We stood outside the glass partition and watched the surgery unfold. It had yet to start and the head surgeon was going to make the first incision to open her head. Then it happened again, the yellow glow.
The surgeon, who by then must have been baffled by what had been going on on his table, must have momentarily lost control of his scalpel. It fell from his hand into the patients head. When I say into I do mean into, like the skin wasn’t even there. From my shocked position I could see most of what was going on, and the lack blood, surprised me. What surprised me more was the lack wound accompanying the surgeon pulling out the scalpel.
I pounded on the partition and called a stop to the operation. We later found small chips on the scalpel that appeared to be bone. The only apparent answer made no physical sense, but the scalpel had gone straight through the patients head and had luckily been stopped by her skull.
I’m still debating whether or not that that was really lucky, because by then things started to fall into place and I knew the what’s, I didn’t care for the why’s, and wasn’t sure of the how’s. The main problem, however, was treatment. How do you treat someone against their own body?
“Your brothers are going to be fine, they just need some rest.” I told Kathleen while I checked for any injuries from the families latest ‘glow attack’.
“Is mommy going to be ok?” I instinctively knew that was coming when I looked into those green eyes, wide like a puppy’s, pouting.
I hesitated a little, “Kathleen, your mother’s is…. is.” Okay, I hesitated a lot.
Thankfully I was saved from lying, “She’s going to be alright kido. That’s if I have anything to say about it.” Someone did it for me. That someone was a woman around my age, with brown hair dark eyes and a black business suit on.
“Aunt Betty! Aunt Betty!” Kathleen jumped from the bed, and my arms, and clung to the woman’s legs.
‘Betty’ kneeled down to Kathleen’s height and started talking to her. I didn’t catch any of it; I was too rapped up in this ‘betty’ character. If she was a relative, or not, then how did she find out they were here? The police were too busy with the accident to give us any information on the family, even with the details Kathleen provided, which wasn’t a lot as she was only five. Thankfully there were few other wounded, but a lot of people had been trapped in buildings because of the tremor. So the question was: how did this ‘Betty’ find out this is where they were?
Those thoughts were interrupted when ‘Betty’ brought a yawning Kathleen over to the bed in her arms. She tucked her young charge under the covers, whispering a “sleep tight” and kissing her slightly green forehead.
She then ushered me out of the room before she turned the lights out for Kathleen to sleep. We walked away as to not disturb her with our conversation.
“Who are you and what do you know about this?” I started waving my arms around a bit, she chuckled at it. Now that I think back on it it was a pretty silly thing to do.
“Direct, I like that.” She gazed back towards the room momentarily, “I’m not related to them, but I worked with their mother.”
“What kind of work?” I interrupted. Impolite I know, but by then I didn’t feel like being that polite.
As an answer she produced an I.D out of her wallet. It stated, “Dr Betty Director, CIA”
“How did you know she was here?” I repeated my earlier question, “And if your next words are, “National Security” I’m leaving.” I folded my arms and waited for her response.
She put her I.D away before answering, “It’s not. I was going to say that the CIA has had the residence of Mrs Lena Goshine under surveillance since she moved there.”
My ears barely believed what they heard but after the rest of the night it seems very plausible compared to it, “What did she do?”
Of course she expected that question, “Retired.” She stated simply with a little hesitation, “She’s my friend and a former colleague. The CIA always looks after its own.” There was little I could do then but except that.
“So what did your surveillance people see?”
“That Lena….um Mrs Goshine and her children were running from their house when it exploded and, from what they’ve described, some sort of shockwave hit them.” That confirmed what Kathleen had told me.
“What happened to ‘your people’?”
“Who do you think called it in?”
That piece of information didn’t shock me in the slightest, “What type of Doctor are you?”
“Oh, the sciences.” She didn’t want to give me any details, or wasn’t allowed to, “Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Only if it helps me help my patients.” I motioned for her to follow me to the elevator, “Do you know what could alter someone on a cellular level, change their appearance and allow them to develop certain attributes?”
Her face was a mixture of fear and terror; she defiantly knew what I was referring to, “Certain chemicals or non lethal doses of radiation might do it. But I’m not sure of what exactly.” She sighed and rubbed her eyes as we got into the elevator, “I take it this has something to do with Kath’s different colouring?”
