Chapter 14: Insomnia

What do I do now? Nothing on TV, no books to read, and no Emily to cuddle. At least there is a pen and some paper in the drawer from before.

Arthur said I needed to practice as much as I could, so I closed my eyes to start looking at the kids around me.

I might as well see if I can guess what is wrong with them and ask the chief pediatrician tomorrow if I was right.

I started looking toward the wall of my room to see into the next room in front of me. I found out I was seeing the wiring, squiggly lines of other kids in their beds and what I think were pipes. At first, I practiced zooming in and out as I looked around. All that did things appear in front of my eyes instead of being in the room looking at them. First, I tried to look at the wires in the wall nearest me and try to zoom out. That wasn’t any better than zooming in on them from on my bed. Looking at the wires in the next furthest wall, before zooming out, was a bit better, but not by much. Finally, I got lucky when I looked at the electricity going into the bed nearest the bathroom and zoomed out. Now I saw the wires and squiggly lines between the electrical ones.

Finding that I could now look at a specific person’s squiggly lines in their bodies, I focused in on one of them. I had no way to tell, at least from the squiggly lines, if the kid in the bed was a boy or a girl. Emily had squiggly lines in the same places, so I guessed the kid was a girl.

Might as well try something different than what I did with Emily. I don’t have anything else to do right now, except practice.

I took my time looking at all of the different colors of energy inside her body. Trying to find the color of good energy inside the girl’s body, I started with the red blood cells. I thought to myself to stop seeing that color.

That method seems to be working excellently, but I’m not seeing anything more than some bacteria about to cause some big nasty zits on her butt.

I shrugged, zoomed out, and looked around in that room until I found the electricity in the other bed.

Ok, that area I am seeing is most definitely one for a girl.

Just a quick look over her body showed me four places around her heart and lungs where she should have had good energy going, but there was none at all. She had a lot of the multicolored blobs of chemotherapy rushing around in her blood, but not any glowing places from radiation. When a chemo blob got to one of the places where I found some harmful energy, it would surround one of the bad cells to kill it. The chemo blob would find another cancer cell and do it again until the chemo blob ran out of energy.

Since this girl didn’t have any radiation energy I could use, I pulled a color of energy into her body that I put on a dead cancer cell to track its progress through her body. Just like inside Emily, I watched the stuff from inside the dead cancer cell go into her blood and down into her kidneys, but only a little bit of it was filtered out as waste. The rest stayed in her blood. When it got to one of the spots with cancer, it was absorbed into one of the live cancer cells to make the color of energy in the live cell a lot brighter, causing them to split into two cells almost immediately. The chemotherapy blobs seemed to be killing off the cancer cells faster than they could break into more. I wasn’t sure it mattered, though. I saw the cancer was growing onto her lungs and heart.

Ok. I think I am getting the hang of this now. All I need to do is to trace in the energy for the call buttons to find a bed.

I was pretty sure the kid in the bed near the bathroom was a boy. I found no signs of the place inside his stomach that girls had to make babies. I didn’t see anything that might be balls, but his body still small. Unlike the last girl I looked into, he didn’t have any large areas of bad energy. I went back to filtering out his health cell energy. In his belly, I found some pumpkin-colored energy blobs attached to what appeared to be his intestines. It didn’t have the same feel as the parasite inside Emily, but the cells inside it looked to behave similarly.

Why isn’t all of that medicine in him attacking the parasite? He has tons of different medications in him.

As I was watching one area, I saw the parasite appeared to be eating a hole in the kid’s intestines and were almost immediately killed off. It happened twice more before I stopped filtering out the energy for white blood cells. It was a shock to see that nearly all the white blood cell energy was all around the outside of his intestines attacking some nasty looking bacteria. Only a few were existed in the wall of his gut to attack the parasite. I stopped filtering all of the colors to see if I saw any antibiotic energy in his blood. There wasn’t any, or he used it all up already. The parasite eating through his intestines was causing his bacterial infections from his poop. I had to be sure to tell the doctor as soon as I could. The overall reserves in the boy’s body showed he was weak, like Emily, before I killed the unhealthy cells inside her.

