Date: Tue, 5 Sep 1995 14:45:17 EDT Reply-To: Russ McMillan Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Russ McMillan Subject: Those who heal... 2/2 Those Who Heal Themselves, Part 2 by Russet McMillan mcmillan@astro.psu.edu Anne gaped. "Stab him in the heart and leave the weapon in place," Joe elaborated. "He won't start healing until it's removed." "I can't do that!" Anne gasped. "It's not as if it would be permanent," Joe pointed out. "And it solves all your problems. You'll have all the time you need to explore. You won't need an anesthesiologist or assistants to monitor his condition. He won't bleed, he won't feel any pain." "Not _after_ I'm dead, anyway," Richie said unhappily. "I can't do that!" she repeated. "I can't just -- kill a patient." "Not even to save his life?" Anne lifted her hands to brush at her hair, remembered that they were gloved, and clasped them together tightly instead. "I took an oath, Joe. I don't kill patients, and that's that." Joe sighed. "I'll do it, then." "Oh, no -- oh, no you won't." "Think of me as an anesthesiologist." "Wait a second, guys, shouldn't I have some say in this?" Richie broke in. "What do you think, then?" Joe asked. "I think I don't want to be dead unless I have to." He pushed himself up on one elbow and fell back with a groan. "Anne, you say this is gonna kill me?" "I don't know!" she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. "If you were mortal, you wouldn't last the night without serious medical intervention." "Why not just wait, then? Either I'll die or get better. If I die, and I don't revive, you can open me up and see what's wrong. If I get better, there's no problem." "The problem is that I have other patients. I can't sit around nursing you while other people need me. You won't come to the hospital, you won't let me operate -- why did you call me in at all?" "I didn't," Richie mumbled. "Joe did." Joe was staring thoughtfully at the floor. He looked up at the sound of his name. "You know what worries me?" he said. "That lost muscle. Has that all happened since last night, Richie?" "I don't know what you're talking about," Richie insisted. "I haven't lost any weight." Anne looked sharply at Joe. "Do you have a scale here?" "Yeah. I'll go get it." It took both of them to get Richie on his feet and steady him so that he could stand on the scale, but he insisted that his weight had not changed in months. "Do you lose weight when you die?" Anne asked, as they eased Richie back on to the couch. Richie was pale from the exertion, clutching his stomach and incapable of speech. Blood trickled from his lip where he had bitten it. "Sometimes they lose weight," Joe answered softly, watching Richie but powerless to help him. "It depends on how they die, how much blood is lost, what has to heal, and so on." Anne adjusted the ice bags around Richie again, her hand on his shoulder. "We can't leave him like this, Joe." "I know." Richie's tortured gasps began to ease slowly, and he raised his eyes wearily to Joe's face. "I give up," he panted. "You're right. Dying can't be any worse than this. Heck, I'm ready to do it myself. Let's try the surgery." Anne stood up and looked around. "We have to have a sterile operating theater." "No, we don't," Joe said. "Don't worry about infection." "He is demonstrably vulnerable to infection --" she began, then cut herself off. "You're right. We can't go to the hospital. We'll have to work something out here. All right. Do you have a sturdy table?" Joe and Anne spent the next ten minutes improvising an operating room. Joe found her some old sheets, towels, two bottles of Lysol and an electric shaver. Anne set out her instruments, insisting that Joe should be masked and gowned and gloved as well. She was still just as worried about their own safety as Richie's. Joe, glancing at the swell of her abdomen, said nothing. They got Richie onto the table, stripped and covered with a sheet. Joe glanced up. "Why don't you go scrub up, or whatever, Anne? I'll call you when we're ready." Anne hesitated, looking from one of them to the other, then left. Richie turned his head. "I brought my sword. It's around here somewhere --" "I don't think Anne would like operating with a sword sticking out of your chest. Something smaller might be best." Joe brought out a small dagger. "I already sterilized it." "Oh, great!" Richie gasped. Joe looked at the young Immortal and swallowed hard. "Richie. . . " "Do you want me to do it, Joe?" Richie asked seriously. "No, I'm fine. Your hands aren't too steady. It's just . . . I hope this works." "Yeah, me too. But if it doesn't . . . if it doesn't, tell Mac --" his words trailed away. "Yeah. I know." Joe lifted the dagger. "Wait. Wait. If this doesn't work, Joe, save the body." "What?" "Save the body. If I don't revive, or we can't stop these cramps, keep my body until -- until Mac comes home. He'll know what to do." Joe hesitated. "He won't like that." "No, but it's better than . . . what happened to Darius." "I guess so." "Really, it is." Richie let his head fall back to the table. "Okay, I'm ready." Joe placed the dagger on his young friend's chest. Richie's hands twitched. "You've got to tilt it, to get between the ribs." He reached up and adjusted Joe's hand position a little. "The things a kid learns, growing up on the street," he said with a grin. Then he closed his eyes. There was no point in delay. Joe took a deep breath and thrust the dagger down with both hands. Richie's body spasmed once, then fell still. His chest sank downward with a final breath and stopped. His eyes remained closed. With shaking hands, Joe wiped the blood away from the base of the dagger wound and laid a towel over Richie's violated chest. It tented over the hilt of the dagger. Now only the site of the operation was exposed. He went to get Anne. Anne insisted that he remove his bloody gloves, scrub again, and put on fresh gloves. Then they went to the table together. Anne felt for a pulse at Richie's neck before looking at his stomach. "Look at that," she said as she lifted the electric shaver. "Definitely distended." She ran a hand clinically over the exposed stomach. "It's not gas, though. Not fat, either. I have no idea what's going on in there." She shaved and sterilized the area and poised her scalpel. Joe hovered over the tray of instruments, running over their names as Anne had told him. He didn't think anything could be more upsetting than what he had done five minutes before, but at the first incision he swallowed hard and turned his eyes away. Her first cut was tentative, almost shaky, but when the