Skillfully: D-Prime Madness (606 hits)
Category: Quotes & StoriesRating: 2 on 6 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Axolotl (View user info) at 2005-10-22 13:23:50 EDT
http://www.ubersite.com/m/77191
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SKILLFULLY
I - The Operation
Chief surgeon James Foster looked down at his patient's record. It was going to be a difficult surgery; John Maywood had a two-centimeter tumor on the side of his brain, potentially fatal.
Mr. Maywood was a football player for the Green Bay Packers, and they had only discovered the tumor after he had been concussed in a hard tackle during practice. He had been having headaches and fainting spells, and was well-aware that this type of surgery had a ten percent fatality rate.
James Foster was a capable man though. Tall and a little pudgy with receding black hair in short curls, he was a well-respected member of the medical community. Looking down his hooked nose at the record, he stepped out into the preparation room where the muscular black man was lying in a gurney, conscious and nervous. His wife was beside him, patting his hand amidst all the medical instruments and barren taupe walls.
"Mr. Maywood," Doctor Foster said in a dignified tone. "We will be beginning the operation shortly. Before you are sedated, I must ask you if you will donate your organs in the case of your death."
Maywood flinched, his face contorting. His wife smiled weakly. "Sure...I think...I think I'll do that," he said in an unnaturally high voice. His deep bantering voice had been replaced by anxious piping.
Foster thrust out the papers fro Maywood to sign, which Maywood did with a pen provided to him. As he looked over the organ donor documents, a smirk crosses momentarily over Foster's face.
"Be safe, Johnny," his wife said, embracing him for what might be the last time.
Foster looked back at the team of doctors behind him and said, "Let's get down to business then. Anesthesiologist?"
Maywood's wife was marched out of the room as the doctors wheeled the athlete into the OR. Maywood's tumor affecting his motor skills, the doctors lifted his two hundred and fifty pound body from the gurney onto the operating table.
"Due to the sensitive nature of the brain," Foster said curtly. "We will be strapping you down so that you do not accidentally move. Goodnight, Mr. Maywood."
The anesthesiologist inserted a mask over Maywood's mouth and tubes through his nose as another doctor injected a powerful sedative into his spine.
"Tell my..." Maywood began. Then he was out like a light.
"Let's get down to business then," Foster said businesslike. "Doctors, you know the risks.
There is a fair chance that the tumor in the brain could rupture and kill the man within a matter of days when we operate on it, and also there is a danger that he will not wake up from the anesthesia. Let us take care...even though I root for the Giants," he added with a sardonic smile. The other doctors smiled and put up their masks.
They prepped the patient; his head was already shaven in the area of the tumor, and they rubbed alcohol onto the patch of skin where they would be cutting. Foster placed a laser-guided drilling apparatus onto Maywood's head, using the X-rays before him to pinpoint the tumor's region.
If he cut too deep he would mangle the cerebellum, killing Maywood. And there was also a chance that he would die from the rupturing of blood vessels in his brain when they removed the tumor, never mind the skill of the doctor.
The drill began its high-pitched wail and Foster placed it into Maywood's skin. The layers of epidermis were ripped away, and bone dust began to fall from the back left of the athlete's skull. He cut a circular hole five centimeters in diameter, taking his time to make sure his patient's brain wouldn't accidentally be cut by the tip of the sharp drill.
"Forceps, Nurse Alyssa," Foster said. Nurse Alyssa handed him the tongs to take out the piece of skull now blossoming blood down Maywood's unconscious head. Alyssa dabbed at the flow as Foster clasped the section of skull and pulled it out carefully and slowly.
Now the cancerous part of Maywood's brain was laid bare; the tumor was just beneath the surface, wedged between the skull and cerebellum. Foster and another doctor probed around, the blinding lights focused intensely on the hole. The pink, watery brain of Maywood had a bruise on it from the concussion that had alerted the doctors to the tumor.
"Just here," Foster said, probing deeper into Maywood's brain. A half-hour had passed since the initial cut was made and there had been little progress. "There, I found it."
Foster pulled away a part of the brain to reveal the pulsating tumor, blood vessels feeding into the swollen mass of cancerous lesions.
"Moment of truth," Foster whispered. This would be where they would know if the operation would end in life or death. If they cut into the tumor and Maywood began bleeding profusely, all hope was lost. The chances were though that Maywood would survive.
Foster made the incision on the edge of the tumor, skillfully moving his scalpel past the arteries giving succor to the malign growth. Part of the tumor rose away from the pink-grey matter that formed the essence of all that made Maywood what he was, the seat of all his personality and body functions.
"I think we have it," Foster said. His doctors sighed, relieved.