This kid needs something done immediately, or he will die soon

The other boy in his room was undeniably male. Zooming in on where he should have balls gave me lots of flashes of good energy bouncing all around down there. A quick scan showed he had multiple angry-looking cuts all over her arms, legs, torso, and face.

Are those scars from being cut open, or something even worse?

All of them had something deep down inside that looked like whoever treated the wounds missed something that wound that caused them the scar. I saw a lot of bacteria inside him appeared close to the bacteria in his roommate. He didn’t have any antibiotics in his body either. What I found out was that the bacteria was causing pus that was going between his skin and muscles instead of making a zit.

He looks even closer to dying than the other boy in his room. Why isn’t he getting antibiotics?

I am not sure if I was getting better at finding the bad energies inside people or not. When I looked into the last room in this direction, there were two girls with the exact, and I mean down to the color, hue, and brightness, cancer energies. Both had a lot of chemotherapy drugs in them, too, but the chemo wasn’t doing anything at all. It was just going all over their body looking for cancers they didn’t have.

The chemo wasn’t even doing anything in the few glowing radiation areas inside the girls.

Between the two girls, the one on the left had little spots of her cancer all over her body, but the cells weren’t doing anything.

That is just weird. Those cancer cells look filled to the brim with energy and everything they need to split rapidly and repeatedly before their reserves decreased too far to keep replicating.

The other girl was the opposite. She had a few areas with cancer, but they were sucking everything they could to power their reproducing. It was attacking and digesting the parts of her body she needed to survive.

I wish I had enough energy built up inside me to fight it off until the doctors can figure out what to give her to kill it.

With no more rooms in that direction, I started looking into the room behind my head. I found it only had one boy.

Yuck! The vile feeling from whatever is in his body is making me feel sick! It didn’t happen with Emily or any of the other kids, so why now?

As I filtered out each good energy, from what I was seeing inside him, the sicker that looking inside him made me feel. I tried to find where it was coming from, but it was everywhere in his body. What was weird was that it wasn’t going crazy, killing cells and digesting them like cancers. It was killing the cells so slowly that his body was making more new cells faster than the vile cells killed off.

Why aren’t the dead cells getting digested?

The more I looked, I started to see that the dead cells looked tainted somehow. The boy’s liver and kidneys were filtering them from his blood, but weren’t doing anything with them after that, stuck there like dust in an air filter. His organs were filling up with the dead cells. His body was filled up with lots of medicines that weren’t doing anything to help him fight whatever it was.

Oh, that was gross! I have to stop looking at him before I barf.

Somehow I had fallen asleep finally. Later the head pediatrician was gently waking me up.

I told him about the kids in the three rooms in front of me. He made some notes. Once I told him about the boy in the room behind me, he sat up to ask for a lot of details. The kid was starting to die on them without any idea what was wrong or how to help him.

“I don’t have a clue how to tell how it looked to me. All the dead cells looked tainted. They don’t get consumed as I saw with parasites or cancer. Whatever this stuff is, it doesn’t even kill off all the cells it touches. Maybe it attacks one out of every twenty that pass by it. Whatever it is doing to the cells causes them to pack up inside the boy’s kidneys and liver. None of them were getting flush out of his body. It doesn’t even appear to be alive like the other stuff I saw here. Could it be something like acid or poison? I’ve never seen that, so I have no idea how it would look to me. I do know it made me feel ill just looking inside him. He was the first that made me feel that way,” I explained.

I guess something in my crazy description made sense to him.

He thanked me before rushing out of the room. After he told the nurses to do something, he got on the phone. He made a lot of calls. While continuing to talk on his phone, I noticed a lot of squiggly lines moving into the three rooms in front of me.

That response happened fast! I hope they can find something to help those kids from what I told him.