I leaned back against one of the walls, exhausted, “Yes. Almost all of the Goshine family have radically altered skin tones and all of them have displayed unique abilities that present themselves when their bodies go into seizures and they also glow their individual skin colours.”
I could tell she was trying to be as professional as she could when faced with something that tragic as that, so was I and neither of us had succeeded very well, “What kind of “unique abilities”?”
“They all have improved healing, Body duplication, increased muscle capacity, bodily mass alteration, Kathleen’s body has produced enough heat to start small fires around her bed,” I sighed, closed my eyes and went further back onto the elevator wall, “but Mrs Goshine’s, she has the worst. She has been altering the density of her overall mass, making it nearly impossible to treat her.”
“She can move through solid material? Why not just wait until she’s stopped seizing and then treat her?” She was like most of the relatives that I had to deal with, quick to question the doctor’s judgment. Not that I blame them for it, I’d do the same if I was in her position, “You missed someone out. I only counted five attributes.”
“The twins share the same ability.” I explained.
“That’s not very unique.” She tried to lighten the situation with a joke, and I think she enjoyed picking apart my assumed mistakes.
“Neither are twins.” A grating voice came from the hallway that could only come from one man. Then I realised the elevator had stopped and the doors had opened. Dr Director met Dr Schooley’s eyes and locked them with her own without flinching, let me tell you now that’s hard task to perform. I don’t she like what she saw as her face grew cold and hard.
“Doctor, what is the status of the patient?” I decided to step in before Robert said anything likely to start an argument, which was whenever he wasn’t talking about work.
“She’s getting worse. McCorkle was right, the blood transfusions we use for radiation treatment has slowed it down and her seizures are becoming shorter. But it’ll only take a few more to render her effectively dead.” We walked towards Mrs Goshine’s room as we talked. I had decided to let Robert fully inform Dr Director of the patient’s condition.
“Schooley, why don’t you tell Dr Director here about how Mrs Goshine’s symptoms are causing us to, how did you put it, “Wander around in the dark with pencils in our eyes.”.”
“She’s paraphrasing.” Dr Director didn’t even acknowledge that he said anything at all and just looked straight ahead, “Well ‘Mrs Goshine’ is currently suffering from seizures that allow her body to pass through solid matter. The problem is that her body isn’t changing to an incorporeal state at the same time. With the last seizure her hands moved and her fingernails didn’t and now, let’s just say she won’t need to paint them anytime soon. We’ve strapped her to the bed in the hope that she won’t loose any important bits. The main problem is inside the body, all those organs that could drop out of her at any moment. She could stop breathing because her lungs aren’t there anymore and if th….”
Dr Director interrupted him and effectively guessed what he was going to say, “And if the cerebral cortex is affected she could be loose all her body’s contact with the brain and simply die. Or worse, part of her brain goes and the rest is still physical, then when it comes back all of those interconnections the brain has will be irreparably damaged.” I saw tears freely flow down her checks and even to this day I can’t imagine what she went through that night, “That’s no way to die.”
I placed my hand gently on her shoulder, but that offered little comfort, “We’ll do everything we can for her. I promise.” I could not offer hope to her, or even an illusion to cling onto when things were going dire. There was little I could do to make things better for her except perform the impossible. So then I set my mind to do just that.
We reached in silence and when Dr Director saw the prone form of Mrs Lena Goshine she instantly rushed to her side. She had a brain monitor attached to her so we could see any difference in her brain activity before and after the seizures. Her heart monitor kept beeping at slow regular intervals. Her wrists, arms, ankles, thighs, waist and head were strapped tightly and secularly to the bed. It was wishful thinking that it would help against something that literally could go through the restraints and anything else. But “desperate times lead to desperate decisions” as my mother used to say.
Dr Director pushed past a nurse and stood beside Mrs Goshine, her hand hesitantly hovering over the other woman’s, unsure if she could actually touch her, whether or not it would do any damage to her if she did. She decided not to and just stared sadly at the motionless woman, “At least she’s sleeping.”
