Occlude

Close; shut (v.)

[under construction]

Dr. Burt Rackey asked a nurse to wipe a drop of sweat from his forehead before it dripped into the open chest of his patient. The televisions cameras were making him nervous.
The nurse wiped the bead of sweat carefully, both of Dr. Rackey's hands buried in the flesh of Ellis Nack, the man that the cameras where there to catch. Nack was Rackey's patient and had been for several weeks. Rackey had performed the same surgery on Nack seven times. Each time the "let's keep him for tests" period of recovery elapsed, Rackey's heart would fail again. Somehow the same artery that Rackey fitted with a metal stint would swallow the little metal tube into oblivion after a period of three or four days, closing the paths to the heart. This required perpetual angioplasties to keep Nack alive.
These surgeries had gained some publicity due to the strange concomitant failures of an expensive federal infrastructure initiative in a town called Sisters in Oregon. Several millions of dollars had been spent to build a tunnel through the Cascade Mountains to connect three major interstates. But every time construction on the tunnel progressed, it would collapse. Twelve men had died over the course of seven attempts.
It just so happened that every time the tunnel occluded, Ellis Nack's artery did also. And Dr. Rackey would open the artery again, and the workers in Oregon would dig through the rubble of their failed tunnel and start to clear it out again.
The nurse that wiped the sweat from Rackey's brow had a brother who lived in Prineville, which is only a few miles north of Sisters, and she made the connection between the two pheneomena when talking to her brother on the phone. Nack's heart and the mountain were somehow linked in a cycle of construction and collapse. Rackey's eigth surgery was now public experiement: would Rackey's surgery mean another few days' success for the tunnelers? Would the stint break again and shut the artery? The story was reported in the Salem Times and made its way quickly across the media--spun as a tension between the magical and coincidental. Everyone in the country (and informed peoples of the world) waited casually to see what would happen next: if Nack was meant to die or the bridge was meant to be or if everything involved was just a freakish happenstance.