Lee Hancock, part one of five: Min Patel huddled in a fourth-floor hallway with Dr. Edward Taylor near an intensive care unit, where the trauma surgeon’s patient lay tethered to a ventilator. Seven intravenous pumps pushed a cocktail of chemicals into his body to fight infection and keep his heart pumping.
The stakes didn’t get any higher than in Baylor University Medical Center’s 4 West ICU. Inside its fluorescent bullpens of beeping, whirring machines lay the most complex trauma and transplant cases in the biggest hospital in Dallas. The middle-aged accident victim had been stranded there for weeks, in a high-tech limbo.
“He looks a mess,” Ms. Patel, the palliative care team nurse, told the surgeon. “It doesn’t seem like we’re going to make him better.”
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