Before I could look at what they were doing to those patients, I felt the vibrations coming from the room behind me.

I don’t want to feel that sick feeling anymore, but I have to know what is going on in that room. What else am I going to do until breakfast or my next rounds of tests?

Based on the amounts of different colors of squiggly lines, people packed into his room. I saw the squiggly lines of the head pediatrician in there too. The machine pulled his blood out from somewhere that would be the right place for his leg. After going through the device, it went back into him through his arm.

Why can’t I stop seeing only his tainted energy?

Soon I started seeing the tainted dead cells pulled out of his body and sticking inside the device. The nasty stuff in his liver and kidney were slowly coming out too, at least until something having a lot of purple energy began filling this boy’s blood. Wherever it touched the nasty stuff in his blood, it caused it to change to a dull, rusty blue color. The device quickly filtered it from his blood. I watched his kidneys as the last of the cells inside them went into the machine. His liver couldn’t remove the remaining fifteen to twenty percent of the dead cells.

Is this just something the body does? I see other kids with about twenty to twenty-five percent of gross stuff stuck in their livers too. It isn’t like I can do anything to make this stuff go away. Might as well watch them work.

Eventually, I noticed the head pediatrician go out of that room and then into the second room in front of me. Some others were already there next to the boy on the right. They seemed to be restraining the boy. I could see right off that he had a lot of medicines in his body now that weren’t there last night. It didn’t seem to matter since they weren’t doing a lot to fight the bacteria.

The head pediatrician moved over to one side of the boy as he felt the scared places very slowly. Each he touched caused pulses from that place he pressed to the boy’s brain, which stopped short. The boy had a lot of puss inside him that sloshed around when someone’s hand moved over that area. The doctor relocated to a different part of the boy. I only had myself seeing the puss, so it looked very odd to see the doctor’s squiggly lines appear that he pulled on something before a tiny blob of puss popped out from the boy. Seeing all the energy colors again, I saw the kid’s energy in a container that held the blob of puss.

Someone took the blob of cells and puss from the room the Pediatrician. I then saw some of the boy’s squiggly lines getting pulled open by something round.

Did they put a drain tube? What else would make pus go out of this boy’s body to drip down beside his bed?

I watched the squiggly lines of the pediatrician move over to the other boy before making a phone call. People came in to start checking the boy over. His screams coincided with the stuff the people moved over his body. Something they injected in him slowly drained down the energy inside him.

Is that what it looks like when someone gets sedated?

Soon all of his brain energy seemed to dull all over now, except where the pulses went to his heart and lungs. I watched lots of different medicines going into his arm and through his body, most of them were focusing on his stomach and intestines. None of them were attacking the bacteria, but some caused the parasitic organism’s energy dimming.

Wow! That is cool to see his blood getting pulled out of his body! Can I even trace it?

I started to try to focus on it when the pediatrician headed to the one with the two girls in it with the same colored cancer energy. I saw the one on the left seemed to be sitting up and moving around. The one on the right was almost in the same position as last night. The doctor and two others were in the room with the girl on the right. I could see them moving her all around like they would if they were giving her a full exam. He spent a lot of time doing something in front of her and almost as long doing something in back before they laid her back down on the bed. He only appeared to be talking to the other girl.

After a quick stop in a room behind the nurse’s desk, he returned to my hospital room.

