The Final Diagnosis

ately now, for the sake of the Alexanders, was for their child to live. The force of his own feeling startled him; it was unusual for anything to affect him so deeply. He recalled, though, that he had liked John Alexander right from the beginning at Three Counties; then later, meeting his wife, knowing that all three of them had had their origins in the same small town, there had seemed to spring up a sense of kinship, unspoken but real

What were the chances of success, O’Donnell wondered—of the child’s survival. Ordinarily they might have been fair, even good. But now, with this procedure days late, the hope of success had been lessened drastically.

The tiny, frail Alexander baby had been taken from its incubator and placed on the warm operating table. Now the assisting nurse, with the intern helping her, was securing the infant in place, using diapers—one around each arm and leg—folded in long narrow strips and fastened with safety pins to the cover of the table. O’Donnell noticed the baby lay very still, making only t