Just A Prank

Just A Prank
By Abbacor


            The alarm went off at 9 AM as scheduled, and I shut if off with a small groan. I’ve never been a morning person, morning being defined as any time before noon. But in this world it’s rare for a student to be able to obtain a schedule that worked for someone such as myself. My classes had actually ended for the semester last week and the summer break, or semester for those who would take it, was coming up. I am planning on taking the break and relax before the fall semester came around. Not being one who is financially set (but not struggling either) I was in need of a job of some type to earn some extra pocket money. I had actually found one that would start today, Monday, and last for a month. The job would pay a nice bit of money that I could then stretch out for a month of relaxing. After that I could get something else for the third month or so until my fall semester and classes started back up again.

          Since you’ve politely listened so far, it would only be polite to introduce myself. My name is Patricia Jackson. I’m 20 years old, and petite is a term used to describe me quite often. I’m about 4’ 10” and 95 lbs. with a slight build. I’ve got a nice modest 30B-28-32 body that tends towards athletic if I work at it, which I admit I don’t do as often as I should. I’m definitely ‘feminine’ but I’m no runway model with “huge tracks of land”. Yea, ok, I look like a kid just starting puberty if I’m not careful, and I can (and still do) shop in the Misses department as those clothes usually fit me better. I’m still young enough though I don’t have to worry too much about getting fat as long as I generally eat healthy which is something I do watch regularly. My eyes are listed as Hazel, but you can see a mix of grey, green, and brown with light gold flecks in them if you look. I have straight long light-brown hair, and when I say long I mean down to my butt long. It’s my major vanity and I take good care of it. I’m a second year student at a small business college in upper-state New York at which I am taking courses in business accounting. Nothing truly glamorous to be honest, but if I can manage to graduate in the top portion of my class I could get a nice job with practically any company. I work hard and study my butt off, and so far my grades are right on track for where I want them to be.

          Enough about me. What is this great temp job you say? I’m going to be a ‘Volunteer Patient’ at a teaching hospital down the road from my school. And I need to be at the school by 11 AM. I got out of bed and got ready for the day. I showered and washed my hair as part of my daily morning ritual to keep it clean and soft. I use what I like to call my ‘special mix’ shampoo which is really just two readily available shampoos and a conditioner that I mix together into a single usable batch that lasts me several months until I run out and have to go buy more and mix it together again. Since I wasn’t sure what I’d be asked to do today I decided to keep the makeup to a minimum (I prefer the more natural look most of the time as it is anyways) and put my hair into a simple loose braid to keep it out of the way. I looked over my clothing selections and went with plain tan matching cotton panties and bra, light green Capri pants and a matching loose blouse, and finally some flat sandals for my feet.

I hopped into my car right at 10, giving myself a good hour for what should be only a 30 minute drive but traffic could possibly make it twice as long. It turned out to be a good thing I gave myself the extra time as I arrived with only 15 minutes to find a place to park and get to where I was supposed to be. I walked in and found the office I needed to be at about 7 minutes before 11 AM. I introduced myself to the man at the desk and found out that the next hour or so would be spent filling in the usual paperwork for a job as well as a general physical. After that I and the other three volunteers would be given about a half hour for lunch then we’d be meeting the students and staff. I doubt you want to go into the details of boring paperwork, and a physical is a physical where-ever you go. Suffice it to say I’m in good health.

I suppose you’d like to know a little bit about the other volunteers? As noted there are four of us total; myself and another female, and two guys. We found out they like to keep the male/female ratio even at 1:1 to give the medical students a fair selection of differing physical makeup’s to see and work with.

Of the four of us, I’m obviously the smallest. The other girl’s name is Jamie, and she is around 6’ even in flats, and has a much more curvaceous figure. Personally, I’m not entirely sure those melons on her chest are real, but to each their own. Jim and Allan are the two guys, and they are as noticeably different from each other as Jamie and I. Jim is the smaller of the two, and fits the “geek” stereo-type fairly well. You know; 5’ 9”, wears glasses, is a bit pudgy from sitting in front of a computer too much, and is a little awkward with the ladies. Allan is much more of the athlete type. He’s 6’ 6” and very trim. He works out at the gym, and is a marathon bicycler. A pretty good cross section of human builds if you ask me. Thankfully there are no abrasive personalities among us (or worse, snobs); and while none of us have just found our “soul mate” here we all easily got along with each other from the start. We all chose to go to the cafeteria in the hospital together and got to know each other a little bit before we had to be back at 1 o’clock in the class room.

