I saw the aftermath, the day clearly imprinted on my mind; it was my second month working the graveyard shift in the E.R. The nights were usually quiet, as is usual in a town like Go Town. The most challenging cases would usually be a S.H.A. (Sexually Humiliating Accident), I once had to remove a talking parrot toy and a rolled up Healthy Lifestyles magazine, and that was just in one night. But that’s about as much excitement as I would get, the rest were mostly hypochondriacs looking to set aside their fears.
It was then that I heard it, well more like felt it, the ground trembled like an earthquake and the room trembled around me. I quickly pulled a nurse away from a falling cabinet, I held her in a doorway until the shaking subsided. I told her to wait a few minutes in case of an aftershock, when none came we assumed it was safe to venture out and see what had happened.
I decided that it was best if we went separate ways, she would go in search of the staff and I would check on the patients and see if any were injured, well anymore injured. We were lucky, few cuts and bruises and a lot of patients had fallen out of their beds, but that was the worst of it.
That was until I got the page, an emergency was inbound, six unidentifieds, one with serious burns. It was later that I wished for all the S.H.A’s in the city to come in exchange for these six to be unharmed.
The rooms were prepped, all on call doctors were called and even a few who weren’t were, burn units were being prepared. But all we had to ‘greet’ the patients were the three doctors (including myself) covering the night shift, a small staff of nurses and six clean beds. We all hoped that would change, none of us believed it could have been done before they arrived.
We were right.
The ambulance siren was drowned out by the doctors and nurses.
“Do we know who they are?”
“I need two CC’s of…”
“What happened to their skin?”
I took charge of the situation immediately, “Alright we need to move them. This one needs burn treatment. Stat!” I barked orders out left, right and centre as I went with the most injured patient, the oldest of them, ‘The mother’ I had guessed.
They appeared to be a family or a group of friends: the youngest were a set of twins, they both had minor burns on their arms and some cuts and bruises. They seemed about three or four years old and they both had dark almost red skin. The second youngest looked only a year or half a year older than the twins. His chest had been burnt, but it was nothing too serious or life threatening. His skin had been turned a dark shade of purple and his hair resonated with that. The next was a girl, mustn’t have been over five years. She was the luckiest of the group; she had no burns, not even a singe. I could tell that her arm was either broken or dislocated, a cursory examination was all I did. She had only a slight pale green tinge to her skin and hair. The apparent oldest of the children, by only a year or so, had the most distinguishing feature out of all of them, a healthy Caucasian skin tone. I still don’t know why but I have a few ideas. His back and upper arms minor burns on them. The last patient was a mid thirty’s woman with a dim yellowy skin and hair tone. Her injures were the most severe out of the six. Third degree burns covered her back, arms and parts of her legs. She needed surgery ASAP in order for her to survive that night.
We rushed her straight to surgery and got her prepped. I’m not proud of the fact that I felt nauseous when I looked more closely at the woman’s back. The clothes she was wearing were melted into her skin. Me, a doctor for so long I can’t even remember when I didn’t think of medicine, and yet my stomach turns to mush after I see someone’s skin liquefied and their nerve endings destroyed. At least she wasn’t in any pain. At least, that was what we all thought. But that night held more surprises than we could imagine.
What happened next…. Well even now I still don’t know what to make of it. Fate, Karma, some drunken higher power, just random chance or perhaps something science hasn’t yet been able to explain. Whatever the case, it won’t help them now.
Her body…. Her… there’s only one way I can describe it, she was glowing. Honest to whatever God there is, she glowed. It was a light yellow colour that resonated from her skin. The nurses who were prepping her backed away slowly, one even made a comment about radiation.
Let me tell you that that wasn’t the strange part.
I was halfway to calling the ‘men in lead coats’ when I heard one of the nurses gasp, some the rest of them followed suit. When I saw it I did the same. Her skin, the burnt flesh, was moving. That’s the only way I can describe it, moving. The patient was perfectly stationary, but her damaged flesh was just…. Moving.
It took me a few seconds of amazement to understand what was happening, not how,that still puzzles me to this day, but what. It seems pretty simple, the skin was healing. Healing in the fraction of the time it normally would take.
Then as sudden as it happened it stopped, the glow dimmed and faded. The room was eerily silent, and then the screaming started.
The patient screamed in terrible pain, her skin still burnt, or the part that I could see still was, but not as badly as before. Some of the flesh had even grown back.
From an educated guess I surmised that her nerves had, at least partially, regenerated and were defiantly working.
“Nurse, I need morphine here, stat.” I yelled out to the nearest nurse. I almost had to shout again when no one moved, almost. She’d scrambled through the draws for one, her shaking hands passed the syringe and vile to me. I quickly calculated the dosage required and injected the patient with it.
After the eternity, it was only just a few seconds, the screams died down. I checked her pulse, it had calmed down and her body stopped shaking.
I checked over the rest of her injures to see if the same ‘healing effect’ had occurred.
Apparently it had. She was in no immediate danger and I didn’t have any idea if it would happen again.
“Finish getting those clothes off, run a full battery of tests and then move her in with the other patients for observation. No surgery, for now.”
“Doctor?” One of them questioned.
I interrupted before she had a chance to fully ask, “For now we need to assume that what happened, whatever it was, was a fluke. We need to know what we are operating on and what just changed in the last few minutes. Try to keep what just happened to yourselves. We don’t want to raise questions we don’t have a clue how to answer, yet. I’m going to check on the other patients. And I want those test results as soon as they come in.”
With a chorus of “Yes Doctor.” they went to run those tests on the patient. I left to see if it really was a fluke.
“Doctor Doable! Doctor Doable!” A young trainee doctor, that someone somehow managed to draft in to help us, called after me.
“Can I help you, Mike?” I asked as politely as I could at 2:47 in the morning, albeit it wasn’t a lot.
“Dr Schooley wants to see you.” He wheezed, slightly out of breath. He should have been doing more exercise, if he was fitter things like that wouldn’t have happened. Sorry, I go into ‘Doctor mode’ as Kimmie calls it, sometimes without realising.
Where was I?
Ah yes…
“What a coincidence. I was just going to look for him.” I said pushing the elevator button again.
He looked at the button and then at me before asking, “It’s working?”
I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose, “Roberts’s been telling you to take the stairs again?” He nodded as the elevator doors swished open, “You know he does have a point in making you run up three flights of stairs, Dr Du.”
He beamed slightly; he always did like it when somebody called him doctor, and we made our way inside, “If I wanted to do lots of pointless running,” He said, with emphasis he pushed the floor button we wanted, “I’d have joined the army, or the mail service.”
That gave us both a giggle. Say what you want about Michel Du, but you can’t say he doesn’t have a sense of humour, “How’s Joan?”
He looked at me with a smile that could only be produced be one thing, “She’s doing great. It looks like it might be Christmas birth.”
“Defiantly in the season.”
“Yeah, it is.” He had a longing look on his face that I had wished to see on James’ soon after that.
“Can’t wait to get back to her?”
“Every second that goes by I wish I was with her.”
There was a short silence before I asked the question that had been on my mind, “So why does the good doctor want to see me?”
“Well it’s the little girl.” That one salient piece of information got my attention straight away, “She’s awake.”
To Be Continued
By W. C. Reaf