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Show 319 I am placing my hand on the graft and there is a sinking within as I note that there is no detectable whirr. I am certain it was there just this morning. She is calling Dr. Emerson to come down to give his opinion. I am staring at the ceiling, lost in bad thoughts, as he enters the room. He is feeling the graft, now listening to it through his stethoscope. "Let's see if we can fix it," he is saying. There is a clot-busting drug, he is saying, that we can try to shoot through the graft. The radiologist is being kind. He has poked through the skin into the graft from several angles, trying to break the clot with the magic drug but I can see as well as he on the screen that the clot is not breaking up. The graft is useless. "All is not lost," he is saying. "They can put another graft into your upper arm." He is patting his biceps to illustrate the location. A hockey-puck sized pump in my abdomen, I am thinking, enumerating, and a catheter snaking from there around my back into my dura. A porta-cath against my chest wall. A spider-like clot- |