          At this point I guess I should explain what I know about the job we’re going to be doing. As I said, we’ll all be ‘Volunteer Patients’. The students in question here are 4^th year orthopedic doctors and just starting their first year of residency. They won’t be handling any real patients personally just yet; they’re still observing and at best assisting the doctors after answering questions about the cases presented by the real patients. So, we four get to be their hands-on patients to get some practical experience with.
The area of studies they will be “treating” us for will be some advanced casting and bracing procedures beyond the simple single arm or leg casts and braces that is the majority of what patients tend to need. From what we’ve been told this will include practical experience applying “spica” casts and/or braces for one or more arms or legs and any combination there of. It will also include the application of more extensive cervical casts and braces as well, all the way up to the use of a halo. We have been assured the pins will not actually be drilled into our skulls, but instead they will use the positioning screws which have flat tips that socket into small shallow rubber “cups” that press against the head in place of the real skull pins. In fact, we have been assured that nothing needing to be cut drilled screwed or otherwise attached directly into our bodies will be used. With signed permission a few less invasive items such as a catheter or endotracheal tube might be used by one of the teaching staff to show the students how it is done on a real person instead of the dummy used for training in their earlier classes.
Obviously, being shy about exposing our bodies to the doctors, students, or even each other would not work very well for this job considering what we are here for; and we all admitted we had signed the extra permission allowing the doctors to insert the catheter or endo-tube. That permission, if used, will also give the individual it was performed on a per-occurrence bonus on their pay-check of about $150.00 each time it was done. One other note is that due to my size I had been asked if I would mind being a pediatric level patient to present the class with a couple of scenarios they would not normally see and I had agreed.

          We were all sitting in a small office off the side of the classroom by 1 PM, and the class got underway by about 1:10. We were walked in and introduced to the class of 8 student doctors. I waved to Steven and Donald as I walked in and took my place off to the side with the others while the head of the teaching staff introduced us as their “practical experience patients”.
Oh, did I forget to mention that I know two of the resident students personally? Well, I do. They are Steven Franklin and Donald Wellington, both keeping up the family tradition of having at least one doctor in their respective families. In fact it was those two who told me of this month-long temp job, and they even pulled a string or two to get me a spot. I’ve known Steve and Don since junior high school, although they were two years ahead of me. We met in drama class and got along quite well with each other. We hung around with about 5 other kids of mixed ages and when the two of them graduated we kept up with each other by phone and e-mail. So now you know about my ‘bud’s’ and how I got the job.


          Chapter 2

Well, the month is almost over now. It’s been interesting to say the least. I’ve been in numerous casts and braces over the last few weeks, none of them small. For casts I’ve had both legs immobilized several times in either a dual hip spica that went from my toes to my arm-pits, or from my toes up to my crotch on both legs with two bars running between the casts connecting them in what they called a Perthes Cast that they said was for hip displacement problems I think. That one was a bit uncomfortable because after they casted my legs they turned them so my toes were pointed down and in then spread my legs really wide before adding in the connecting bars to hold my legs in that position. I’ve had both arms immobilized in a single cast called a dual shoulder cast so I couldn’t move anything all the way out to my finger tips. Then there were the casts that immobilized one side of my body. For example they put my right leg and arm and my entire torso in one big cast, or the weird cast that covered my LEFT leg up over my torso then out to the end of my RIGHT arm. And speaking of weird, they did this one cast on both arms that went from my knuckles up to the arm-pit on both arms then they added in a bar going between both arms. Not only could I not move my wrists or elbows, suddenly my arms were locked in a position relative to each other and I couldn’t twist my shoulders at all. The most I could do was raise or lower both arms at the same time up to the point where the cross bar would hit my forehead or come down against my body. There was no way to get my hands anywhere near the rest of my body.

