In other words, we only take care of chronic intensive-care patients.

They are so frequent in intensive-care patients that prophylactic medication is prescribed.

"Shooting - they are all shooting," he said, looking at the intensive-care patients.

Over a ten-week period, four intensive-care patients had succumbed to blood poisoning and died.

A year ago, if someone told me I would be tending a hundred intensive-care patients myself, I'd have laughed in his face."

Like an intensive-care patient whose mind has become fogged, we see the euphoric atmosphere that greeted the first implants as a dim memory.

Dr. Kurtz said he could recall thousands of surgical intensive-care patients with much less severe brain injuries who had similar amnesia.

"The entire people participated in this war, from babies in hospitals to intensive-care patients, to soldiers in air-defense positions and soldiers on the border," he said.

And in a step toward electronic medical charts, almost all records of intensive-care patients are now on line in the trauma, liver-transplant and coronary units at Pittsburgh.

A balloon knocked out power to two of Rhode Island's largest hospitals today, forcing surgeons to operate by flashlight and nurses to help intensive-care patients breathe by hand.

The new home is part of the 35-acre campus of 20 buildings, including town houses for independent living and an 80-bed nursing home that will now be converted into a special-care pavilion for intensive-care patients.

The actual Brutus is Martin Sheen, whose performance here recalls not the dynamic actor of "Badlands" and "Apocalypse Now" but his becalmed appearances as an intensive-care patient in the film "Wall Street."

And a recently completed nine-year study at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, found that screening led to a 75 percent drop in M.R.S.A. bloodstream infections among intensive-care patients and a 67 percent decline throughout the hospital.

Next came several euthanasia stories: The first few covered the case of Roger Damon Shar-veneau, a respiratory therapist at a hospital in Rochester, New York, who'd confessed eighteen months earlier to snuffing out three dozen intensive-care patients by injecting potassium chloride into their I.V. lines-wanting to "ease their journey."