“I was emphatic about there being no additional unexplained patient recoveries from the brink of death, but today your observations allowed us to take a different direction in the treatment of two patients. You see, we only have so many diagnostic testing capabilities. When we have a possible diagnosis, we treat it aggressively. None of our procedures were able to match the symptoms of the patient behind you to that of an unknown toxin in his blood. The lab found the dead cells in his blood, but they were well below those of a healthy patient. We checked his albumin in his urine and creatinine in his blood. They vastly improved over those on his arrival. If you hadn’t mentioned that his liver and kidneys weren’t getting rid of the dead cells, I wouldn’t have thought about putting him on dialysis. As soon as we did a procedure to filter out the waste cells from his body and removed the toxin, his condition started improving immediately. I called an associate that confirmed my suspicions, so we are keeping the patient sedated while we search for how he came into contact with the toxin,” he explained. “The other patient who owes you their life is another boy that was having his body crushed by the pus caused by his own body as it fought off an unknown bacteria. We are still waiting on the lab to see if they can even identify the bacteria so we can get him on a specific regimen of antibiotics. I made an initial incision into one of the scarred areas and lightly squeezed to see what I found, a stream of high-pressure pus that shot out about three feet. While I shouldn’t laugh about it, I can’t stop myself from seeing the look of horror on the face of the arrogant bastard from billing insisting that ‘minor surgery’ won’t be covered by his insurance as I’m not a surgeon and this isn’t a surgical suite. I can’t wait for his manager to come storming up to the board of directors to demand my resignation for doing a procedure that wasn’t pre-approved or funded by his insurance company. Anyone who says doctors are cold, heartless people need to go spend a day with Billing as they make sure they suck as much money as possible from insurance companies and patient’s families.”

I’m glad I wasn’t there to have to smell what came out of that kid. If that Billing person is like the people dad talks about at his job, then the guy probably had it coming.

“Unfortunately, with all the good you helped us do, that isn’t my reason for coming back here to beg for your services again,” he told me softly. “The two girls you found at the end of the hall are identical twins. You already know both suffer from an identical form of cancer. It is a mutation of a form of Leukemia that is resistant to the treatments where none of the available, including those not even cleared for human trials yet, can cure. One girl has a large number of growths that appear to be dormant. Her sister’s cancer cells increased ten-fold. As with most twins, I fear that should the one perish. Her sister wouldn’t desire to continue fighting and succumb as well.”

“Yes,” he said after looking at his phone before answering. “I’m with a patient. No, this will wait. I said you need to wait! Watch that patient’s online medical treatment log. Once it is updated and you have reviewed it, it will be your choice if you want to speak to my lawyer, HR, or both. If you want it before then, you can get off your pompous, entitled ass, and drive over here to look at the patients yourself. Do you think I give a flying fuck that you are on the board? Before you get on that horse, you better call your daddy and lawyer to see if it is a good idea to take me on. Goodbye.”

He looked at me and said, “Dumb money-focused greedy dick.”

Before he could continue, he had another call and told them to piss off too. There were two more of those before he set his phone to do-not-disturb.

“Now as I was saying,” he told me after he calmed down a bit. “I have been a physician for a while now. Losing patients comes with the job, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I do all I can to give them every chance to recover and have learned to recognize those who are beyond that which I can control. I wouldn’t even seek you put you out if any risk if their story wasn’t such a tragic one. Their parents, four siblings, and the girls were taking a family trip when a tractor-trailer with mechanical issues approached them from the opposite direction. It careened into their lane to hit the family’s van so hard it pushed them it the road. The van slammed into a building. The two girls were in the rear of their vehicle, and that pushed through a picture window. Each had a few scrapes and bruises but was otherwise in perfect health. During their family’s funeral both girls collapsed to the ground. Attempts to wake them failed. An MRI scan found Leukemia was already rapidly attacking their bodies. At that time, it was a known strain that we have treated aggressively over the last year with chemotherapy and radiation. Both went into remission for a month. When we did the pre-discharge MRI, for their insurance company no less, we found this mutated form of Leukemia. I know I am asking you to play God here. They have suffered way too much in their short lives when I know someone who can give them one more chance at living their lives. I know it is a lot to ask, but how can I not ask?”

I told him I had no idea if I could do it, but said I would try. It might take me a while.

“Take as long as you believe is required, David,” he told me. “You do have some testing I had scheduled for this morning, but I will have it rescheduled for this afternoon. I will apologize in advance for the indignity your upcoming testing requires. Unfortunately, this is the only way to do this particular test to further remove suspicions from anyone who may still be watching you closely. Of course it will also satisfy your insurance company and allows Billing to try to push through another hundred thousand dollar bill.”

