Chapter Five

Three days later, it was my turn to try and hold the patient asleep while others checked over the body. Starting out with everything open, I tried using the main line of power to put him out. Good thing I was there to catch his head, as apparently even that was too much. Quickly shutting off the flow, I looked up sheepishly and said, "Sorry about that. Guess I still have to work on my tip toeing."

Still acting as our guest lecturer, Jane looked at me strangely and asked, "Excuse me? Tip toeing?"

"Sorry, got some tips on improving my technique earlier. Nothing to worry about." I knew it would get to her, but I slipped a quick wink in Carmen's direction and was rewarded with a deep blush. Concentrating again, I turned the main flow back into the source and opened the split from one of the smallest pipe. Using this, I tried to project relaxation and have it flow in waves down the patient, rather than straight into his brain. This time, rather than abrupt unconsciousness, the patient's eyes started slowly drooping, and I was able to slowly lower him down. Smiling at my success, I looked up to see rather shocked faces from everyone save Carmen, who merely looked thoughtful before noticing my gaze and dropping her eyes.

Jane spoke up, "Very well done that time Larry. Perhaps after this we can have a group discussion on how you learned to tip toe around. Until then, Ben would you care to take the lead on this? Everyone else follow along as best as you can. Some basic background, patient is male, 34 years old, and is complaining of trouble seeing and headaches."

Standing close, Ben closed his eyes to concentrate. Since everyone else was doing it as well, I decided to use the main line from my power to do a gentle sweep and see what I could find as well. Something just didn't feel right about this guy.

"I can't really find anything wrong with him. No bleeding anywhere and no flow obstructions as far as I can tell. That pretty well rules out stroke, which is the usual suspect in symptoms like this. Anyone else getting anything?"

"Don't worry Ben, several physicians have already checked for stroke as well. We wouldn't be sending someone with an emergency like that to you guys until you had at lot more practice doing this as well."

Exhaling with relief, Ben visibly slumped a little as he looked at everyone else to see if they had any ideas. I sent my thoughts flowing through the blood vessels in the patient's head, not quite convinced we hadn't missed anything. Suddenly I felt a massive drop in flow before I was past it. Whoa, what could have caused that? Backing up, my stomach plummeted. This guy was a ticking time bomb. Swelling like a balloon, one of his arteries was primed to rupture within a month or so, provided he didn't have a stressful day. "Jane, guys, someone want to confirm this and get Dr. Minton in here ASAP? There's a massive aneurism in his occipital lobe that will kill him very soon if we don't do anything."

Pale now, Jane looked at me and asked, "Larry, how did you find that out if you are holding him asleep at the same time?"

Before I could answer, Gloria spoke up "Oh my God he's right. What can we do to fix an aneurism though? That's a death sentence."

"Look, I can do multiple things at once with my power but that isn't important right now. Someone go get Dr. Minton right now. I have an idea, and if we can get a skilled earthbrand, we might be able to save this guy. Hurry!"

Fifteen minutes later, Ben, Doctor Minton, and a petite blond came in huffing and puffing.

"Introductions later, let's try and save a life first. Doctor Minton, do you know any techniques for sealing up an aneurism?"

"No, sorry. It's hopeless. There's too much that can go wrong, and too many things in the way that we can't get through."

"Ok, I have an idea but it will take an obscene amount of concentration. First, can your earthbrand there conjure a platinum wire thin enough to slip inside of an artery?"

Looking confused, the blonde nonetheless gave me a slight nod and started concentrating. Her first few tries were either too thick or too rigid. The third try she got something that I thought I could work with.

"Good enough for an emergency. Right now I need to run a test on something. Hold it out in front of me." When she did, I conjured some ice around the middle of the wire and applied as much pressure as I could. Unfortunately, no matter how much I strained I couldn't cut the wire. Wait, if I can sense strains on the water I conjured, could she do the same with her metal? "Quick, I need you to close your eyes. When I use ice to put pressure on that wire, can you sense the location and sever it?"

Confused at my obviously absurd request, she still needed to clarify, "If the oldest end of the wire I conjure is considered "up," do you want me to sever it above the ice, in the middle of it, or below it?"

"Try for in the middle of it, that way I can slowly release any tension that might have built up."

"OK, I think I have it, release the ice." As soon as I released the ice, half of it fell to the floor.