The cut was small, but the artery was big.
The blood rushed out in a steady stream from the pierced tumor. Foster grunted and staunched the flow with a light sponge, but the fluid seeped further out.
"Nurse Alyssa, we need the suction," Foster said, growing anxious.
Alyssa put a small vacuum against the tumor to drain the blood, but she jabbed it into the tumor itself by accident and made the hole a little wider.
"No—"
The blood poured through the brain, essentially a man-made aneurysm. Foster and the other
doctors tried all they could, but they could not stop the flow of blood. Maywood flatlined at 7:22 PM. The doctors pronounced him dead at that time.
"Damn..." said Doctor Adams.
"Might as well take his heart out, he signed the papers," Foster said unsympathetically. The doctors and nurses looked at him quizzically, but they proceeded with the next part of the protocol. It was highly abnormal for the organs to be taken so soon after demise.
"If you must know," Foster said in some irritation at the hostile stares he was getting. "I know of someone who needs a heart badly."
The doctors sawed open his sternum and removed his once-beating heart, skillfully cutting it out of his chest and placing it into a cooler. Foster smiled.
It was all going so well. He now had everything he needed—brains, heart, liver, lungs. The heart was the final piece, and he now had one.
II - The Creation
James Foster as a child liked the story of Frankenstein. He mostly was intrigued by the concept of the creation of life from nothingness. He also admired Yahweh in the Book of Genesis, creating an entire world with just a command, and populating it with beings of his own design and creation.
As he could not create life, he chose as his profession the next best thing: saving lives. He decided to study medicine at Princeton and graduated 3rd in his class, going on to become one of the most respected brain surgeons of the East Coast.
Foster inherited a large mansion when his parents died, as well as millions of dollars in
stock and bonds, most of which was invested in a laboratory beneath his cavernous house. Inside that laboratory was an array of medical instruments, all centered around a body lying on a table in the center of the room.
The body was created from all different body parts. Fascinated with creating life of his own, Foster stole life from others. For six years, every few patients he operated on he would kill. His respect went a little down in the medical community, but he always got the organs and bones he needed. Piecing them together, he killed others to make his own life.
"My heart," he crooned, stroking the sealed plastic container where John Maywood's heart lay. Just a few tests needed to be done to see if the body would cooperate with the heart. He had studied so much, more than anyone else in the field of reanimation. He knew things no one else did. He could make life, if he had all the right materials.
Sitting in the deserted OR, from where Maywood's body had been taken off to the morgue
just hours before, Foster prepared to pack up his heart and equipment.
"Doctor?" asked a familiar voice. Foster froze; it was Nurse Alyssa.
"Yes?"
"What are you still doing here?" Alyssa asked, walking into the OR. Foster unzipped his rucksack and gripped a bottle of chloroform.
"Why, my dear, I could ask you the very same question," Foster replied hesitantly. Alyssa stepped a little closer.
"Is...is that Maywood's heart?" she asked, pointing at the container. "Is that...?"
"No, just some lunch meat," Foster answered, coming up quickly with an answer. "Here, have a look."
Alyssa stepped over to the container and looked down at it, her blond locks touching her face. She snapped open the clasps and popped the seal apart.
Inside was a human heart.
Foster grabbed her from behind and forced the bottle of chloroform into her face, sticking the bottle under her nose. He twisted her wrists with one hand, the bottle in the other. She screamed, but Foster brought his arm up into her throat, and she fell silent.
"There, there," Foster sighed. "We can never have too many organs, I suppose,"
Alyssa slumped to the floor. Removing a vial of strychnine, Foster mechanically attached a syringe to it and stuck the needle into Alyssa's jugular. She twitched, and batted her eyes.
Lifting Alyssa up, Foster strapped her down onto a gurney and covering her with a white cloth, wheeled her out of the hospital. There was no one there as witnesses but a few oblivious janitors and deliverymen. Alyssa was dead from the poison before she got to Foster's car.
At the mansion laboratory Foster carted in the body of Alyssa, balancing the heart on top
of her chest. From the garage a passageway led down a sloping floor toward the lower levels of the damned chambers of creation.
The body was a grim sight to look at. All sewn together, with different-sized hands and legs, it looked like the work of a deity with only a slight knowledge of what a human looked like. The face was gruesome, with two different eyes, a cheekbone taken from an African-American but all the rest of the face white. Long lines of stitches and scars wound meanderingly across his face. His genitals were sewn on and unfunctioning. The cavity in his chest and abdomen was open and preparing to accept the heart.
Foster settled in for long hours of work. Placing Alyssa in the fridge if he needed her, Foster began to sew the heart into the body. He had a very high knowledge of what he was doing, and a high level of skill.