As for the braces I’ve been put in, there have been many. I’ve had a halo brace put on me, thankfully WITHOUT the pins being screwed into my head. Both arms have had rigid and hinged braces fabricated for them, as well as my legs. One brace they made was a rigid splint that covered my right thigh and up to the bottom of my ribs around my torso. Let’s see, they made and put me into a rigid body brace that included my head. Oh, and they made a brace with hinges that would lock when straightened out that covered my feet legs hips and right on up my chest where it stopped at the level of my shoulders. That one was really hard to get around in once they had me in it and all the hinges locked out. I’ve even let them put a catheter in me a couple times and a tube down my throat once. It was uncomfortable, but I can’t say no to the $450 it got me for doing it those three times.

And all that gets us back to today. I’ve arrived early to be the volunteer for what I’ve been told should be my last patient session with the class. Apparently earlier in the week Doctor Henry, the head of Orthopedics here and their primary teacher, told the class that he wanted them to come up with a patient chart and fill it out for him to review. If the chart was done accurately, not only filling out the appropriate areas on the chart correctly but with injuries and treatments that were consistent, then he would sign off on the chart and the class would handle it like a real patient scenario and ‘treat’ one of the volunteers as the chart indicated as if they had been brought in to the emergency room with the listed injuries. It seems that my two friends, Don and Steve, convinced the others in the class that their patient should be a young teenager who had been caught in a recent five-story building collapse that really happened last week. Thankfully nobody had been seriously injured in the actual damage that happened, but in the mock scenario the class worked up their patient was going to be seriously injured. I should say I was going to be seriously injured since those two goofs had convinced the others to be treating a 13-year old, which left only ME as the one who could fit the patient slot. I didn’t mind though as I’d been having fun with all the things they’d been doing so far and this was to be their last big hands-on class if they got the chart right. Which it turns out they did.

Steven and Donald told me the story and injuries they cooked up the night before, and boy did they mess me up. A group of kids were playing around in the abandoned and condemned building that had collapsed last week, and I had been on the third floor when it started to fall. The cause of the resulting injuries would have happened due to both falling almost two floors and having another two floors worth of rubble come down on top of me so I had suffered both impact and crushing injuries. Since this was an orthopedics class they would only be ‘treating’ me for the broken bones I suffered, but the chart had been filled in to include several soft tissue and organ injuries to make it accurate which they thought would be the way to go to get Doc Henry to sign off on it. I had been listed as breaking both calcaneus, or heels, from the fall and several metatarsals and phalanx, those are the bones in the feet and toes, from a large piece of concrete coming down on my feet. The fall broke both bones in my left leg, the tibia and fibula, and the tibia in the right leg. A falling beam landed across my thighs breaking both femurs. The hard landing from the fall dislocated both hips which threw me backwards so that I hit my head on more broken concrete hard enough to break my neck and give me a concussion. I had apparently tried to protect my head and body from the rest of the falling rubble with my arms but was only partially successful. My right elbow was dislocated, the humerus, or upper arm bone, snapped in two, and the right shoulder dislocated when a large chunk of the 4^th floor came down on me at an angle. The left arm had the radius and ulna, the bones in the forearm, broken when a door hit my arm followed by another large piece of concrete that broke the top of the left humerus and shoulder socket when it smashed down on my shoulder. The initial impacts to my arms happened so close together that my arms were forced up over my head and pinned down by the debris leaving my hands vulnerable and exposed when more broken chunks of the building came down and crushed both hands, breaking multiple metacarpals and phalanges, or the bones in the hands and fingers, as well as both wrists. My arms taking the brunt of the damage did mostly protect my chest and I only had about seven or eight cracked ribs, but that would cause difficulty breathing for a while. The soft tissue injuries were primarily in the lower torso from some ‘relatively’ smaller debris come down and hitting my abdomen causing severe bruising to the muscles and internal organs.

So here I am sitting off to the side as Doctor Henry is looking over the chart the class has made up.

“Well, it’s within the realm of possibility I suppose. How do you explain the fact that there won’t be any surgery for this patient?”