I don’t like the sound of whatever this testing is going to require. At least he isn’t putting a tube in my body to drain puss or sucking all the blood out to run it through some machine to clean it.

Closing my eyes, I went right to the worst of the two girls in the last room in front of me. She wasn’t moving around. My trick to zap her arm to get the muscle to move it over to the metal on the bed didn’t work. I told the doctor that to have any chance of helping them, I needed to be sure their hands, and part of the arms if possible, were on the metal bars. I watched as he went to the room, gave them a shot that made their bodies relax and their hands, the ones without the IVs, he placed onto the bedrails like they had pushed their arms through a bit.

To be sure their beds were grounded, I pulled a bit of the power for an adjustment button in their beds into the metal bar by their hands. As soon as I saw it heading toward the ground wire, I got started.

I hope this works similarly to how it did for Emily. Maybe I can find a different way to do it that would be better?

Like with Emily, I looked all over their bodies for their cancer and focused just on that energy type. Since it was going to go toward ground anyway to neutralize it, I decided that I would experiment. I pulled some of the energy from a few cancer cells inside the girl on the right, pushed them into the ground wire while holding on to the cellular energy lightly. I held it back right as it started to get pulled into the rod going into the ground under the hospital. I watched to see what was going to happen. At first it required no effort at all to hold it back. Then whatever made the Earth neutralize this energy started to pull on it harder and harder. I started having to fight it harder than when I pulled the parasitic organism’s energy out of Emily.

What the heck am I doing? Can I pull what I need back up to the room when it is this hard to keep from being pulled into the ground?

Getting these cells back out of the rod and back up toward the room took a lot of work. I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to keep doing it before I got exhausted. I only managed to pull the energy about halfway when I started to see the exact color of the opposite energy I needed was what had been fighting me. Instead of struggling to pull out the cancer cell energy, I grabbed onto what they needed to cancel out the cancer energy. The closer it got to the girls, the less amount of effort I needed to pull it up from the ground.

That is amazing. It split off to go to both beds as soon as I got it close enough to them and their cancer.

The best way to describe it was that their bodies were metal and the energy was a super-strong magnet.

Why is there other energy piggybacking up and into their bodies? Is it going to attack their healthy cells?

I made my self only see the good energies and found that none were under attack. Switching to only bad energies in their body, I filtered out the cancer energy. I noted that what came up from the ground was breaking apart the chemical bonds inside the cells used to power the bad cells. It was even counteracting the radiation treatments. When I allowed myself to see the colors in their bodies, I only saw a glowing bluish color a few seconds before all the unhealthy power in the unwanted cells vanished out the ground wire faster than I could see it moving. Neither had any remaining bad cells living in their bodies.

“Hey sleepy,” Kelly said from beside my bed. “I was worried that you went back into your coma again.”

She sounded concerned until she heard the well-dressed man asking if she would be joining me for lunch. He asked her a few questions about what she didn’t like to eat and then left.

I explained how I now have an upgraded meal plan. I realized I needed to pee even worse than when I had to ask the candy striper to help me. I started to get out of bed to go to the bathroom when Kelly insisted she help me pee into the urinal. When I went to lay back down, I found that sweat had soaked my PJs and sheets.

“I noticed you reeked a bit when I came in and found the bed soaked in sweat. When I asked the nurses if they wanted me to go ahead to bathe you so they could change the bed, they told me that you had tests after lunch and would only be wearing a gown anyway,” she told me as she climbed up on the bed after finding a dry spot. “You would need a bath when you got back up here anyway.”

It was only a few minutes later that the well-dressed man came in with miso soup and ginger salads, just like at the Hibachi place my family likes a lot. He removed the empty dishes to put an enormous bowl of fried rice, stir-fried vegetables, and a big plate of teriyaki steak, shrimp, salmon, and chicken.

