95: Patience
Dr. Lucius Tertullian waits for his patient to wake up. He watches as the nurses change the young man's bandages, give him hydration and painkillers and blood volume expanders through the tube in his arm, check his wounds for infection. If circumstances weren't quite so dire, Dr. Tertullian would already be drafting his journal article on the young man's case. A medical miracle. That tube, a whole new procedure. He'd be published for sure. But circumstances are dire, Dr. Tertullian isn't the only man waiting, and he's not sure how much longer he can tell the man from Romula that his lordship must be allowed to rest.
The doctor and the man from Romula are present when the patient stirs. The doctor takes a small mirror and reflects light into the patient's good eye, and his pupil contracts. He taps the patient's elbows and knees, feeling for reflexive twitches. Next he asks the patient to move his hands, flex his feet, both sides if you please. The patient complies on his right side, but his left hand and left foot barely flutter. Interesting. It must have come from the brain injury, but the trauma was to the right side of his head. Modern medicine could learn so much from this case, if only the man from Romula wouldn't rush things along.
Now for the part that the man from Romula is there for. Dr. Tertullian raises three fingers and asks the patient to please count them. There is a gleam of intelligence in the young man's eye before he passes out.
/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/
"We cannot wait, Doctor," says the man from Romula.
"And I cannot go any faster, Colonel. Have you any idea what kind of injuries we're dealing with here? I'm inventing protocol as I go, count your blessings that his lordship is even breathing," Dr. Tertullian snaps. The man from Romula has only seen the patient stable. The doctor has been elbow deep in his blood and touched his brain on that chaotic night the sky-ships came in. He can still see it. Late and the wards mostly empty, the lookouts sounding the alarm; ships coming from the north, wounded aboard. They rushed to the airfield in time to see the first come down, an ungraceful landing; the captain venting hydrogen-helium until he hovered barely a foot above the dirt, soldiers and medics leaping from the hatches to help unload. His patient was the first off, of course.
He had written the young man off as a lost cause. Stab wound to the abdomen, massive injury to the head. Right eye gone, right side of his jaw ruined, skull broken open, brain showing under all the blood when the doctor unwound the bandages. Surely a hopeless case, move on. But no. Between the ships and the hospital, they had enough personnel to handle the wounded. He would try, even though some would say this patient didn't deserve to be saved. It wasn't a doctor's place to decide who lived and died, Dr. Tertullian had thought, only help as best he could and let nature take its course.
The surgery had taken fully half a day. They had administered painkillers; it could not have been enough for what they were doing, but the patient would hardly notice any more pain - if he had brain function left at all. At every turn Dr. Tertullian thought he would fail, there was no other possible outcome, but the man pulled through. Simply remarkable.
And now this man from Romula wanted to rush the next most critical part. Who knew who the patient would be when he woke up?Dr. Tertullian had read other accounts of massive brain trauma - the Pawan miner with a steel rod in the front of his skull, the girl in Kara Kitai who took an arrow straight through her head. Both survived against all odds, but both were deeply different afterward. And what skills? Clearly the patient had lost muscle control on his left side. Could he think critically? Could he even speak?
What would someone like the patient, whose entire life had been built on physical and mental skill, do when he woke up and all of it was gone?
"I understand the severity of his lordship's injuries -"
"Then you should also know that the recovery will take months. Years, for the brain."
"-but the fact remains that the Empire is under attack now, and we need his tactical expertise more than ever."
"You realize that little or none of that tactical expertise may remain? At the moment my fingers are crossed for gross motor, maybe speech. Fighting a war, even if he's doing it from a desk, may be asking a bit much."
The man from Romula appears to hesitate, as if wondering how to phrase his next argument. "Doctor. I realize that you may think this course of action medically foolish -", he raises his hand to forestall any comments, " - but the situation in the south is much worse than the newspapers have reported. My superiors are of the opinion that any assistance his lordship could provide would be beneficial."
They are desperate, Tertullian realizes with sinking fear. He glances through the window to where his patient lies, unconscious yet again, constantly monitored by a rotation of nurses. Heavy painkillers and sedatives keep him almost comatose, and a modified neck brace immobilizes his head and jaw. Bandages cover half his face and all of his scalp and wrap around his abdomen. The great and terrifying Commander Sulla Bellorum, hovering between life and death in an intensive care ward.
The doctor is a kind man, and cannot help but pity his patient. No retirement for him, if by chance he survives, no pension, no slow recovery in the countryside. Of course not. An intelligence such as his is far too valuable. A resource, a sort of adding machine, albeit one that had to be paid. Poor man, they want a weapon, and you're not yet done.
Scipio viewed his sons as resources foremost, I don't see that changing after his death, and the Empire's in a really dire position after BOF. So it's back to work - kind of a shit deal for Sulla, though.
I like this. I'm going to continue with it.