Hail Mary

 188.

The lead medical specialist, whom I see as a dour cardboard cutout, replete with stethoscope and monogrammed overstarched white lab coat indicating he enjoys alphabet soup, summarizes my condition with rehearsed ambivalence. Like a dog listening to masters commands and only hearing his name, I take away only two words, and their ramifications, from his accounting.

Inoperable and irreversible.

Everything before and after those two words fly over my head like a brisk autumn wind. I look at my trio of compatriots and read fear in their eyes. Julie stands four feet from bedside between Harlan and Davis, she is the only one of the three looking at me. I watch with fascination as she fights the inevitable tsunami of tears. Both flanking soldiers have their heads pointed towards their shoes.

It seems that the perp responsible for the ambush, three cowardly and amateurish shoots in the back, failed in the first rule of the assassin, make it lethal. The shot to my head is the one most worrisome as the shrapnel penetrated and destroyed a good part of the protective cranium guarding the soft tissue cerebellum responsible for fine tuning bodily movement and balance. Adding to the complexity of the situation is the wound to my shoulder, severing 90% of the nerves serving my dominant side. The combination of the two creates right-side incapacity the severity of which has yet to be reversed by modern medical technology.

The cutout doctor is wrapping up his cardboard summation but all I hear is a sickly reverberation of dread. He asks the other specialists in attendance if they have anything to add. They are silent, further adding to my depth of hopelessness. I actually feel bile collecting in my stomach and lubricant beginning to coat my esophagus and throat. The meeting is about to adjourn when one of the specialists, a petite woman with a empathetic smile, whom I assumed to be a neurologist, adds, in a soft and tentative voice, attempting, it seems to me, to use both specific medical terminology and civilian plainspeak in her verbal oped.

"Our strategy behind the induced coma was to allow complete endemic reduction in the hope of neural restoration. The fledgling experimental process centers around the myelin axons that influence electrical flow and action potentials known as the nodes of Raniver. In your case they continue to trend positive. There is a chance, however slight, that time, the new technique overloading the nodes with steroidal anti-inflamatories might provide benefit."

She has the room. All eyes are on her. She notices the sudden change of energy flow and looks for a suitable closing statement. I am a cheerleader, a rabid front-row fan screaming for an encore, the beleaguered coach sending in the last-ditch call for the Hail Mary.

"So there IS hope."