The day the first breath of autumn was in the air, Digen came on duty with Hogan just as a police ambulance screamed up to the dock and began unloading red blankets before it had rocked to a halt. In all, five shooting victims, three of them police officers, were wheeled into the EW.
Before they all had their names taped to their wrists, Thornton was there. Digen and Hogan waded in, getting the patient who had the most critical brain injury up to surgery. By the time Digen finished with the last admission form, turning away from the nursing station to look for more work, the others had all been taken to treatment rooms or to surgery.
A resident came by and, seeing Digen idle, handed him a couple of units of blood plasma. “Room five. Jump!” He sped away and Digen took off in the other direction. He pushed open the door without knocking and stopped dead in his tracks. The nager was overwhelming.
The patient on the table was surrounded—Thornton, an orthopedics resident, and a neurologist on one side, Joel Hogan and half a dozen nurses and orderlies on the other; at the patient’s feet, two police officers blazed with anxiety-fueled anger.
“What do you mean, you don’t know if you can save her? The mayor went out on a limb to get her assigned to this case—those in-Territory sonsabees didn’t want to risk one of their precious Donors on a raid of a Distect hideout! Not even to wipe out Distect influence in Westfield! Said it was our imagination! Well, it wasn’t—Pirot Street has always been a hangout for them—and you know what will happen if she dies? With them all yelling ‘Donor shortage’ all the time! They’ll….”
At that point somebody spotted Digen and moved to take the plasma. “Well, it’s about time!”
As Digen surrendered the two containers, the policeman who had been delivering the tirade saw his retainers and fell silent.
Hogan said, “Dr. Thornton, I think she’s coming around.”
Thornton nodded. “Get those IVs set.” Then he briefed Digen crisply. “Two bullets, one lodged near the spine, I think. Profuse hemorrhage, not sure of the source yet. We’ve got to get her up to surgery immediately.”
Hogan whipped a tourniquet around the patient’s arm. Her head rolled from side to side as she struggled to focus on her surroundings. Gleaming white tile walls, intense light, upright poles, and dangling tubes. Then she came to Hogan—face, arms, uniform whites—and suddenly she twisted her arm out of Hogan’s grasp, staring at the needle he held, screaming, “No!” in English, and then in Simelan, “No! No! Get me out of here! Help me, somebody!”
As she began to thrash about, an orderly threw herself across her legs while a nurse drew the pelvic restraining strap tight. Hogan grabbed the patient’s shoulders and said, “Stop it! You’ll bleed to death if you don’t lie still and let us get some fresh blood into you!”
It was the wrong thing to say. She went totally hysterical, wildly fighting them. The red stain on the sheets spread visibly. Digen leaped to her side, grabbed her hands tightly, and shook her hard. “Stop it!”
As he touched her, the shock of her pain lanced through him, driven by the power of her Donor’s nager. His breath caught in his throat. Then she ceased in mid-scream and let out a ragged cry of relief, her nager falling into crude synch with Digen, drained now of the wild panic. Faintly, she said, “Hajene Farris, help me. I hurt so.”
Digen switched to English, trying to make a point. “I can’t help you. There is nothing—at all—that channels’ science can do to save your life. Understand that: nothing. You’ve lost too much blood, and the damage is too severe to be corrected by the usual method.”
“I’m dying, I know. Stay with me, Hajene—As One First, All Firsts.”
“There’s still a chance. Let the doctors try. I’ve seen them save people with worse injuries.”
Eyes fixed on the needle Hogan still held, she twisted aside. “No!”
“You’re too precious to waste like this. Trust me, they know what they’re doing.”
She was fading fast, shock and blood loss catching up to her again. “I can trust you, Hajene. Not them.”
Digen met Thornton’s eyes, then said to the woman, “I’m one of them. And I’ll stay with you every minute. I won’t let them harm you.”
