Gord Rollo
Page 7
tem is usually dead or dying and now there's no way to
try repairing it. They j u s t sit back and hope time and
rest will eventually heal the damage.
"At this institute we've taken a radically different ap¬
proach. Blood supply must be reestablished, of course,
but nobody said we had to sew the limb back onto a
body to accomplish that."
W h e e l s , in the front row closest to the doctor, let out
a little gasp, drawing all of our attention. Slapping
the armrest of his chair for emphasis, he finally made
the connection I'd figured out earlier while watching the
video. "It's those damn machines, isn't it? They're what
p u m p the blood. They're how you reestablish the blood
supply without a body, right?"
"Exactly. It's relatively simple too. We j u s t connect
the tubes right into the existing main veins and arter¬
ies. If you've ever known anyone who's undergone a
heart transplant, or more common still, heart bypass
surgery, you'll know that the doctors stop the patient's
heart so they can work on it. To do this, they hook the
patient up to a machine called a cardiopulmonary by¬
pass machine, or CBM for short. The surgeon redirects
the flow of blood away from the heart into this C B A ' ,
which will perform the function of the human heart
and lungs for as long as the operation takes.
"It's an amazing machine. N o t only does it rhythmi¬
cally p u m p blood throughout their bodies, it also warms
the blood to maintain the patient's core temperature,
and oxygenates the blood as well, acting as a set of
healthy lungs.
"An interesting fact a lot of people don't know is that
when a patient flatlines in ICU after bypass surgery,
they bring him or her into the OR and hook them back
up to the cardiopulmonary bypass machine. That way,
the doctors can work on the patient's heart without the
frantic pressure of the ticking clock working against
them. Instead of minutes, their window of opportunity
can be expanded, and they will often resurrect someone
whose heart has been literally stopped for hours. I've
always found that fascinating.
"Normal CBMs are quite bulky and heavy to move,
but ours have been redesigned smaller, more efficient,
and portable so they can be moved from operating
rooms, to the labs, to anywhere they might be needed.
We have a minor problem keeping up with our con¬
stant need for fresh blood, but besides that, the system
works fabulously.
"In the medical community, the record for the lon¬
gest a patient has been kept alive on one of these ma¬
chines is twenty-eight days. Most people would agree
that's an impressive number, but not around here it isn't.
Using a specially modified version of this heart bypass
machine, which I hold the patent on, some of the body
parts shown on the video were kept alive for several
m o n t h s . Our personal record is one hundred and n i n e
teen d a y s . . . and counting. That's right, it's still alive.
It's a left leg, and if you're np to it, we'll check on how
it's doing when we tour the labs after lunch."
Everyone agreed they'd like to see the doctor's work
with their own eyes. I put my hand up to ask a question
but Bill Smith beat me to it.
"Hey, Doc? W h a t about those wires r u n n i n g all over
the place? I figured out they were what was making the
body parts move, but can you tell us how?"
"Certainly, Mr. Smith, but the how is the easy part,
it's j u s t electrical stimuli. The real question is 'why? It's
not just to freak you guys out. Far from it, in fact. The
motion you witnessed is the most crucial part of our
research here. Let me go back a bit and explain.
"Blood supply is obviously important, but what
we've found is even more vital is electrically stimulat¬
ing the multitude of exposed nerve endings. Remember
we talked about how the nerve ceils line up in a row?
Well, the human nervous system is incredibly complex,
but basically it's made up of the nerve cells, the syn¬
apses, or gap between the cells, the spine, which acts as
the highway for the stimuli, and the brain itself, which
runs the whole show. The brain is a type of huge bat¬
tery source, which produces and sends an electrical im¬
pulse down the spine and along a certain nerve chain,
cell by cell, to reach a specific spot. It's called electrotonus, which is the altered state of a nerve during the
passage of an electric current through it. You under¬
stand this all happens almost instantaneously and it's
far more complicated than I've gotten into, but not
nearly as complex as We once thought.
"Take the hand you saw in the video. Normally, the
brain would send the signal down the proper n e u r o pathway to tell the hand to, let's say, flex its index finger.
My fiber-optic network can do the exact same thing.
The hand in the video has no idea that it isn't still at¬
tached to an arm and a body, as it once was. It's still re¬
ceiving the electrical signal to move one of its fingers. It
doesn't make any difference, as far as the hand is con¬
cerned, that the stimuli are being transmitted along a
wire rather than a chain of nerve cells. The function of
the brain in these experiments is performed by a highly
sophisticated computer program, nowhere near as com¬
plex as an organic brain, but more than capable of carry¬
ing out the rudimentary tasks we're asking it to do."
