The hefty nurse who came to check on Egon an hour later that morning expected to find him in a semi-coma, not staring down at a reverse engineered phone, parts laid out neatly on the covers in the order of disassembly, a blackened half melted wall cord laid out like a dead snake beside a neatly coiled nasal tube and a pile of used dressings. Janine must not have told the nurse at the desk that he was awake on her way out.
Maintaining her composure, the large woman alerted the physician on duty – and Egon spent the rest of the morning discovering a few things about himself:
That the electric charge which had fried his PKE meter, blown him half out of his clothes, and rendered his glasses a twisted mess, should have killed him, but didn't.
That the second degree burns on his hands and feet in the shape of an "8" were rapidly healing, despite the itching, blistering, and peeling... and that picking at it was not a good idea, and
That thanks to the charge he took, Egon now had an interesting second degree burn pattern, like the rhizoids of his favorite pathogenic fungi, adorning his upper torso, shoulders, arms, and back. Regrettably, these fractal scars, which he found fascinating, would fade in time, but hopefully not before he could show them to Janine; though judging how she acted around him lately, this wasn't likely to happen for a while– so he asked the x-ray technician to send copies of the documentary photographs to the fire station back in New York for framing just in case Janine ever changed her mind. These too, itched, blistered, and peeled maddeningly.
A fourth thing Egon learned about himself was that it was better to administer a radioactive iodine I.V. to a research subject prior to a full body CT scan than to BE the research subject; particularly when he had the flu. Shivering and miserable, hot and cold as well as wet and dry all at the same time on the flatbed, which seemed to be rocking like a boat in rough water as the room circled, the interesting experience of GETTING a CT scan had been considerably diminished when he vomited over the side, delaying the experience until the mess could be cleaned up.
And of course the whole experience was rendered worse when Egon then learned that the entire gang, including Janine, had been in the in the little waiting area outside of Radiology and had heard the whole debacle.
But the fifth thing Egon realized about himself happened while going through the CT scan, post-gastro-intestinal upheaval was, that he had been attacked by a second entity, one that had come right at him out of nowhere, shoving him back so that most of the charge presumably dispersed harmlessly into the structure of the bridge as he blacked out out; a shove along while a woman screamed, "Ah-nee-yo anni!"
What reminded him was the Korean radiology intern administering the IV. He had asked her if he could have copies of the scans; she had said, "Ah-nee-yo anni… sorry, I forget, I mean, no, I can't do that without your doctor's permission."
Egon had lay on the motorized examination table while the CT scanner clanked and whirred around him, wondering why a ghost in Cleveland would be screaming at him in Korean, one of the few languages he just knew enough of to be able to avoid ordering kim-chi, which always gave him a headache.