The Anesthesia might kill you during Surgery!!!!. Review on Coma - Robin Cook

Hey Friends,

Coma is a medical thriller of highest order. First, let me tell you something about the author.

Dr. Robin Cook is a graduate of the Columbia University medical school and he finished his post graduate medical training at Harvard.

With such credentials he might as well have been a great surgeon or physician or any other type of doctor he would have wanted. Instead he chose become a writer and that too a novelist. This man sure has some guts. And why not, when John Grisham (the lawyer) became a successful novelist perhaps a doctor can too.

And mind you friend, he has done a great job in this novel. I have not read his other works but I sure do plan to do that.

The Characters

Susan Wheeler is the main character. She is a third year medical student who is on medical training (or whatever they call it in medical schools) in the Boston Memorial Hospital.

Mark Bellows is a surgery resident in Memorial hospital and he is also the instructor of Susan Wheeler and four other students who are assigned to him. This group of 5 students is to be taken to rounds in surgery rooms and ICUs.

Dr. Billing is the anesthesiologist. Dr. Robert Harris is the chief of Anesthesia. Dr. Stark is the Chief of Surgery.

There are some other minor characters, most of them doctors, some patients and other sundry characters that are there for three or four chapters, not worth mentioning here.

Nancy Greenly and Sean Berman are two patients. Both of them went into coma immediately after their operations because of complications in their surgery due to anesthesia.

The Story

The story of the novel is complicated which makes it very interesting to read. I will give you an overview. Lot of patients in the Memorial Hospital are going into coma due to anesthetical complications during surgery. (Anesthetical complications mean that they were not able to come out of sleep after being given anesthesia during the operation. Anesthesia is given to patients before the surgery to make them unconscious). The number looks small on paper but when seen in correlation with other facts and comparison to national numbers it is extremely high in Memorial. But no one notices it because hundreds of thousands of patients are treated in the hospital daily and no one has any time to really look into the facts and the figures.

There is another facility called Jefferson Institute with handles patients who need acute intensive care only. All patients who are declared brain dead or vegetables as doctors call them are referred to Jefferson Institute.

Susan notices that too many patients are getting comatose. She decides to look into it. And finally she uncovers a very dirty secret of a great hospital and its life saving surgeons.

The Positives

It is a great medical thriller to read. The vocab that is used is highly medical so you feel like reading something really medical. It is very realistic. The story tells us things that might be happening around us. It is very fast, for a doctor turned writer, it is no mean feat. The author is a famous one and has written more than half a dozen successful novels and he has done a real good job telling us the deep things that happen in the medical world or perhaps that might happen. It is a very satisfying highly intense drama. Not necessary a bed time read, in fact I don’t recommend it to bed time read. Read it any day but try to be free on that day because this thing is unstoppable. You can not stop yourself from reading ‘just one more chapter’!!!!

The Negatives

Here come the shortcomings. The author has said that the problem Susan tumbled upon has been under investigation for a long time. Best brains of hospital have been working on the problem for a long time. Yet they have not been able to solve it.

Susan Wheeler, who, mind it, is just a third year medical student, who is not even a doctor, who has not been inside an Operation Room yet, is able to solve this problem in less than a week.

Now if she can solve big problems like this in a week than perhaps she should go to the CIA or NSA!!

The use of medical terms to give a good realistic medical touch to the story is fine; Arthur Hailey and Sidney Sheldon have also done that. But Robin has loaded it with medical jargon. At times it becomes very frustrating to read 25 pages and yet being able to make out just 12 of them and re read them all. I mean a novel is meant for relaxing, not for utmost highly concentrated reading unless you are not reading some classical writer like Shakespeare or Dickens etc.

I guess in order to make the novel fast paced the story started on February 14th, 1976 and ended on February 26th, 1976.

And the ending of novel is completely absurd. The ending is really bad. Author managed to get tension raise in reader’s mind, adrenaline pumping; the reader is really all charged up and then suddenly it comes to an abrupt halt.

A bad ending can really make a novel loose a lot of points and the author the reputation. For example, Sidney Sheldon has written some 18 novels, but he has ended only 6-7 of them nicely. I can say that because I have read them all. Some authors give importance to ending the novel nicely, if the ending leaves you with certain emotion (happy or sad) it is much better that to leave the reader thinking (like, what the hell does this ending means – that too after reading 500 odd pages).

But still it makes for a good read, because it increases the awareness. It is not a medical science fiction kind of futuristic novel. Rather it focuses on a social issue (I can not tell you what it is because just the name of that issue will clear the story in your mind and will spoil you reading pleasure). It needs to be read.

Happy Reading

Mr Gautam.