Her eyes were closing inexorably, but she was driven by such panic that she managed to insist; clearly, “Pledge of Firsts—”
Digen hesitated, pleading to Thornton with his eyes. I can’t break a pledge like that. Thornton gave a slight nod. Digen turned to the woman and gave her formal channel’s commitment to see her through the crisis.
She dropped into twilight consciousness, relaxed at last, and allowed them to insert their needles and wheel her up to surgery. Digen helped them swath her in sterile drapes and install her in the operating theater.
When at last she succumbed to sedation, as the anesthetist applied the mask to the patient’s face, Thornton said, “The board is probably going to consider this some sort of intricate plot to get you into surgery.”
“I can’t leave her, Doctor. I gave my word.”
“I won’t ask you to break it. A doctor has to have a certain integrity—despite what you might think from observing my colleagues upon occasion. But I won’t have spectators in my operating theater. You’ll scrub in as an assistant. Jump!”
The nurses were efficiently preparing the room while one of Thornton’s residents was prepping the operating field. Digen considered and decided that stepping out to scrub didn’t constitute abandoning his patient.
Digen had lost track of Hogan. He realized it only when his friend half poked his head into the scrub room, holding two dripping X-ray films, to say, “Your sterile retainers are in the autoclave.” And then he was gone with the X-rays for Thornton.
When Digen rejoined his patient, Thornton was already making some progress with increasing her blood pressure. A whole-blood bottle had been attached to the IV stand. Thornton said, “Stand here, Dr. Hogan. You there, Dr. Farris. I’ll want the retractors in two minutes.”
With that, he continued to peer alternately at the X-ray film displayed off to one side and at the blood pressure indicator, which the anesthetist read off at thirty-second intervals.
As Digen and Hogan took their places, Digen said, “I never even found out her name.”
“She knew you—I thought you knew her,” said Thornton, holding out a hand, into which a nurse slapped a scalpel without being told to.
Somebody said, “Everyone in-Territory knows a Farris, and they’re all Hajene Farris.”
Thornton grunted, studying the blood pressure and respiration. Then, eyeing the X-ray again and positioning his scalpel carefully, he said, “A little more light on the field, Nurse.” And to Digen, “Name’s Ditana Amanso. I understand she’s a first-order Donor.”
“That she is,” said Digen, once more overcome by her nager. Ditana Amanso wasn’t above a 3.0, but she was definitely high field, and Digen couldn’t help but feel it. He braced himself as Thornton lowered the scalpel to slash open the wound, saying, “We’re going to have to do some fancy repair work in here, Doctors, now observe carefully.”
Digen could barely stifle a gasp. Amanso’s body had been responding to Digen’s nager, increasing her selyn production to her maximum. This was, Digen was sure, one of the prime reasons she was still alive. Yet that same powerful production now drove the shock of sliced tissues, sundered cells, deep into Digen’s body.
“…I said, retractors, Dr. Farris!”
Thornton, struggling to catch every bleeder, to save every ounce of blood he could, didn’t look up. If he had he might have thrown Digen out of the room rather than risk having him faint.
Digen extended the retractor. The assisting resident placed the cruel looking instrument along the incision and pulled back to hold the wound open, saying, “Now, just hold that tension, just like that, no more, no less, until I tell you to stop.”
Thornton bent over the wound and swore. Then, offhandedly, he said, “What I don’t understand is how she’s—hemos
tat—still alive, let alone—hemostat—how she managed to regain consciousness downstairs. Sponge. Clamp. And you better have enough of those on that tray.”
Digen only half heard him. He could see, over the resident’s shoulder, just one corner of the operating field. What he couldn’t see he could perceive, etched in fire within his own guts. Against that, the resident’s occasional revulsion at the sight of Digen’s retainers hardly registered at all.
Placing a vacuum tube into the incision, Thornton drained the fluids that had collected, had the light adjusted a few times, and then said, “Maybe it’s not as bad as it looked at first. Get comfortable, gentlemen, this may take a while.” And he began, painstakingly, to dissect away the damaged portion of her liver.
