Chapter 200: Getting Into The Groove

Doesn’t breast milk get digested faster than formula?

April, at least, seemed to uphold that theory. By the time we were back to room I changed her soaked diaper and then she downed a four-ounce bottle of formula, quickly, before dropping off to sleep.

“She is such a cute and quiet baby David,” Paula told me when I was getting April into her carrier for her to get some sleep since I wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. “I hope one day I will have a little girl as cute as her. She is so precious and sweet.”

“Thanks. So how have you been doing in therapy this week? Are you relearning a lot of stuff? What about getting your strength back,” I asked to get her talking about herself.

Paula still seemed kind of scatterbrained as she jumped between sounding like an adult, a child, a toddler, and rarely, a teenager. From the best I was able to follow, she felt like she was learning a lot with the brain therapists. I never got a straight answer from her about her physical therapy. She was going twice daily, when she managed to not crash for the rest of the day after her first session, but she couldn’t remember what she did there. Her way of gauging her progress was how much easier it was for her to get in and out of bed than it had been a week ago.

I think she is taking her own showers, even if they are right there making sure they keep her from getting hurt.

Paula fell back to sleep as she was in the middle of telling me something, so I got April’s carrier locked into the matching stroller so I could get to the cafeteria to eat before they closed at eight. I noticed my blind friend doing her best to get what she wanted to eat, but without Braille anywhere, she was getting miffed.

“Can you bring me by a Light Saber and someone to do a quick training for it when you come by to check on Paula later? I met a girl here that found the recovery center didn’t design anything for blind patients. I think she can really use a Light Saber. I don’t know if your family could even afford one. If not for her mom taking the driver’s car insurance company to court to force them to pick up the bill, I doubt she would have even gotten the care need to get her legs to heal properly,” I told Steve as I pushed April over to the girl. “You can take whatever it costs from any of my various accounts it takes to cover the costs. I’ve not met anyone before that deserves it more than she does. I ran into her on accident as she worked her way down the hallway on crutches and using her cane. That definitely wasn’t covered in the rapid paced blindness survival course.”

Do I hear him smiling?

Without hesitation he said, “You going to be available in half an hour? I just happen to have an intern that lives near there who trains children at the clinic on how to use the Light Sabers. As soon as she finishes with her last patient, we will come over that way. Do you know her name?”

Shit I never even asked.

I had him hold on a second as I got near the girl, gently placed my hand on hers, to keep her from falling on her ass as she tried to navigate with a tray while using crutches. She jerked a bit until she heard my voice. I quickly found her name as Jill Hoff.

“Jill Hoff,” I told Steve. “Ok. I’ll most likely still be in the facility’s cafeteria getting something to eat while April is sleeping ... See you then.”

“Sorry I wasn’t trying to startle you. I just happened to have my phone in one hand. I needed to know your name because I’m doing something special for you, but it is a surprise,” I told her. “You mind hanging out down here for thirty to forty-five minutes? Sorry. My manners suck sometimes. Can I help you find something else to eat and something to drink? I don’t see any Braille anywhere. I will even carry your tray if you want. If you don’t want me to the help, I will leave that all to you.”

She gave me a frown before saying, “Actually it is a real pain to carry a tray when using crutches. Kind of hard to see where I’m going as well.”

“Sorry. I didn’t see that coming,” I joked.

I got a big bright smile as she replied, “Funny.”

“Well it does come with some strings,” I said as I watched her frown come on her face again. “You have to agree to babysit while I get myself some more food.”

“Babysit? Like I can do that in this condition. I can’t even find my own food,” she said with her head tilted to the side.

I told her I would explain once we got her over to a table with her dinner. With my help she ended up with a big salad and some chocolate milk to go with her burger and fries. I found a round table, helped her get seated and used her hand to map out where I had put her food. She started eating her fries and then asked me who she was babysitting.

“April. Until I went to pick her up, she was crying non-stop and they couldn’t figure out why. I’m taking care of her until my mom, dad, and twin siblings catch up on their rest. I changed, fed, and put her down, asleep, in her carrier before coming to get dinner. I don’t think she will wake up, but just in case, I wanted to have someone close by,” I told her.

I started to get one of the high chairs made to hold the carrier securely when I felt like a goof. The stroller had it locked in place and all I needed to do was lock the wheels, so I moved it over to be next to Jill’s left hand, as she was eating with her right currently. I did use hand sanitizer on her hand before putting it on the side of the carrier. She felt it to get the shape in her head and then reached in to find April.

She has the prettiest smile. At least she got to see babies before she went blind. I think she might even like babysitting April.

