Word: marler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even then, TPA is not without risks. Because it thins the blood, it can also worsen a stroke by causing bleeding into the brain. "You can't know [in advance] which patient will have serious adverse effects," says Dr. John Marler of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who headed the nih study of TPA. But some specialists believe the risk of bleeding from TPA is greater a couple of hours after the stroke. And they are adamant that the drug should never be used after three hours. Neurologists are now learning the subtle signs by which...
...treatments the minute patients arrive at the emergency room. Some doctors point to the fact that emergency cardiac treatment has helped cut the rate of death from heart attack 30% over the past 20 years. "I think we can catch up to and surpass that for stroke," says Dr. Marler...
These witty asides constitute the main entertainment of Posthumous Improvisations precisely because there is no dramatic tension in the events being described; we are never absorbed by Marler's struggles. We know that he will pass his exam in the end. Oswald simply disappears, depriving us of any deeper insight into his problems, or at least the pleasure of a final confrontation...
...Pamela subplot, which has the most potential to be something resembling a drama, is the most disappointing element of the monologue; we never hear enough about Pamela to believe that Marler is interested in her, and when he loses her we don't see it as any kind of defeat. The closest thing we get to an absorbing problem is Marler's struggle with social phobia, which he presents honestly and sympathetically; but this too is unresolved, apparently cured by having passed his exams...
...Marler might say, that is the way things happened. As he announces at the outset, he has avoided "fictionalizing events or characters in any way." Maybe the conclusion that must be drawn, then, is that sincerity is not the highest value in art after all. Hearing about someone's ordinary life can be entertaining and diverting, but rarely dramatic, engaging, or absorbing...