incision neither bled nor healed before her eyes Anne felt her steadiness returning. She pulled the skin back with retractors and prepared for her next incision. It was almost more like an autopsy than an operation -- or like working on a cadaver in med school, except that there was no overpowering odor of formaldehyde. As she made successive cuts through the familiar layers of fat and muscle, a different smell began to rise. Joe made a gagging noise. "Peritonitis, just like I thought," Anne said with satisfaction. "From an open bowel wound." She was anticipating an unhealed wound in the large intestine, although she couldn't begin to guess why it wouldn't have closed. She had forgotten about the swelling of the stomach, and it was a surprise when she reached the peritoneal cavity to find yards and yards of large bowel bulging outward. "Oh, my God," she whispered. "What?" Joe said weakly. "He's been growing a new large intestine. It's twice -- three times -- much longer than it should be. That must be where the lost muscle mass went." "Makes sense," Joe managed, still not looking away from the clean instruments. "But why? How do I make it stop?" Joe didn't answer. There had to be a cut somewhere, Anne realized. That smell wouldn't be coming from an intact bowel, no matter how long it was. She began to shift the masses of flesh aside, probing for something. "Forceps," she said, and lifted them from Joe's hand with a bloody glove. A moment later something thudded onto the table. "What was that?" "A bullet. A .22, I think. Any idea how long it's been in there?" Joe tried to think. "A year, year and a half, I guess." "Should I expect to find more?" "Uh, you might." Anne shook her head. "How does he get through metal detectors?" Joe grinned weakly. "How does Duncan, for that matter? He must have collected a lot of bullets in four hundred -- aha. There it is." "What?" "The cut in the bowel. But where's the other end?" She adjusted the retractors and kept searching. A few minutes later she said, "I think I know what happened." "What was it?" "When he stabbed himself, Richie bisected his large intestine. Along with probably a lot of other things in here. But when he fell, or when he moved, or pulled the sword out -- at some point, the cut ends of the large intestine got displaced from each other. Instead of healing together neatly, both ends started growing a complete new intestine. Meanwhile, the open ends were pouring out a steady supply of digestive bacteria into the peritoneum, causing infection faster than even an Immortal body could fight it. Therefore, peritonitis, stomach cramps, fever, a change in mass distribution. It explains everything." "Then why doesn't this sort of thing happen to Immortals more often?" "Maybe it does. Probably most of the time, an Immortal that receives a bad wound with a displacement like this has his head taken soon after. If not -- I suppose it might have sorted itself out eventually. The two ends would have found each other and closed, and the extra length of bowel would atrophy or be reabsorbed. Or maybe one of them would have finished growing a complete new digestive tract. Or Richie would have died from the infection and some other critical factor would have changed. In fact, this might not have happened at all if he had died when he first got the wound. Anyway, this certainly should alter the view that Immortals can get by happily for centuries without seeing a doctor." Anne's voice held a certain satisfaction. "Wait. Does this mean you know what to do?" "I'll cut away the extra length of bowel and suture the two ends together. When he revives, it should heal at once. And I can clean up some of this infection while I'm here." She went to work. The smell got much worse as Anne pulled a few things out of Richie's stomach that Joe refused to look at, and slipped them into the bag they had pinned to the side of the table. Another bullet appeared in the process. "Is this going to take much longer?" Joe asked, when it seemed to have been going on forever. "Not long. I just have to close up, now." "Don't bother. Just put everything back in place and pull the dagger out of his chest." "Hmm. Yes, I suppose that would work. Sutures would just get in the way." She began to move more quickly. A door slammed somewhere in the building. "What's that?" Anne said sharply. "Didn't you lock the door again behind me?" "I thought I did." "Joe?" called a familiar voice. "Oh, hell," Joe muttered under his breath. "What's Macleod doing here?" Anne pulled the last of her retractors away, tossed it on the dirty instrument pile, and patted the skin back in place. She reached under the towel on Richie's chest, made a quick tug, and added Joe's dagger to the pile as well. Then she moved the towel to conceal her incisions, and pulled a corner of the sheet over the incriminating bloody instruments. "Joe?" Duncan called again, closer. The door to their improvised operating room opened. "Are you in -- _Anne_? What are you doing here?" His eyes took in the strangeness of the room. "What is going on?" While he had admired the swiftness of Anne's movements, Joe hadn't helped her conceal anything. There didn't seem much point, when they were both wearing bloody gloves and gowns and surgical masks. "Emergency surgery," Anne explained calmly. "On who?" Duncan moved to see the head of the table. "Richie? What -- is he _dead_?" "He's fine, Macleod," Joe said hastily. "He should wake up in a second." With perfect timing, Richie groaned and moved his head slightly. "What the hell did you do to him?" Duncan demanded, on a rising note. "I've been pulling bullets out of him," Anne said truthfully. She turned to the patient. "Richie? How do you feel?" "Nnngh," said Richie, opened his eyes and scanning the room. "Like I just woke up from the dead." "Aside from that." He pushed himself up on one elbow, lifting the towel to look at the pink lines fading from his torso. "Tired. Thirsty. Hungry. Very hungry." Anne smiled. "You definitely lost weight this time," she said, "but the way you eat, you should gain it back in a few weeks." She turned to Duncan and began to strip off her gloves. "I want to talk to you about something, Duncan. You and I have a date with an X-ray machine. Don't worry, I won't let anyone see the copies. How many bullets are you carrying around with you, anyway?" She herded Duncan from the room. Richie looked at Joe and raised his brows. "Don't ask," Joe said. "Just get dressed. And . . . welcome back to the land of the living." =========================================================================