Crossover Fan Fiction / Neon Genesis Evangelion Fan Fiction / Tenchi Muyo Fan Fiction ❯ Reason And Accountability ❯ Long Term Care Ward ( Chapter 28 )

TWENTY-SEVEN

I woke up with a sore neck to darkness filled with beeping. I am a nurse. I have several patients in the long term care ward on respirators. Five of them have working battery backups and I can hear the diesel generator starting. The sixth one is going to die in around 110 seconds. I rushed to their bed under the emergency lights to find my patient struggling to breathe. Her ventilator is down and power won’t be able to cycle the system fast enough to save her. I disconnect it and start Heal Other going. She’s still choking on tubes and vomits. I pull the hoses out, noting the VR headset the patient is wearing. Very high end. This is a scifi world, even if it’s Earth. I get the hose out of her throat and vacuum out the vomit using the CPR cart tools. She starts breathing, but is clearly paralyzed. Heal Other finds her spinal cord is receiving poor signals from the brain associated with the car crash that killed her parents and left her a quadraplegic. Cure Disease starts that healing, then back to Heal Other to cure all the various damage in her body. Her organs had started to fail and there’s all kids of fatigue poisons in her tissues from the delay and from years of being confined in a bed. I cure a bunch of bed sores and scars from operations and incorrectly healed bones from the crash. There’s a lot of damage, including burn scars and scars from compound fractures.

Her first name is Keina. I removed the VR headset exposing her eyes. She looks around, surprised. She is unable to speak after years of having a tube down her throat. I fill a squeeze bottle and bring her water. She swallows very small amounts. I am careful, continuing to apply healing around her body, and to the muscles of her high degraded voice box.

“Dark?” she finally says.

“We had a blackout. Your respirator failed. I just barely saved you,” I explained, leaving out the magic. The lights came on, finally, from the generators restoring power to the building.

“Others?” she asked.

“Have some more water. It’s been months since you last spoke or breathed on your own,” I pointed out. She reached for it, then was surprised, lifting her hand to stare at herself. She was in poor shape, and would need a lot of physical therapy, but I’d cured her. A pointless death prevented. Most people who go on respirators, die on them.

“I was in Leadale. My game. It was strange. 200 years had gone by and I had kids and grandkids and I was really strong and healthy,” she said.

“That’s some dream. Isn’t Leadale that game you like?” I asked her, pointing to the network console beside her bed. Most of the patients in this hospital have some degree of movement limitation. Some come for Exoskeleton suit tuning. Others are stuck in beds and get nurses to visit them at home, and still others are like Kagami Keina, dying by inches and immersed in VR as us long term care nurses tended to their bodies.

“Yes, a game. In the dream they all seemed like real people,” she said.

“Can you wiggle your toes for me?” I asked her. She did, very slightly. I cast more healing and restoration magic on her nerves, circulation system, and degraded muscles.

“Good. It seems you’re making a strong recovery. Your doctor prescribed an experimental drug that is supposed to sometimes reverse the effects of nerve degeneration and another that is known to promote growth in separated nerves. You might be one of the lucky ones,” I lied. Keina wriggled her fingers. “But you’re going to need a lot of physical therapy to walk again. You’re out of shape.”

“It’s been four years confined to this bed. I haven’t felt this much in a long time,” she admitted. I started making notes on her file, requesting confirmation tests and examination by the attending physician in the morning.

The lights beyond the windows down on the street and across the city came back on. The roof generators shut off after a moment and the hospital systems switched on, one after another. I shut off the alarms for the various systems Keina would never need again. She was cured, even if she didn’t know it. Even her kidneys were healed, and her brain had recovered from the massive damage the car crash had done to her.

I spent a bit longer with her before exiting the private room and going down the ward, healing several MLS patients and another two quadriplegics. They would wake up eventually, and then to the cancer ward, and the leukemia ward for children. This was exhausting.

The sun was coming up and I was struggling to stay awake as my mana bottomed out in this body. I yawned. I sank into a chair and passed out. I hope Nurse Yamaguchi doesn’t get in trouble. They might be more interested in all the suddenly healed patients.