When I asked for a plate so we could share he told me, “You must ask the lady if she is willing to permit your consumption of her meal after you have exhausted what is being prepared for you or until you no longer wish to consume any more of your meal.”

Why is he being so weird and talking like a lawyer about my lunch? Is this how the super-rich people who pay him expect him to talk? Why didn’t he tell me to hold my horses and wait for what he had for me like mom does when she makes me something special?

He brought in the biggest sushi boat I have ever seen. There were ten pieces each of salmon, gizzard shad, yellow-fin tuna, Tomago (egg), red snapper, and Spanish mackerel. I did a quick check for wasabi and then a small taste test to see if I needed to add wasabi, dip it in soy sauce, or both. It was one of the things a sushi chef a hibachi place showed me when I first tried sushi. Like a machine, I was working my way through the first sushi boat when he brought in another. This boat had rows of octopus, albacore tuna, halibut, sea bass, and shrimp.

Better be sure I eat all I can before someone decides I have to leave right then for my testing. I never had sushi this good before.

All of the pieces of the fish melted in my mouth. Not even the octopus needed very much chewing.

My love of sushi came purely by accident. Only after mom got to work did she find out that they had an out of town meeting and she wouldn’t get home until late. I already knew that dad had a big client dinner that night too. Given my past accidents, they didn’t want me being at home alone for that long, so dad came to get me from school on his lunch break. He explained the issue to his boss and was told to bring me along. The dinner was a huge celebration thrown by the client as dad’s company had helped them make a lot of money. His boss said that this client would have been there drinking at the bar for over an hour by the time we arrived anyway.

I heard him tell dad, “David could be there running naked up and down the tables with flaming rolls of toilet paper. They would only notice the fire if they needed to light something they wanted to smoke.”

When we arrived, the client had already ordered up so much Nigiri Sushi, Maki Sushi, and Sashimi that the restaurant had to call three additional sushi chefs to keep up. I was put over at the sushi bar to keep me out of the way of the drunk adults. Dad made sure to tell the sushi chefs that I was part of the bigger party and that I could have anything I wanted that wasn’t alcoholic. I had never even heard of sushi or sashimi. Over the next few hours, I learned a lot.

First up was shrimp and eel, since they were both fully cooked. I found I didn’t like the rice with them so much. That was when I learned the joys of wasabi. They were very patient as they showed me that I could mix it into soy sauce or take a tiny pinch to put between the fish and the rice. They made me practice until I could do it quickly while using chopsticks. The funniest part of the night was when a new sushi chef came in. Someone joked that I was a sushi virgin. He told me that I had better not eat the green paste.

Uh yeah. I’m twelve. You telling me not to eat the wasabi straight is only going to make me do it!

I got a big blob as all of the sushi chefs watched me. It did make my eyes water a tiny bit, but I loved it. I went back for more until I finished what I had in front of me. They gave me some pickled ginger to cleanse my palette before I tried more sushi. I quickly mixed up some wasabi and soy sauce until I had what seemed like the right bite of wasabi without overpowering the soy sauce. When I tried another piece of the shrimp sushi, I found that it was the perfect fix for the flavor. By the time Dad said it was time to go, I had eaten at least one of every type of sushi they had here and every roll. It turned me into sushi and wasabi junky. When I asked dad when we could come back, he said it would need to be a special occasion. By myself I had eaten over three hundred dollars in sushi, and this was at lower-end of the middle of the road sushi places. That was a lot of money, and still, no sated.

On my birthday that year, my mom and dad once found out that our preferred Hibachi place was having a special all-you-can-eat sushi feast if you are turned thirteen the same week as their thirteenth birthday. Mom only eats California rolls so that she would get hibachi, and dad only eats sushi at business dinners where the company or client is paying the bill. They were taking me there on my thirteenth birthday and dad joked that I would be the reason if the hibachi place never offered to do this again.