If You Only Knew by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page A

See where each needed to go, who needed to do what and if there were any of those common surprises that often dictated a pathologist’s day. The chief ME, Dr. Ljubisa Juvan Dragovic, was there, as well as all the toxicologists and pathologists in the office, and even medical students and residents. One of the other reasons for the meeting was to see if anyone had a problem with what had taken place over the weekend.
    When it came to the toxicologist to talk about his findings in cases from over the weekend that he had looked at earlier that morning, it was the first time Dr. Ortiz-Reyes learned of what he later called a “surprise” pertaining to Don Rogers’s death. The toxicologist was concerned, he explained to everyone at the meeting, about something found in Don’s urine and blood.
    As it turned out, the toxicologist told the team, Don had a beyond-dangerous amount of alcohol in his urine and blood. His opinion was based on two tests that didn’t take days or weeks to come back, but were immediate. Even for a chronic alcoholic, Don’s bloodstream showed a whopping alcohol level of .44, way above even for a guy who might like to overindulge, as Don clearly had. This number indicated acute alcohol intoxication. Don had enough booze in his system, in other words, to kill him. Take a man of Don’s weight—141 pounds—and height—five foot seven inches—and put that amount of booze into his system, and it was far beyond what could be called a dangerous and deadly amount. In fact, that ridiculous amount was enough to make a morbidly obese alcoholic stumble and pass out cold. For a guy that weighed 140 pounds, according to most blood/alcohol percentage charts, a .27 was enough to cause death—and Don had .17 more in his bloodstream.
    So the question became: how did all of that alcohol get there?
    Even a guy with Don’s tolerance for alcohol would have passed out by about the .30 mark. According to the McDonald Center for Student Well-Being (formerly the Office of Alcohol and Drug Education), loss of consciousness occurs at about .25, with alcohol poisoning coming in near .39, and the onset of coma at .40, with death due to respiratory arrest near that same mark. Thus, Don was physically unable to put that amount of alcohol into his system by his own hand. It was impossible. He would have passed out before he was able to do it.
    At .44, on paper, anyway, there was a pretty good chance Don Rogers was dead long before the level of alcohol in his blood reached the .40 mark.
    The entire team around the conference room table was stunned by this revelation.
    The urine sample, the toxicologist explained, was even higher: .47.
    Ortiz-Reyes indicated that he would then have to go back and change his opinion regarding Don’s cause of death and the hasty notes he had made on that Saturday morning. That was not a big deal; pathologists did this all the time. The simple fact was that yes, it could have been a heart attack that killed Donald Rogers, but acute alcohol intoxication was definitely a contributing factor. The guy didn’t drink himself to death—that was not what the doctor meant by the change from “accident” on the death certificate to “contributory cause” of death.
    In changing his opinion of Don’s death, Ortiz-Reyes would have to issue an addendum to the certificate of death. He’d already written a certificate of death on Saturday and the medical examiner had signed off on it. Ortiz-Reyes had not yet filed it, however.
    Don’s heart problems could have been, as Ortiz-Reyes later explained, “contributory” to the root cause of death. However, they had a major issue now: how did that alcohol get into Don Rogers’s system?
    â€œWe better do a complete autopsy,” the chief medical examiner suggested at the meeting. “We need to find out if anything else is going on here.”
    Several in the meeting appeared