The scientist paused long enough to see if we were
managing to keep up with what he was saying. It was
making some sense to me but a couple of the other guys
were kind of shaking their heads in confusion. Rather
than answering a ton of questions, Dr. Marshall held
his hand up to quiet us down, and carried on with his
explanation.
"Let me walk you through it. I hope it will make
things clearer. Okay, when a limb suffers the kind of se¬
vere trauma associated with an accidental amputation,
it's inevitable that many nerve cells will be too damaged
to survive. There's n o t h i n g anyone, including m e , can
do about it. This is why it's wrong to try reattaching the
limb to the patient's body right away. All you're doing is
connecting two dead nerve cells together, effectively
blocking the path the brain signals travel along.
"We've discovered that if we place tiny electrical re¬
ceivers and transmitters into the exposed body tissue,
the nerves below are still healthy and wondering what
the hell is going on. N o t on the surface tissue, where the
nerve cells are mostly dead or far too damaged, but be¬
low that, into the next link in the chain, if you will.
These nerves are still ready and waiting for the brain's
next signal.
"Our mainframe computer tracks the transmitting
signal it is sending out, and when it is received b
y a
neuropath inside the limb, the computer locks on its
location and continues to feed it electrical stimuli. It's a
bit hit and miss, but we try and locate as many undam¬
aged neuropathways as we can, then sit back and wait.
If all goes as planned, the traumatized limb settles back
down and starts to act as if n o t h i n g has happened. It's
receiving a more than adequate blood supply and a con¬
stant transmission of brain-simulated electrical stimuli.
I'm oversimplifying again, but basically those are the
only two things the limb needs.
"Those spastic, jerky motions you noticed in the
video are actually induced by us. The body parts don't
really need that much stimulation to stay healthy, but
we do it anyway j u s t to keep the muscles from succumb¬
ing to atrophy.
"It's not a perfect system, by any means, and some¬
times all our efforts still end up going for naught, but
our success rate now stands at j u s t over ninety-one per¬
cent. N o t too shabby, h u h ? "
He stopped talking and once again the small confer¬
ence room was silent, but this time it wasn't uncomfort¬
able. Unlike the tension-61'ed silence that had succeeded
the video presentation, this quiet was more of a ponder¬
ing, absorbing all the facts kind of quiet. We'd been fed
a lot of information, both visually and verbally, and we
each needed a minute or two to chew it and digest it at
our own speed. Realizing this, Dr. Marshall remained
quiet, busying himself with straightening out and tuck¬
ing in the blanket covering his legs. It didn't need
straightening, but it gave us the time we needed to
gather our thoughts.
My thoughts weren't particularly nice ones. In fact,
they were downright nasty. I couldn't quite get the im¬
age of my own arm out of my head. I kept picturing it
severed from my body and twitching on some lab table
with thousands of those little colorful wires trailing
out from its ragged bloody end. It wasn't a pretty im¬
age to sit and think about so I stood up to ask the doc¬
tor a question, just to derail my morbid thoughts.
"Doctor?" I asked. "Earlier, before you showed the
video, you said the point wasn't to shock anyone but to
prove what we were going to attempt here could be done.
Maybe I'm missing something but with the obvious
success you're having with this type of thing, isn't it
becoming old hat for you? I mean, you've done this
over and over with various body parts, and to me at
least, you seem to have it down pat. W h a t do you need
us for? W h a t are you planning to attempt with our
limbs that's so special?"
Dr. Marshall seemed to deflate in his wheelchair and
for a moment I thought I'd blown my chance at getting
rich. I was sure he was about to get mad and have me
tossed out on my ear. Instead, he rolled his chair closer
to us and asked Bill and I to move down so he wouldn't
have to shout anymore. I helped move Red Beard down
beside Wheels and Bill and I grabbed chairs in the first
row too.
"Much better," Dr. Marshall said with a smile, then
took a deep breath. "I was going to save this until after
lunch but what the heck, now's as good a time as any.
Mr. Fox has brought up a very good point. There comes
a time in any research project when simply repeating
the experiment becomes redundant. What's the point
of doing something again if you already know it can be
done? It's a waste of time and resources.
"Our research, while miles ahead of the public sec¬
tor, has basically slammed up against that proverbial
redundant wall, so I've decided it's time to take the next
step up the ladder. It's time we used the knowledge
we've acquired not only to keep a severed limb alive and
healthy but to go ahead and reattach it to a h u m a n host,
fully functional and strong as ever. This is where you
people come in. Yours will be the first limbs we ever try
this with, which is why I felt it was important to have
this talk today."