"Perfect, but let's check something. As you sever it, can you make both of the ends round? We will have this wire in someone's brain, and I don't want to save him from the aneurism only to have the wire slash open an artery and bleed him out when we withdraw it." At her nod, I figured we should begin. "Carmen, I need you to hold him asleep while I do this. I'm going to need all my concentration. Dr. Minton, I need you to guide the first bit of the wire into the patient’s femoral artery. As soon as it is in, I will make a small ice cap on the end of the wire and guide it up into the aneurism. Ma'am, your job is to keep conjuring wire. Once we are into the aneurism sac, I will line the inside with a very thin sheet of ice to reinforce the vessel wall. We need to keep coiling the wire until the sac is full, at which point I will put pressure onto the last bit and you can sever the wire. Holding an ice cap on the end of the wire again, we will need to draw it back out, making sure we don't slice any tissue. Any questions on the procedure?"

Grim determination was etched into my partner's faces, so without any further question we went ahead with a crazy plan. Sure, this would work fairly well in my world, but here they only had the most basic of surgeries available. No time to start worrying however, as this guy didn't have much time. Dr. Minton managed to get the wire into position while I was psyching myself up. Not wasting any time, I formed my ice cap and started pulling wire in, moving at a clip of around one inch every ten seconds. Keeping my eyes shut to keep out distractions, I asked our new earthbrand, "Is this a good rate? I can go slower, but would prefer if you were able to keep at least two feet of excess wire formed and ready."

"This works for me, I already have your safety margin and then some and will keep a conjuring at the same rate you are moving."

"Excellent. Ok, I'm almost to his neck. At this point I'm going to slow down, and I want you to keep between two and two and a half feet of excess conjured. Just use stop and go conjuring as needed."

"Roger that."

Slowing down, I tried to pick a route that would keep me in fairly large arteries (for the brain) while still providing the most direct route to the problem. Three grueling minutes and I was there. Figuring it was best to keep everyone informed, "Ok, I'm at the aneurism. Slipping the tip of the wire inside. Lining the inside of the aneurism with ice. Damn, I don't have enough control over the wire to start looping. Can you conjure metal on the end very slowly, and turn as you hit my ice walls?"

"Not really, I don't know of anyone who has that kind of control. Would it be possible to slowly expand the tip of the wire instead, filling the sac with a solid ball of metal rather than a coil?"

Thinking fast, I knew we needed something to seal up the entrance to the sac. "That could work, but we would still need something to seal the entrance. Yes, let's do that and afterwards, I'll use the wire to create a coil to catch enough platelet cells to form a seal over the entrance. Ok, I have you positioned in the middle of the sac right now, but it isn't perfectly spherical. The wire direction is the shortest, while the other two axis are roughly the same length. Here's an idea, can you grow two perpendicular axis to the direction of the wire? If so, I will put an ice cap on each end and we can slowly expand them until they reach the sides. That will give you the outer limits of your conjured metal ball."

Painstakingly slowly, we found the edges and filled it in with solid metal. With the hardest part done, creating a small coil to seal it and dragging the excess wire out was relatively painless. As the last bit came back out and someone put a dressing on the small wound, I stumbled into a chair and collapsed in exhaustion. "Someone want to double check our work before we let him wake up? I'm spent."

I didn't bother keeping track of who was doing what at that point. I just flopped forward with every intention of memorizing the details of the back of my eyelids. Unfortunately, I could feel someone staring at me. Well, they could stare to their heart's content, I wasn't planning on explaining anything until everyone was done with the patient.

"Ok Carmen, whatever Larry managed to do seems to be holding. Why don't we wake up our patient and see if his symptoms have been eliminated." Leave it to Dr. Minton to take charge, natural born leader that guy.

Yawning, I heard our former patient starting to stir. "Hhhhyyyyaaaaahhhh. Oh, some new people. Is everything ok? How long was I out?"

"Mr. Daniels, sorry to drop in like this but it was rather exceptional circumstances. I will try and explain everything, but first we need to check to make sure everything has been resolved. I'm Dr. Minton, and from your chart it seems you were having vision troubles and headaches, is that correct?"

"Yeah, everything just seemed a little blurry, like I was looking through a bit of glass with vaseline on one side. No matter what I tried, I couldn't bring anything into focus. I would also get migraines that would strike randomly throughout the day. I must say though, aside from a little grogginess whatever you did seems to have cleared up the vision quite nicely. Is there any hope that it fixed the migraines too?"

"Yes, well that is our hope at least. One question before we start with explanations, did you notice anything about the headaches that could trigger them? An emotion, argument, things like that?"

"Hmmm, now that you think about it they did tend to occur when I would be stressed. Either work or rush hour traffic were the most common causes."