“We had discussed that several times Doctor. We based our decision on several of the real injuries we’ve seen while on rounds over the past several months. There have been quite a few patients whom, from the description of their accident, you would think their injuries would be much worse. Yet after diagnosis and imaging a non-surgical approach was the prescribed method of treatment. We feel that the human body is much more resilient than it would seem and in times of extreme physical duress is able to withstand much more than the average person might think. Therefore, while there have been quite a few injuries to quite a few bones through-out the body, the various fractures are minimally displaced at the worst and can be re-aligned through external manipulation. Also, it was brought up, and a general consensus was agreed upon, that with the amount of trauma that has occurred to our patient going with a non-surgical treatment regime would be better so as to not cause further stress to an already badly injured body.”

“I see.” The doctor looked the chart over for a few more minutes in contemplation then pulled out his pen. “Very well, I approve. You are correct that the human body can do amazing things in times of great duress; often times people will walk away from circumstances that quite possibly should have killed them. And trying to not further stress the body with more damage by not cutting it open in surgery is commendable. If something doesn’t work out then surgery can always be utilized at a later date when some of the existing damage has had time to heal there-by reducing the stress on the system.” And with that he signed the chart in the appropriate spots just as if it was a real patient’s chart.

“Patricia, did you wear clothing you don’t mind being ruined like I suggested?”

“Yes I did sir.”

“Good, because it would appear that you have sustained a rather long list of injuries here and these fine doctors are going to be taking you into our emergency room to treat you. I’m afraid that none of your clothes are going to survive. George, get the gurney in the hall and bring it in here. It’s time to treat your patient people, I expect you to treat this as close to a real situation as you can. There will be nurses standing by to assist and I will be there to observe only.”

George came back in the room leading a couple of EMT’s pushing a gurney that was piled high with bags and equipment.

“Ok class, get to the training emergency room and get prepared. You may assume that you’ve received the call from an ambulance that is inbound with your patient and the typical pre-arrival assessment and vital statistics have been called in. As soon as these two paramedics and I have finished prepping Patricia here they will be bringing her in post-haste. Shoo.”

The room cleared out leaving just the four of us. Doctor Henry explained that they would be putting appropriate splints and bandages on me to simulate the condition of a real patient being brought in with the injuries my chart indicated. It took about twenty minutes to truss me up, and by the time they were done I couldn’t move. They had me climb up on the gurney after moving all the gear off of it and started turning me into an accident victim. One thing that surprised me was when a bag of blood was pulled out. Doc Henry winked at me and said that it was a little surprise for the class to see how they reacted to a ‘bloody’ patient. A large gauze pad was completely soaked in the blood then put on the back of my head and a roll of gauze was wound around the back of my head and across my forehead several times to hold it in place, in the process soaking up some of the blood from the pad. More bloody pads were secured similarly to my left shoulder and right elbow, and the left shin. Then they took my shoes off and both feet got the bloody bandage treatment as well followed by my hands. A final large bloody bandage was taped over my abdomen. Once they were done with the surprise bandages, splints that looked like little metal ladders, which were actually called ladder splints, were used to immobilize my arms and legs. They could bend and twist the splints any way they wanted to fit them to my limbs, but once they wrapped elastic bandages around them to hold the splints in place I could barely get them to move. They explained that it was because the elastic bandages made the ‘cross bars’ curve around the limb which locked them in place. A rigid emergency neck brace was strapped to my neck and finally I was strapped down onto a back board from the ankles to the forehead holding me down, a little more blood was used to look like it was dripping from my nose and mouth, and I was ready to go.

