Luger Rounds

Luger Rounds is a novel of suspense, murder, and mystery. Unexplainable septic deaths are occurring in the University Medical Center, murders which seem to take the phrase Luger rounds to heart.

Luger rounds; the phrase implies ending the life of a patient whose illness requires an overwhelming effort to maintain, while being too sick to ultimately survive. It is a pessimistic, gloomy, sarcastic idiom floated from one overworked house-staff to another. An insensitive concept, tossed around by interns and residents stressed from the long never ending hours of their post-graduate training. Someone however, has taken this phrase to heart; someone in the hospital is carrying out Luger rounds.

Dr. Philip Thomas, the chief resident in urology at the University Medical Center, is the main character of this story, who finds himself a Luger rounds candidate- a ventilator dependent patient in severe septic shock, a victim of the hospital assassin. The story of betrayal and murder is told through his point of view involving many morphine assisted dreams, memories of past events, as an individual trapped in the tortuous world that is the Intensive Care Unit.

Dr. Thomas is comatose: an unconscious state from which a person cannot be aroused even with powerful stimulation as if dead; insensible, lifeless, and cataleptic. Trapped in the intensive care unit, he appears unconscious, but the horrible truth is that he can hear and feel everything. In this real life nightmare he is a non-person, ensnared, and dying.