While his fingers flew through the work with deft precision, Thornton went on, “If she survives the first eight hours or so after surgery, she’ll have the psychological shock of finding that she may never have the use of her legs again. That will probably kill the last spark of her will to live, which is the only thing that’s sustained her this far. Yes, gentlemen, you will find as you go on in medicine that ‘will to live’ is a very tangible factor, often decisive.”
Thornton went on and on, lecturing to the interns on one level, then to his resident on another. Some surgeons had to have a radio playing while they operated, others swore and threw things on the floor, others blamed every little problem on the incompetence of the nurses, and others told gruesome jokes. These were the colorful legends among surgery teams. By and large, most surgeons put in a day’s work and went home satisfied. But Thornton was a born professor, lecturing casually, easily, constantly, but in a wholly uninvolved monotone. And he expected, to be listened to.
Digen could not listen. As internal organs were sutured back together, as muscles were mended, and cells destroyed in the tedious process, Digen, whose only responsibility was to stand perfectly still, pulling on a retractor at a steady rate, drifted on her selyn field inexorably up into hyperconsciousness, snapping rudely back down to duoconsciousness every time Thornton attacked a high selyn field zone.
The first few times that the transition to duoconsciousness hit him involuntarily, it was an unpleasant shock. But then it didn’t feel too bad, and Digen congratulated himself on getting used to one phenomenon of the surgical theater. After a time, he found himself waiting with anticipation for the forced snap back to duoconsciousness. There was a certain electrifying thrill to it that was totally different from anything he’d ever felt before.
After a while he let it happen and just ignored it. But toward the end he suddenly found himself wishing to guide Thornton’s hands toward a zone of high density selyn storage in the Gen’s body—there, right there—anticipating the resounding snap to duoconsciousness it would cause him.
Then he was thrown abruptly all the way down into hypoconsciousness, losing all touch with the selyn fields.
The world stood out around him in stark, too bright colors that hurt his eyes, with sounds that were merely dim clicks penetrating like needles in the brain, and he could almost feel the polka dot weave of the Sime Center undershorts he was wearing. The stinging smell of the room seared through his sinuses, bringing tears to his eyes.
He staggered under the impact of it, and swore silently, Shen! He suddenly found that he was shaking, with real tears flooding his eyes now. The thick walls of emotional callus that had held him since Im’ran’s departure were dissolved, gone as if they’d never been. For a few moments he thought he was going to collapse in postsyndrome.
But Thornton’s voice shocked him back to reality. “Dr. Farris! If you please!”
Digen realized that his retractor had become dislodged. Still swaying on his feet, he replaced it and resumed his stance. It wasn’t long before the surgeons had completed the work and released the two interns from holding retractors.
During this time, Digen gradually faded back to duoconsciousness and stayed there, not comfortable but less affected by the superficial suturing that closed the wound. His internal balances had been badly disrupted, and he knew that he required some time with a good Donor to set himself to rights.
Yet, he had given his word to stay with Ditana Amanso—and Thornton had said it might take eight hours or more in the recovery room before she regained consciousness.
As they were all stripping off their gloves and gowns, Thornton said, “I presume, Dr. Farris, that you intend to sit with her until she comes to?”
“Yes,” said Digen. “I’d like to. I’m obligated to.”
“Hmm,” said Thornton. “Well, since I’m having you two assigned to my staff, effective immediately, I may as well send a couple of my interns down to cover for you, and let you get some experience following post-surgery patients. Report to the recovery room—”
He saw the surprise on Hogan’s face and added, “Oh, you can take time out for coffee first. I’m not a slave driver. You did well enough—for green interns. If Dr. Farris can learn to pay attention the way you do, and if you can learn to stand still the way he does—no, Dr. Farris, I don’t blame you for freezing up at first sight of a real, living incision—I did, too—nor for getting tired and dropping your retractor—even Simes must be human sometimes—well, we’ll see if we can make surgical residents out of you in five months.”
