Quote:
Follows a shadow to stalk fire.
This is going to be a lot of trial and error, they told him. Faustite didn't understand what that meant when he said okay.
Over the following days, he slowly began to learn what that meant. It meant needles warping in his arm when inserted into his vein, or IV tubes melting, or blood tests being thrown out because their instruments couldn't parse viable results from the atramentous substance. It meant halting a chest x-ray because the lead pad had started smoking before they could ready the film. It meant recalibrating an MRI machine to function with heat-resistant metal and foregoing contrast dye when it immediately denatured in his body.
It meant delays. More delays. Delays on delays on delays.
It meant more pain than he wanted to tolerate, more anguish in waiting for results. More frustration when those results were thrown out and retested.
Then the tests themselves changed. They needed more blood. They needed him to burn his glamour time for viable samples. They needed biopsies from his youma form. They stopped explaining what they were doing and why they were doing it, and Faustite stopped asking. There wasn't any point; he wouldn't understand them anyway.
He had only to keep going. Visiting medical became part of his routine.
Then, after what felt like ages of pissing away his blood, tissue, and effort, medical began to respond with results. Blood serum tests returned with results, biopsies had been tested, and various samples had been cultured. Faustite couldn't say how many milimoles of sodium was supposed to be floating around in his extracellular space, but he could understand within normal limits. He could tell that there was nothing abnormal to find if the lab results came back without being flagged.
Sometimes, helpfully, one of their attendings included a short note with an interpretation of the results, written in a language that wasn't so esoteric and incomprehensible to him. Confirmations that he didn't have cancer, or tuberculosis, or an upper respiratory infection, or a lower respiratory infection. No Pseudomonas. No H. pylori. MRSA couldn't live on his skin, nor could Staphylococcus aureus, so all those cultures came back as barren and sterile as the labs that ran them.
He received endless descriptions of how his body worked. Graphs with little peaks and valleys that told him how his heart kept him alive, broken down into a handful of sections. Numbers with abbreviations that meant his kidneys and liver were working appropriately, though last he checked, he didn't have any. He had numbers for how much plaque was in his arteries, for how big his red blood cells were, or how many there were, or how old they were. He had information on his immune system that he understood just as poorly as the rest.
They were all meaningless numbers. They were all interpreted with the caveat of if you were human.
If you were human, your heart is in excellent shape.
If you were human, you should cut back on eggs and shellfish.
If you were human, your lung function tests came back normal.
If he was human, they wouldn't have found anything wrong with him. That much he understood. But he wasn't human, and that was where all their knowledge and training and tests and instruments and protocols and procedures and diagnoses all fell short. When he asked them, what about my youma side, they could only shrug and admit their ignorance. There were no case studies on fire youma, no randomized controlled trials, no meta-analyses, no retrospective studies. No one knew what lab values mattered to a fire youma. No one knew how to treat one.
Eventually, the number of tests dwindled. His hours spent in medical decreased. Faustite went from showing up every day to every other day, to once a week, to being told that there were no more tests to run. By then, they had an encyclopedia of information on Eion Risk, and all of it told them that he was a healthy young adult. Whatever was wrong with him, it wasn't his human side.
It wasn't his starseed, either. Faustite was left with just as many answers as when he started. He asked for a second opinion.
All those results — all the blood tests, the scans, the labs, the biopsies, the assays — they were all sent back to Bloodstone as a consulting physician. Trauma was clearly done to the body, so the trauma surgeon was their most credible option. Faustite had but to wait until a clinical judgment was made.
If a clinical judgment was made.