Chapter 3

The EMT’s rolled me out into the corridor then started running me down the hall and into the training emergency room. As soon as they hit the doors they were calling out and the members of the class moved right in to do their thing. One of the girls, I think it was Jane, gasped when she saw the bloody bandages but otherwise everyone acted like this was the real thing and took it all in stride. For the next while, I’m not sure how long it went on really, it was really confusing. Everyone was yelling back and forth all kinds of medical jargon every time they inspected a part of me or found something like the big bandage on the back of my head. That one got a response along the lines of ‘severe contusion to occipital area of posterior skull’. Other things I caught were ‘cervical fracture to C 2 and 3’, ‘severe hematoma on abdominal region’, or ‘bilateral disfigurement of hips, suspected bilateral dislocation’. It looked like the students were doing most of the work, even taking the place of the nurses that were on hand. I guess they all wanted to be involved so were doing everything themselves. I had little flashlights shined in my eyes, my toes and fingers were pinched, and I was poked and prodded all over the place. The ladder splints were removed by the simple and expedient method of cutting through the bandages and most of my clothes were cut off too leaving me in just my bra and panties by the time they were ready to cart me off to ‘x-ray’.

The session of taking x-rays of me was a mock exercise with no real x-rays being used, but they did go through the motions of positioning my arms legs and body how they would want them to get the different necessary views of my bones. The neck brace was left on the entire time, and soft splints were used to hold my arms and legs after the metal ones were taken off. When I was taken back to the exam room a couple of blankets were placed over me to keep me warm while they waited for the ‘films’ to be developed. A little while later one of the nurses came in with a folder and started placing x-ray pictures up on the viewer panel. I could just see them with the angle I was at and it looked like they covered all the injuries that were on my chart. While everyone looked them over for a bit Donald turned to me and pointed out that these were copies of x-rays from various patients in the past who had similar injuries as mine, but these had the labels on them changed to list them as Jane Doe which was me as I had come in with no identification and had not been able to tell them who I am. All of these films would go into my ‘medical file’ for reference.

After the pictures of ‘my’ injuries had been reviewed it was time to take me to where I would be treated. They wheeled me out of exam and into a room that had odd looking frame standing in it with plenty of room to get around all sides of it. I could see cabinets around the room and a couple sinks on opposite sides of the room as well. The blankets were removed and my bra and panties were cut off leaving me completely naked. I didn’t stay naked for long though. A loose shirt and pants that resembled really light long underwear were brought over and put on. The pants covered me from the bottom of my breasts down to past my toes and the shirt overlapped the pants from my hips up to my neck with short little sleeves barely covering the top of my arms. The shirt had a really long bit like a turtle neck sweater but was long enough to cover my whole head which they pulled down and left rolled up on my neck. I realized the material was the same stuff as the stockinet they had been using for the casts they had made on me before; really light and very stretchy but not tight at all. Once I was covered the gurney was rolled over right next to the frame and I was picked up by four or five people together so my entire body was lifted up at the same time and they transferred me over onto the frame. I felt like I was going to fall off of it because there was hardly anything holding me up. My head was resting on a small pad at the top, and a narrow flat pad was between my shoulder blades supporting my upper back. Another flat, narrow padded bar was positioned so my bum was sitting on it with a round padded bar coming straight up between my legs off that which pressed right up against my crotch. Finally my feet were placed on these stirrups and positioned so my legs were spread out to the sides a bit and bent at the knees. That was the extent of what was holding me up.

After moving me over the shirt and pants were adjusted so there were no wrinkles anywhere. Next long sleeves of stockinet were pulled up my arms that over lapped the short sleeves on the shirt and hung down over my finger tips. Once everyone was happy with the stockinet layer, rolls of padding bandages and felt pads were pulled out and everyone took turns wrapping me up from the neck down until they were satisfied I had enough padding everywhere to keep me from developing sores or pressure points once the cast was finished. Then the rolls of plaster bandages and various sizes of plaster splints were dunked in water and everyone had a hand with encasing me inside a form fitting shell of damp, warm, and rapidly hardening, plaster-of-Paris.

