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Carl already in his room. She hoped that would not be the case.

3.
    Monday, April 6, 9:48 A.M.
    L ynn moved quickly toward the main bank of elevators. It was crowded as it always was at that time in the morning, especially on a Monday morning. Lynn was well aware that the hospital, along with Medical University of South Carolina on the other side of town, served as the tertiary-care centers for the metropolitan area, with a population soon to be pushing a million. Charleston was growing, as its manufacturing and biotech base expanded, particularly in the northern suburbs. Boeing was enlarging its 787 assembly plant, and the multinational drug giant, Sidereal Pharmaceuticals, had just announced it was adding a thousand new jobs to its expanding biologics manufacturing plant.
    There was another reason the hospital was busy. Answering what was considered a national need, Middleton Healthcare had built a state-of-the-art facility, called the Shapiro Institute, for the care of persistent vegetative state, or PVS, and had physically connected it to the Mason-Dixon University Medical Center. It had been built with a huge philanthropic grant from Sidereal Pharmaceuticals. Although the institute was for the most part self-contained, it diduse the center’s clinical laboratory and operating rooms when necessary. Although Lynn and her buddies knew little about the establishment, since it was not used for teaching purposes, she did know that patients from all over the United States arrived on a regular basis along with their families and were admitted through the hospital.
    During her second year of medical school Lynn and her fellow classmates had been given one visit, presumably to encourage them to refer their vegetative patients to the facility when they went into practice. Their guide was one of the institute’s hospitalists, but the tour had been very limited. Its purpose was mainly to impress upon the medical students how computerized and mechanized the place was, and how that made it possible to take care of so many patients with so little staff.
    Accustomed to multitasking, Lynn slipped her computer tablet out of its pocket as she hustled along and entered Carl’s name to get his room number. When no number came up, she wasn’t concerned. She knew how the system worked. On day-of-surgery admissions, a room wasn’t assigned until the patient was ready to leave the PACU. That meant that Carl was probably still there. But sometimes during the busy morning hours, data entry for room assignments lagged as much as an hour behind more important data entry. Even without a specific room, she was not going to go to the PACU. It was one of the areas of the hospital that medical students were discouraged from visiting, even when rotating on surgery during their third year. Instead Lynn would head up to the fifth floor, where orthopedic cases were sent after surgery, provided a room was available.
    “Excuse me,” a pleasant voice said amid the general din. At the same moment Lynn felt a tug on her arm and found herself looking down at an older woman with blue-tinted white hair. At five feet ten inches tall, Lynn looked down on a lot of women. “Can you helpme, Doctor?” the woman added when she had Lynn’s attention. She was clutching some lab slips.
    “I’m not a doctor yet,” Lynn said. Lynn was honest to a fault. “But how can I help?”
    “You look like a doctor to me even if you are much too young. I need to have some blood work done, but I don’t know where to go. They told me at the front desk, but I’ve already forgotten.”
    For a moment Lynn hesitated. If she was still going to be in time to welcome Carl, she needed to get herself up to the fifth floor. Yet, sensing the woman’s panic, she relented. “Of course I’ll show you.” Lynn took the woman’s free hand and marched her back the way they had come. From the main entrance foyer, they crossed over the connecting bridge into the outpatient clinic building.