"Are you saying you're going to remove our different
parts like we'd agreed, set them up on those machines
to keep them healthy, then reattach them to us?" Bill
Smith wondered aloud. "I'm actually going to walk out
of here looking j u s t like I do now?"
There was a giimmer of hope in his voice and my
thoughts were racing too, but the look on Dr. Marshall's
face made it clear our hopes were in vain.
"No, Mr. Smith," the doctor said. "I'm afraid that's
not going to happen. I have other plans in place. I'm sorry,
but I've already promised your limbs to someone else."
" W h o ? " all four of us asked, speaking in quadstereo.
Dr. Marshall seemed to shrink even further into his
chair and with a heavy sigh, whispered, "If you remem¬
ber, I mentioned that I had a personal reason for thank¬
ing you. Well, that personal reason is my son. I'm
planning on giving your arms and legs to him."
C H A P T E R N I N E
"I'm going to attach your arms and legs onto the body
of my son," Dr. Marshall repeated, but even though I'd
heard him say it twice, I was still having trouble grasp¬
ing what he was telling us.
"I don't understand," I said, my confusion obviously
shared by my companions. "You can't be serious. Your
son, he needs all four of o u r . . . I mean ... he doesn't
have any of his own ..."
I couldn't even finish the sentence. Jesus! H o w could
I ask this man if his kid was n o t h i n g but a torso? Maybe
I had this situation all screwed up. His son might have
both his arms and legs intact, but something was wrong
and he j u s t couldn't use them. That sounded more like
it—for a minute there my imagination got away from
me. I apologized to Dr. Marshall for my callousness,
then decided to shut the hell up before I put my foot in
my m o u t h again.
"No need, Mr. Fox," he said. "Actually, your assess
ment of my son's situation was right on the money. At
least for the moment, he has no arms or legs. He's con¬
fined to one of my hospital beds upstairs."
The doctor was looking directly at me, seemingly
expecting a response. His tone of voice had been light
but the way he was looking at me was anything but
friendly. Then again, I could be reading him wrong. I
was trying to imagine what it must be like to He in a bed
day after day without being able to move, but I couldn't
comprehend it. The doctor was still staring at m e —
really staring—and I felt a chill envelop me as I strug¬
gled to come up with something to say. Unable to come
up with anything that might change the subject, but
feeling like I should say something, I asked, "How did
your son lose his Limbs? Was it an accident?"
"No, no accident," he said. "I cut them off him my¬
> self, about three weeks ago."
For a moment, his eyes stayed locked on mine and I
can honestly say I'd never seen such cold, penetrating
eyes before. They were like dark marbles, almost rep¬
tilian in appearance, but then he laughed, and all traces
of maliciousness were instantly gone. Might not have
been any to begin with.
"That came out a little more sinister sounding than
I'd intended." The surgeon smiled. "I did have to remove
my son's arms and legs, but that was only in preparation
for his operation in the near future. Let me explain.
"My son's name is Andrew, Andrew N a t h a n Mar¬
shall, and I love him with all my heart. He's had a fairly
happy life but it's also been a difficult one. He's been
severely disabled since birth and every pain-filled day
he's endured has been my fault. It was me who caused
his disabilities and I've never forgiven myself for it. N o w
I'm hoping to finally make it up to him.
"I was a y o u n g man back in the early 1960s, a prom¬
ising doctor and surgeon who thought he knew it all.
W h a t I was, was a first-class fool. My wife, Julia, was
pregnant with our first child and was having a terrible
time with m o r n i n g sickness. M e , being the brilliant
doctor I thought I was, prescribed her the drug thalidomide, which in those days was being used during
pregnancies to stop nausea in the first trimester. There
were reports out that thalidomide was causing birth
defects but I didn't pay attention to them. I thought I
knew what was best for my wife and unborn child. I was
wrong.
"Andrew was born in the summer of 1963, and was a
perfect example of the classic thalidomide baby. His
head and torso were completely normal-sized, his brain
and spinal column fully developed and normal in every
way, but something in the drug had stunted the devel¬
opment of his arms and legs. They formed, but not the
way they should have. Basically he had small paddlelike
flippers where his arms should have been, and his legs,
although somewhat better formed, were still grotesquely
underdeveloped and have never been able to hold his
weight.
"I lost the use of my legs in a freak car accident, but I
at least knew the joy of walking for my first forty-five
years. Because of my stupidity, my son has never walked
a day in his life. He's never played a game of baseball,
never ridden a bike. He's never done any of the things a