I’m not sure how long it took to put me in a cast that almost completely covered me from my shoulders down, but they were working at it for a while. Once they were finished I was in a cast that held my arms out to my sides so my upper arms were at about a 45 degree angle, my elbows were bent at a 90 degree angle with my forearms pointed up so my hands hovered above and just out to the sides of my hips or waist. Both hands were covered out to the finger tips, all 10 of them, with my wrists bent up slightly and my fingers held in a curled position. While they were working on the torso portion of the cast some kind of plastic harness was brought over that they pulled down over my head and it rested on my shoulders chest and back, then they continued wrapping plaster over the harness incorporating it into the cast. I didn’t know what that was all about and nobody said anything either. My legs were kept spread in the position the stirrups held them in and once they got down to my feet the stirrups were lowered and the plaster was rolled on all the way down to the tips of my toes. Once the cast was as thick as they wanted it they finished off all the edges by pulling the ends of the stockinet back and using a final layer of plaster to hold it down. My head was free of plaster, you could see just the tips of my fingers and toes if you looked down in the cast at the right angle, and my crotch and butt crack were left uncovered thanks to the padded pole and seat my butt was resting on. Wooden bars had been incorporated into the cast at several places. One each went from my elbows to my waist, and two were put between my legs at the knees and the ankles. Thankfully, they were nice enough to bundle up my hair into a pony-tail then pull it up into a short braid and wrap it up with an elastic bandage to keep it clean and out of the way while they worked.

Just when I thought they were done they started bringing over rods and other parts along with a Halo ring. The halo was positioned and held on my head with the positioning cups and screws, and the rods were connected to something on my chest and back that I guessed were part of the harness they had added in earlier. Then everything was connected together and tightened down firmly and more plaster was used to encase the ends of the rods and include them into the cast as well leaving me completely immobilized. I couldn’t move a single thing from head to toe. Doctor Henry came over and inspected their work and asked if anything was uncomfortable or pinched me anywhere.

“Well, other than the clamps of the Halo being screwed down really tight, everything is actually pretty comfy. Although there is one little problem. I’ve been trying to hold it, but I’m about to burst here and need to pee.”

“Doctors, you heard your patient. I don’t think you’re going to get her out of that cast quickly enough for her to make it to the bathroom in time, so I suggest you find some way for her to relieve her bladder.”

“Um, with the injuries she is supposed to have, then a catheter would probably have been inserted already. Would that be ok?”

“If it keeps me from having cramps or peeing on the floor here, I think I can live with a catheter.”

One of the students left to get a catheter insertion kit, and while we waited for him to come back Doctor Henry whispered in my ear. He wanted me to star gasping and breathing really shallow like I was having trouble breathing. I told him I was already breathing shallow with how tight the cast was around my chest so that wouldn’t be too hard to do, but I wanted to know why. He told me that with the injured ribs and the tight cast it was very possible that a real patient would being to asphyxiate and need to be intubated and wanted to see how the class would react to the situation now that I was completely held in the cast. I agreed and gave permission to have them put a tube down my throat for this. The student came back with the catheter and in a few minutes the catheter was inserted, the balloon inflated to hold it in place, and I got the relief of having my bladder emptied, albeit through a tube and into a bag. While they were updating my chart with the need for continuous catheterization and Doctor Henry was signing it, I did as asked and began to make wheezing and gasping sounds and rolling my eyes around wildly like I was in trouble. One of the students noticed right away, but when they tried asking me what was wrong I just moved my jaw up and down and played like I couldn’t get enough air to talk. Unfortunately I over did it, and with how tight the cast was I really did start having a problem with not being able to breathe and started trying to struggle against the cast. That only made thing worse and my chest muscles started locking up on me so I couldn’t breathe at all.

“Oh crap! I think Patricia is going into respiratory arrest! Her lips are starting to turn blue! We need to do something!”

That got everyone’s attention and several people dropped what they were doing and jumped into motion. Two of them ran out of the room yelling they were going for an intubation kit and a respirator. Several others came over and noted the muscles in my neck were standing out and straining and even my crotch appeared to be tightly clenched. They very quickly conferred and decided they needed to get me to relax so my body would unfreeze. They realized that in the cast I was in there was little they could do directly to get me to relax and asked Doctor Henry to order a quick acting muscle relaxant to inject me with. With the presented evidence he immediately sent one of the nurses to get three doses of a drug in syringes and get back as fast as she could.