At that, Thornton left, the swinging door flapping shut behind him. Digen and Hogan looked at each other, then at Ditana Amanso being wheeled past. With one accord, they eschewed the coffee and followed the stretcher off to the recovery room.
There were actually three recovery rooms on the surgical floor. The most critical patients, who were expected to linger for a day or more instead of the usual hour or so, were taken to a special ward at the far end of the wing. The particular four bed ward where Ditana Amanso was taken had only one other occupant, who was being removed—deceased—when Digen and Hogan followed the nurse into the room.
Digen slumped into a chair and let Hogan deal with the nurse and the assorted routine traffic in the room. His head was ringing, and he was having periods of acute hypoconsciousness again—as if he were definitely post-, even though there had been no selyn flow into his system. His internal circulations were severely disrupted in some very odd ways that worried him; but there it was, at last, the reaction that had begun after the transfer with Im’ran and been shut off so abruptly.
He clenched his teeth, gripped the chair arms tightly, and forced himself to stillness. Every Gen moving through the room was a screeching discord that further disrupted his internal flows.
And there was something else, a throbbing ache, a gathering of tension at the base of his skull that was still only a ghostly shadow. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been ignoring it when he finally named it. Entran! Shen! It’s not possible to be post—and entran at the same time!
He began to giggle at the ridiculous things happening inside him. Dimly, he realized how it had happened. Entran, the prime nemesis of the Farris channel, was a condition set off by not exercising a channel’s secondary system vigorously or frequently enough. Digen, during his First Year after changeover, when all physical capacities grow at their fastest rate, had had his secondary system forced to maximum development, as did every channel. After his accident he had become unable to work at that capacity, and as a result lived in the constant shadow of entran.
Somehow, and he wasn’t sure how, Ditana Amanso’s field during the operation had broken down some resistances, unblocked certain functional pathways, and cross-connected his primary and secondary systems. And now, the long-cramped and abused primary system, rebelling against the transfers that had been forced into him, was responding with both the postsyndrome and entran symptoms—a contradiction in terms, but there it was.
Giggling, Digen tried to invent a word to describe what was happening to him, and his attempts were such atrocious puns—or seemed so to him in his giddiness—that he laughed out loud.
The sound of the door closing sobered him momentarily. Hoga
n, standing by the closed door, was looking at Digen with a mixture of curiosity and outrage, but at the same time he was grinning. They were alone in the room with Ditana Amanso.
“Digen, I know it’s ironic how we finally got to the surgical ward and all—but really, a doctor ought to be dignified and all that—especially around the critically ill—at least when they’re conscious.” He glanced at Amanso, whose breathing was stronger and more regular now than it had been.
Digen shook himself out of it and got to his feet. He was exhausted as no physical exertion could make a Sime. He felt as if he’d just been through three consecutive A-prime functionals. He went unsteadily toward one of the vacant beds. “I agree absolutely,” he said, “but right now….” His feet betrayed him and he grabbed at the end of the bed, hanging on for dear life as the room tilted around him.
Only a moment, and Hogan was there supporting him. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve been acting strange ever since you dropped that retractor—”
Digen groped toward the bed, letting Hogan help him climb up on it. His knees had turned to water as the entran symptoms grabbed hold. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Some muscles contracted hard, shaking in spasm, while others let go, completely flaccid—but they were all the wrong muscles. His head throbbed with exploding migraine, but he somehow was wholly hypoconscious, still flying in the grip of postsyndrome, and he should have felt great.
“Digen?” Hogan was enough of a doctor not to panic. His brain was still ticking off diagnoses, and in a moment he added it up. “Some kind of seizure?” Hogan fumbled in a bedside drawer and came up with a thick object that he attempted to force between Digen’s teeth.
Unto Zeor, Forever Page 14