Skill was necessary to connect all the tubes and valves to one another. It was nothing more than a giant jigsaw puzzle, skillfully created by a Creator, and one that would skillfully be charged into an imitation of life.
Out of all things, the brain had never died. Taken from a middle-aged smoking man who died of lung cancer, it had always been kept in an optimal condition and permanently attached to electrodes which ran a constant current through the brain. There were other brains in the fridge and in storage should the first brain fail.
At three o'clock in the morning the final stitches were pulled into place, and the chest was closed up for good. The body was ready.
"All right, Frank," Foster said, his body trembling in excitement. "Let's see how this goes."
Injecting a stimulant into "Frank's" brain, Foster began running the machines and processes that had took so long to create. The blood of a heart-attack victim began running through Frank's veins, pumped by an external machine. The electric stimulus of the brain was notched up, and from a mask over his face, oxygen flooded the system, and was pumped out as soon as it entered the useless, dead lungs.
Foster strapped a crown-like device around Frank's head, and electrodes over his heart and lungs, placing probes and instruments of conductivity all over his body. Three generators hummed loudly in the corner of the room. Energy was coursing everywhere, channeled from the local nuclear power plant. All that was needed was to throw the switch.
Foster looked down at his marvelous creation and laughed. It was all ready. All the tests, the years and years of labor, it all boiled down to this one point. He grasped the switch and pulled it down, sending thousands of volts coursing through Frank's body.
Frank's body jumped and his eyes shot open; involuntary reactions caused by the brain stimuli, no doubt. Foster gave a higher burst of electricity, and Frank's arms and legs waved wildly in all directions.
Foster set the power to the maximum level, giving short staccato energy bursts. Frank was
shaking and convulsing on the table, his heart beating wildly from the electricity, and his brain readouts going off the charts on the computer screen before Foster.
The energy flow stopped. Foster disconnected the switch and looked down at his creation.
A low moan escaped Frank's lips. He moved an arm up painfully, the muscles congealed and desiccated from months of disuse and death. His eyes glanced around. Was this really it? Was this just involuntary electricity reactions, or was it reanimated life? Did a zombie just awake on the table?
"W...w...w..." Frank moaned. "W...weh ah aye? Wehr ah...ahm I? Where am I?"
"It's alive," Foster cried, pounding his desk in joy. "Finally! It's alive, it's alive!"
III - The Cremation
"What is this?" whispered Frank, his voice scratchy and low.
"You are alive!" repeated Foster, maniacally pressing his fingers into Frank's newly-sewn chest. Frank screamed, a torrent of oxygen searing his lungs. On his lumpy, scarred chest was the thumping of his electrically-charged heart pulsing out of his body.
Foster checked the body system readout on his computer. The heart was beating too fast, the brain was going crazy, and most major organs were convulsing or palpitating with the new blood flow...but Frank was alive.
Frank felt as though he had woken up from an evil nightmare. He had been with his family in the hospital, dying from smoker's lung...his last few memories were of coughing up his organs, and going into a deep slumber, but now he was awake and it felt as though his lung was even worse.
Every inch of his body burned agonizingly in pain, from his aching brain through his rapidly palpitating heart down through his twisted, mangled intestines to his legs, where coagulated muscles hung limply from his searing shin bones. In his last life he had never felt so much pain, and it was impossible to get a grip on where or who he was.
"Frank," Foster said. "You have been reincarnated, given a new chance at life in a new body."
"No..." Frank groaned, lifting his weak arm over his naked and cut chest.
"Look at yourself!"
Foster pressed a button on the side of Frank's bed, raising his head and upper torso with a hydraulic pump. Opening his rolling and bloodshot eyes, Frank was dazzled by color and light, his retinas burned by the new found glory of the world as he had known it.
Beneath his head was a torn and ripped carcass of a body, naked and slashed abominably. His skin was different colors and in different sections, as though he had been put together by a child and his jigsaw puzzle.
"You died as Michael Brown June 3rd, 2004," Foster said. "Today, October 22nd, 2005, you have been brought back to life by me, and you are now Frank, or Frankenstein. I have done this. I have created your life, and maintained your brain and mind. I am Yahweh, giver of life. You should bow down on bended knee before me and thank me, worship me for this precious gift, this second chance at life I have blessed you with."
"Kill me..." muttered Frank.
"Get up, Frank," Foster ordered coldly. His pleasured success would need cooperation from the subject. "Your muscles have not been used in a long time, they will be sore."