The student with the kit got back first followed shortly by the nurse with the drugs and the student who had gone for the respirator was just a couple minutes behind her. While the intubation kit was being opened Doctor Henry injected the first syringe into my neck and the second one into the top of my thigh, explaining that he was hitting the major arteries at the top and bottom of the body to get the drug into my circulation as fast as possible. As soon as he finished injecting the second syringe he grabbed the endo-tracheal tube and insertion guide and shoved them into my mouth, pulling my tongue and jaw down out of the way, and pushing the tube down into my throat past my larynx. A bag was attached to the external end of the tube and someone began manual ventilation until the respirator was brought in and setup. Once the machine was ready it was hooked up and turned on and my breathing was regulated by the machine.

“Well done class. I had asked Patricia to fake a breathing problem to test you all, but it looks like she went a little too far and really went into respiratory distress. With the two injections of Rocuronium I’m afraid she will have to remain on the respirator for several hours until the effects of such a large dose wear off. I ordered the third dose as a precaution on the possibility she did not respond rapidly enough to the first two injections. A third dose at this point would probably put our patient out completely for the night and require mechanical ventilation well into the next day.”

Once they had made sure that I could breathe again, even if it was by a machine, my chart was updated to include the continuous ventilation and signed off on by Doc Henry. When they decided it was time to get me out of the huge cast they had put me in but when the cast saw in the room was looked for it was found to be missing. One of the nurses went and checked and when she came back reported that a saw in the regular orthopedic department had failed and the one from training had been taken to replace it until a new one could be obtained. My two friends volunteered to take me down to where a working cast saw could be used and get me out of the huge cast I had been put into. They pushed me and my respirator out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. While we waited for the elevator to arrive Steven turned to Don with a grin and a wink that I recognized and knew it was going to spell trouble for me. This was a side of them I had not seen for quite some time and had thought they’d grown out of it. These two were trouble with a capital ‘T’ when it came to the wild pranks they used to come up with, and I had a bad feeling they were about to pull another one on me.

“Doctor Wellington, I think we need to get poor Jane Doe here on up to the pediatric ward where she can be taken care of properly.”

“You know Doctor Franklin, you’re right. It’s only the proper thing to do for the poor girl. But we need to make sure she gets everything she needs you know. I think an order for an intravenous line and a nasal feeding tube is in order so she gets plenty of nutrients and medication.”

“Right you are, Doctor Wellington. And once we get the patient to the ward, I think she deserves a good long night’s sleep too. Good thing I have this third injection of medicine waiting to be administered. Let’s go around to the back elevator, I know a better route to take.”

There was nothing I could do to stop them. I was encased in a cast that held me completely rigid which included a Halo frame embedded in it, There was a tube going down my throat so I couldn’t make a sound of protest, and the drug I’d been given had me feeling so weak I felt like a limp noodle and knew I couldn’t do anything even if I was out of this cast. They turned the gurney around and wheeled me away down several hallways until they arrived at another elevator that looked like it didn’t get used much. While they waited for this one to arrive they made changes to my chart, I assume to include the things they had said earlier. Once we arrive on the pediatric floor Steven played lookout to avoid anyone seeing them and they got me into an empty room and set me up on the bed. Donald put my new chart on the door where the floor nurses would find it and turned on the indicator to show the room was occupied. Then Steven stabbed me in the neck with the third syringe and injected the whole thing.

“Have a good night Jane Doe. We’ll be back tomorrow to get you out.”

I glared daggers at them, which is all I could do, but they just grinned and walked out of the room after checking that there was nobody around to see them. A couple minutes later the drug did its work and I was out cold.

Chapter 4

When I awoke the next morning I could tell a few things had changed. There was a new tube going up my nose that I could just see was attached to a half empty bag of something that looked thick and pale yellow hanging up beside me on a pole. There was another bag about the same size hanging there with something clear in it, and two other smaller bags with drip chambers next to it also hanging on the pole. All of them had tubes running down to a small machine attached lower down on the pole, and from there another tube ran out of sight to someplace I couldn’t see. I could feel something on my neck, like there was something taped there, so I guessed with how much of my body was hidden under the cast they had to insert the IV line in the one place available. I also felt weak and guessed that I was being fed continuous drugs to keep me on the respirator which was on the other side of me and keeping me breathing and alive. I tried flexing my crotch and was pretty sure the catheter was still there too. I figured that while I was drugged into sleep yesterday the nurses on the floor had found a new patient and after checking the doctor’s orders on my chart made the necessary additions to my ‘treatment’.