It’s amazing what simple statements conjure up in other peoples minds. That last statement sprung this set of thoughts, ‘Yes she’s sleeping, a state in which the brain is most active doing numerous tasks that most people take for granted. If only there was some way to do the opposite, then….’ That’s when the proverbial light bulb went on over my head.
I asked Robert to talk with me outside the room; I told myself then that it was to keep professional, but what I wanted was to stop the spread of any false hopes in a treatment that had as much likely hood of working as… as…… Walking through walls was the only thing that came to mind.
I quickly told him my idea, trying to get his confirmation on a foolhardy plan.
Of course I knew what his reaction would be, “You’ve been taking patient’s medication again, haven’t you.” Always a quip, always a jibe. He just happened to be right, the idea was too farfetched.
It was basically this; a chemically induced coma. Her entire body would go into a ‘stand by’ mode and use as little bodily functions as possible. That would more than likely stop the seizures and give us time to finish the blood transfusions to clear up most of the residual radiation in her system.
“You know all we’re doing is basically rubbing Aloevera into the wound constantly until it goes away.” His grating voice always got on my nerves, actually it got on almost everybody’s nerves, “But what’s one more ineffective treatment for something we know next to nothing about?”
I smiled at him then. I knew that he wouldn’t have agreed to do it if he didn’t think it had a chance.
We started the treatment as soon as we could. We didn’t get any objections to it and the only difficulties we had were convincing Dr Director to take a break from Mrs Goshine’s side and rest. She only left to get some coffee and visit Kathleen.
I hadn’t the heart to go see the little girl. She…. Well I didn’t want to bring any false hopes to her, or tell her that we put her mother in a coma to save her life, that we weren’t sure that it would do anything to help.
We were giving blood transfusions to all of the children, hoping to stop their regular seizures. And it did the trick, I think. In the next few hours all of them had their seizures reduced, one even had his stop altogether. Though he still had the ‘glow’, as it was dubbed by everyone who had seen it, but none of the ill effects his younger siblings had.
Soon after that they all stopped seizing. Boy did they ever cause such a commotion when they saw their glows for the first time, and its effects. Shrinking, duplication, increased strength, we had our hands full trying to calm them down. The worst was what happened to Kathleen, when a fire broke out next to her for the first time she did as any scared child would have done. She latched onto the closed person she could, the nurse attending her. She only had small burns her hands and arm, but was otherwise fine. Sufficed to say she didn’t go into Kathleen’s room again. We found the scared girl huddled in a corner behind a bed, afraid to even touch anyone in case she hurt them. Her ‘Aunty Betty’ managed to coax her out and she told her that none of it was her fault. I don’t think she believed her.
That poor child.
We surmised that all their glows were on a sort of time delay, that’s the best way I can think of describing it. Every seizure, every glow happened at the same time for all of them, the pattern was obvious. The effects of the radiation were varied with all of them, but their bodily reactions to it were the same. “Expulsion of excess energy through the seizures” was the theory I put forward after the fact.
Not that we had known that much at the time, we don’t even know much more than that now. The fact remained that it was a safe bet that once the children stopped seizing and glowing then the mother might be ok. That is until you take into account for the fact that she wasn’t expending the energy because she was in a coma.
So we waited another few hours after the children stopped to make sure the blood transfusions had done their job and we had the radiation boy check all of them. The children still had very small amounts of radiation on them and the mother was only slightly higher than that. We set up a safety margin based around the others results and did everything we could to push her under that margin.
When everything looked clear, and Dr Director had given her approval, we took her out of the coma. Or at least we tried to.
More damage was done than initially thought. We….we couldn’t do little more than watch her as she went into a catatonic state. Cold and unmoving, she simply stared into space with eyes that showed no signs of life.
I have no idea when it happened, our worst fears imagined. It could have been the seizure before we put her into the medically induced coma, or it might have been the very first one she had. No amount of miracles that I’d witnessed that night could change that fact. Her brain was dislodged slightly and separated from itself. There was no mend, nothing I could do; she was never going to recover from it.
When I saw little Kathleen that one last time I wished I could have done something more for her than take away someone in her life. I could tell she had lost all of her innocence that day.
To Be Concluded
By W. C. Reaf