Frank got into a sitting position, his patchwork face contorted in pain. He was ugly beyond all belief, his misshapen head a deformed mass of flesh out of which two different-colored eyes popped, and wherein a gash formed what was left of his mouth.
"Sore...isn't the word for...it," Frank moaned.
Frank shook violently, his breathing labored. His heard was thudding wildly; Foster turned down the electrical current acting like a pacemaker.
"You are a first, Frank," Foster said, caressing his patient's face. "No human has been clinically dead longer than two minutes before being defibrillated. Not unless you believe the story of Lazarus."
"Mmmh..." Frank grunted, his slit of a mouth twisting into a frown.
"The rabbi's daughter died of a fever, and the rabbi called Jesus to save her," Foster said softly in Frank's battered ear. "While he was there, a woman touched Jesus and was healed. Jesus asked, 'who touched me?' and saw the woman standing there, and told her that her faith had saved her. Then looking upon the young girl, the rabbi's daughter, Jesus said, 'Talitha koum.' He said 'Little girl, wake up!' And she woke up from the dead. Gospel of Luke, Chapter 8, verse 41-56."
Frank twitched, barely comprehending the words.
"I have raised you from the dead like Jesus, like he raised Lazarus after three days, and the young girl, and himself."
"Breathe..." Frank murmured.
"You need to breathe?" Foster asked in concern. Frank nodded numbly, his body in shock
from the newness of the world.
"All right," Foster replied, turning up the level on the oxygen tank, and also adding a
small portion of nitrous oxide to Frank's air. The mask over Frank's ravaged face let flow life into his lungs, and Frank closed his eyes in fatigue.
As he closed his eyes, his heart stopped beating. It dropped from the rapid pace of a rabbit to nothing at all. Foster swore and raised the level of electricity high once more.
Frank's eyes shot open and his heart began beating madly, the electrodes glowing in heat as they delivered amplified power into his chest. Frank roared as he tore the electrodes out of his chest, aided by a newly-rebooted adrenaline gland. Throwing them down onto the bloody paper towels below him, he climbed off of the bed and put his feet on the floor.
He immediately collapsed, and the electrodes fell onto the paper, igniting it.
"No!" Foster said. He couldn't throw water over an electrical fire, but he turned off the power level, putting it on the lowest level.
Frank glanced up at his creator, and for the second time, died.
"You won't die!" Foster shrieked, turning the power of the electrodes back up high again. He twisted the dial to the highest energy level and broke off the switch. "Not after this! Not after all this!"
The fire blazed on the floor, spreading onto Frank's body and near the tanks of oxygen. Foster's eyes widened in realization of what he had done.
The oxygen tanks exploded like small bombs, blasting away the computer, generators and medical equipment. Foster turned his face at the last second, but was blown off of his feet and into the opposite wall.
The fire was spreading now. Blazing all around him was glowing flame, rising up the walls and consuming the operating table.
The supporting timbers for the basement began to catch fire. The thirty-million dollar mansion was undermined by the illegal basement lab, Foster knew. When the supports went, the entire house would fall through the floor and onto him.
The pillars began to crack and splinter, the concrete-reinforced wood pylons burning brightly, illuminating the entire room.
"I wanted to create life," Foster tried to say through his seared mouth.
The foundation gave way to the fire, and the mansion on the hill plunged down through the basement, the ceiling coming crashing down onto Doctor James Foster. The house collapsed in a caldron of smoke and destruction, as though God himself had smote the mansion with his mighty finger, alighting the very foundations of the house of evil.
Three bodies were recovered the next day from the rubble. One was James Foster, judging by dental records, and another was Alyssa Herrick. The third body was so consumed and blasted by the flames, that it was unidentifiable. All official records had perished in the fire, and the police informed the city of the tragedy: the doctor, a young nurse, presumably his lover, and an unidentified third person had all died in an accidental fire at the mansion when the pillars gave out and the house collapsed.
The truth would never be known or told. It was probably better that way.
User Reviews
Submitted by gAGGLE (user info) at 2005-10-23 21:08:39 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
VERY WELL WRITTEN
Submitted by simple_catalyst (user info) at 2005-10-23 20:47:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
you, sir, are an excellent writer.
Submitted by d_prime (user info) at 2005-10-22 16:00:04 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I *will* continue with DPM, and gak's isn't real, but go ahead and be in it anyway.
Joe, I responded to you in the post youg ave me a -2 on. I apoligize and would like it if you joined again.
Submitted by ghola (user info) at 2005-10-22 15:54:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
i'm so tired- i can't believe i read all that.
Submitted by d_prime (user info) at 2005-10-22 15:53:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
People are going to start getting confused.
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2005-10-22 13:51:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
nicely done