I did the only thing I could for the time being and lay there waiting. Steve and Don had said they’d be back to get me out of this today, but I didn’t know when that would be. I just hoped it would happen sooner rather than later. I also began to plot to my revenge on them once I got out of here. Those two were so going to die such horrible deaths that Genghis Khan would shudder. Well, maybe not that bad, but I was going to get them back big time for this. No doubt about that. Unfortunately, someone else showed up before they did and changed everything. The day shift nurse came in with the doctor in charge of the floor making the morning rounds.

“Good lord, what happened here?”

“It appears she is a new patient, a Jane Doe I’m afraid, who came in last night. She’s been through quite a bit it seems. Here’s her chart Doctor.”

“Hmmm. Yes, I see. Attended by Doctor Henry I see. Well he certainly knows what he is doing, and I can agree with the conservative treatment regime considering, but why is she on this floor? She should be in P-ICU where she can be closely monitored.”

“Um, Doctor, take a look at this. The Halo is being held in place with just the positioning cups. That’s not like Doctor Henry to make a mistake like this.”

“You’re right Hellen. It’s not. I’m guessing that with the large amount of work that had to be done to the patient it must have slipped by, and the orderly who brought her up probably misunderstood where she was supposed to go. Let’s just take care of the oversight ourselves and get the patient on over to ICU where she belongs.”

“Of course, Doctor. I’ll go get a Halo pin kit and be right back.”

Oh hell! They are about to screw real Halo pins into my skull and then move me to another part of the hospital! Steven and Donald will never find me and there’s nothing I can do to stop it from happening!

The nurse, Hellen, came back a few minutes latter carrying a package sealed in a plastic bag. While she opened the kit and got it ready, the doctor checked the alignment of the Halo on my head and decided it was good as is. Over the next 15 minutes they shaved my head in two spots to get the hair out of the way of the two pins sites on the side of my head, injected a local anesthetic in all four sites, proceeded to screw all four pins down tight by hand which I still felt when the sharp points pierced my skin, then they used some kind of special screwdriver to tighten them down one at a time to a particular ‘torque’ limit. What ever that limit was, it hurt like hell and the sound of the pins actually penetrating my skull was horrible. All I could do was cry. Nurse Hellen wiped away my tears and said nice soothing things to me, neither one of them realizing that I was not really a patient and none of this was necessary. When they were done I realized that the positioning cups had actually been allowing me a tiny bit of movement with my head, but now that there were actual screws embedded in my skull that tiny bit of movement was gone. The nurse and doctor cleaned up the remains of what they had done and Nurse Hellen took it away and to get an orderly to help them with moving me to P-ICU. While she was gone the doctor tried to talk to me, but I just closed my eyes and wouldn’t look at him. He did tell me that I would receive better care once I was in ICU where the nurses there would be monitoring me closely and coming in to check up on me frequently. He also manually overrode the current dose of pain medication I was being given to counter the pain from the pins they had just inserted into my head.

Nurse Hellen finally returned along with an orderly and the three of them got everything together and pushed my bed and everything else still attached to me out the door. They took me down the hall towards the main elevator and went right on past it. We arrived at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit where the doctor alerted the duty nurse of the transfer of a patient and a bed space was arranged for me. They got me and my little mechanical life support machines situated in my new ‘home’ and the new nurse had a look at my chart.

“Poor girl. Looks like she did a number on herself here. All covered up in plaster and unable to move anything. How sad.”

“That she did. And going by the number of injuries and the notes on her chart from Doctor Henry, she’s going to remain like this for a while before we can start trying to reduce any of it. Of course we’ll be monitoring and assessing her condition often, but I would not expect anything to change with her current treatment for the next six months.”

To Be Continued ... ?

*Authors note: This story is complete. If I continue this with a sequel, I do have a definite idea of where it will be going. What happens to Patricia next will get worse.