told it totally preserves the skin and minimizes nurse care.

When the nurse leaves her to go check on something, she gets on an elevator to go up. Following the floor plans that she had, she tried to find the OR room and had to slip past a few security cameras. In the control room of the institute, they were trying to find out where Susan was. None of the security cameras showed her anywhere. The guards started to go looking for her. Susan had finally found the OR.

She then heard people doing an autopsy in the other room. They were talking about where certain organs where going and how much people were paying for them. Susan finally knew why people were killing patient at the Boston Memorial Hospital. The Jefferson Institute was a clearinghouse for black-market human organs! She heard someone coming and hid in a cabinet.

This is my favorite part. After one of the guards reached her, she stabbed him in the hand with a pair of scissors and hid in the ceiling panels. Right as the guard got out of the room the panel crashed in. She found an enclosure next to the elevator shaft and climbed down it. She manages to get to the garage right when a semi was pulling out and she jumped onto it. At a stop light she slid down the windshield and started running to get a cab.

When she got to Boston Memorial Hospital, she went immediately to Stark's office. He offered her a drink whiles he told her story. She suddenly started to feel sleepy, and knew that Stark had drugged her drink. Stark told her that the same thing would happen to her as did Nancy Greenly and Sean Berman.

Bellows found out that Susan was going to have an operation in room 8, which he thought was a great coincidence. He decided that he'd check out the T-valve that Susan had talked about. During the operation, there was a malfunction in the oxygen lines, and Stark didn't know if she had gotten enough of a dose of carbon monoxide to destroy her brain. Right before he was about to start cutting into Susan, police officers came in and arrested Stark..