"I see. Well, that does shed some light on things. I feel fairly confident in saying that we most likely have found the cause of these headaches, but if they recur I want you to head to the hospital immediately. One of our students here actually made the diagnosis that probably saved your life, and I think it would be an excellent learning experience for him to explain everything to you, are you ok with that?" At his nod he turned and said, "Ok Mr. Davidson, he's all yours."

Thinking the most vile curses imaginable, I nonetheless gave up on my eyelid inspection and walked back over to Mr. Daniels' table. Extending my hand to shake, "Pleasure to see you feeling better Mr. Daniels. I will try and explain everything in layman's terms, but if you don't understand something feel free to interrupt for clarification at any time." Seeing him nod in agreement I continued, "Well, what you had was what we call an aneurism. Basically that means a blood vessel in your brain had a small pouch bud off on one side, then expanded until it was pressing on the part of your brain that interprets what your eyes see. This is a life threatening condition, so we had to undertake some drastic measures, which is why Dr. Minton was called in before we tried anything. He was supervising everything, so please don't feel that the university lets students experiment on patients."

"Ok, I can see how Dr. Minton was called in, but you said it was life threatening. I don't see how a small pouch of blood can be life threatening."

"Well, think of it this way. That small pouch of blood has a wall holding it in. As blood fills the pouch, it expands, stretching the walls holding it in. Just like an overinflated balloon, if the pouch gets filled too much it will break open and you will essentially bleed into your brain until you die. When you would get stressed throughout the day, your blood pressure would increase. This would expand that pouch enough to cause your headaches. What we did was insert an incredibly thin wire into an artery in your leg, and threaded it up into your brain. Once there we used the wire to fill up the pouch and force the blood out of it. We also left a coil of wire in the entrance to the pouch so that your body can form a blockage to prevent more blood from entering. Eventually this will heal over and you won't have to worry about it."

As I explained the cause of his illness, you could see it sinking in just how close to death he had come. Face pale and hands shaking, Mr. Daniels let his head droop. Poor guy, to be confronted with your own mortality like that had to be hard. Placing my hand on his shoulder, he looked me in the eye as I said, “Listen, the important part is that we caught it in time. This treatment will work, and we will closely monitor you for the next week. After that we can slowly back off the monitoring.”

Dr. Minton, seeing that I was pretty well tapped out in the support department, decided to step in. “Mr. Daniels, I agree with my colleague. Close monitoring that tapers off will be our treatment plan, and I don’t foresee any difficulties. Come, let’s get you back to your family. I think, given the events of today, I will also be ordering a mandatory two-week vacation. Stay at home, rest as much as you can, and spend time with your loved ones.”

As they walked out the door, the rest of the class turned to look at me. Sticking out her hand to shake, the blonde beat everyone to the punch. “Well, that is definitely in the top ten for most intense introductions I’ve ever had. My name’s Leah, and I hope most of your life isn’t nearly as stressful as what we just went through.”

“Larry, and no thankfully it isn’t nearly that bad. I can’t express how glad I am that you came though, this would never have worked without you. If you ever need anything, just ask.”

“Well, I for one hate having to keep track of debts, so let’s get this out of the way right now. How in the world did you ever come up with a complicated procedure like that on the fly and coach us all through it like you had done it before?”

Damn, this is dangerous territory. If I were in her shoes I would want to know the same thing, but the less people know about me the better off my other plans will be. I wasn’t surprised to see everyone else staring at me intently as well. “Well, that is a rather complicated story. Before I talk about it, would you all do me a huge favor and swear to keep this knowledge as secret as you can? It isn’t something that I really want bandied about.” Seeing confused nods from everyone, I resolved to take the plunge and not hold back. “The short story is that I have seen that procedure done before. Many times, although not with the same equipment. I’m from another world.”

“Impossible.”

“Bullshit.”

“Go ahead, pull the other one.”

“Hey, I did say it was complicated, didn’t I? The truth is I come from a world where nobody has any powers. Any healing we do is done with machines and chemicals. That’s why I seem like I have no experience using my powers. Until a few months ago, I didn’t have any.”

“He’s telling the truth. I was there for his first unfortunate day in our world.” Forgetting Jane was there, I was glad I had someone to back me up. “His fiancé was killed by members of the Malias family.” Until she lets slip things I didn’t want everyone to know. “That’s why we really need to keep this all a secret. His life would most definitely be in danger.”

“Ok, way more than I wanted to tell everyone but thanks there Jane. So back where I was from, this was how aneurisms were dealt with. We would use a machine to watch a wire be threaded into the sac, and it would be coiled inside to seal it off. We had to do a little improvising here, but it all worked out in the end.”

With my secret out of the bag, I tried keeping as many details about myself hidden, but was free with my medical knowledge. More knowledge never hurt.