“Looks like you two are all set. I won’t be far away. I just didn’t want to risk dumping food on her as I tried to navigate a stroller, or her carrier, along with a tray. I’ve been known to be a klutz from time to time,” I explained.

I got another grin, so I headed off to get me two double cheese burgers, fries, tater tots, spinach, broccoli, and a bowl of steamed carrots. Chocolate milk sounded pretty good to me so I got a large cup of it as well. At the register I joked that I was eating for two and pointed to April. The old, wrinkled, cranky-looking woman at the register did give me a small laugh at that.

When I started to sit down Jill asked me what I had since something smelled great to her. Turns out that she didn’t even know about the vegetables and asked if she could have some carrots and spinach. I didn’t mind, so I went to get her a fork and refilled her milk for her.

As I was putting her milk down, I told her, “Don’t you dare even think about getting huffy about me refilling your milk. There is no possible way for your to not spill it everywhere as you tried to hold it while using crutches and your cane. Any of the other patients here could slip on it and re-break something again. The floor is the same brown color as the chocolate milk. Most patients in here are having enough trouble carrying their trays. They aren’t paying any attention to the floor.”

I wonder if she has ever used that tongue, which she is sticking out at me, on a girl or boy yet.

Jill seemed almost as hungry as me. She had managed to eat all her food, the veggies I gave her, and then most of my tater tots. We only had twenty minutes before they closed so I headed up to restock on what I wanted as well as the things Jill asked if they had here. I then loaded up another tray that we split as we talked. I didn’t get much out of her other than she was a bit annoyed that she would turn sixteen in a month and wouldn’t ever get to drive.

You can’t just “fix” her. It doesn’t matter that you fully rebuild most of Paula’s eye and optic nerves. You just can’t do it. There can’t be any more miracles anywhere near you. This must be something fixed by documented medical procedures.

I had gotten us both big bowls of ice cream when Steve entered with a tall, nearly flat-chested, woman who wasn’t wearing a bra because she obviously didn’t need it.

“Hello Jill, my name is Steve. David is here helping my daughter Paula recover from a devastating car accident that nearly killed her. Well it did kill her, but they managed to get her back before it caused any more damage to her brain. They’ve known each other since they were very young,” he said. “David called me to ask if I would swing by to bring a gift for you. My company is fine tuning a very advanced type of digital cane. The name our scientists called it is cold and plain boring, so everyone just calls it a Light Saber. I wished I could officially name it that, but then I would have to buy Disney. I don’t like mice or theme parks that much.”

We had to wait on Jill to stop laughing before she said, “Well that would do it. Don’t they own all of the Star Wars universe and everything associated with it now?”

“Probably. Before we go any further talking about the Light Saber, I wanted to get some details of what happened that caused your blindness and examine your eyes, if you don’t mind,” he told her. “It is sort of this thing I do, you know, to earn a living.”

He got a lot more than I think he wanted.

They had been driving from Chattanooga to Gatlinburg early one morning. There had been a storm overnight and there was a thick fog this long mountainous stretch of road on I-75. The higher they went, the thicker the fog got. There were a lot of signs and things about the fog, but someone failed to tell the D.O.T. about the truck carrying a bull dozer that had overturned and was blocking all the lanes. The sun coming just over the horizon made it hard to see anything in the fog. Her mom almost slammed into the people who had hit the truck, or someone had hit them. Her mom was off to the side of the road with her hazards on. That didn’t stop the person flying down the road at over eighty. They were probably going faster since was the speedometer stuck on high end after they plowed into one of the already wrecked cars. Instead of stopping in the mass of wrecked cars, it glanced off them into the passenger side of their car. No one knows that caused her blindness, on that see was blind when she woke up in the hospital. None of the specialists she saw had any clue.

When she finished Steve took off her sunglasses before using a flashlight to look into her roaming eyes. I suddenly felt him pulling in some power from around us and was pretty sure he was looking inside her head. After a minute or two he put her sunglasses back on.

He took out his phone and asked Jill, “Would it be ok if you gave your parents a call to authorize a treatment that has been very successful in curing the cause of your blindness? This is up to you. If you would rather not, then I understand. I can’t promise you this will work, but I see all the signs of the condition the doctors and scientists have identified. They are some of the best in the world. I do want to say this up front for you to consider. I can’t promise it will work and don’t want to give you false hopes. What I can promise is that if this doesn’t work, you won’t be any worse off and I will make sure you always have the latest version of the Light Saber each time we produce a new one.”

Yeah Steve. Does a cow shit in a cow pasture?

Jill gave him the number for her dad and he called him right then so he could put Jill on the phone if needed. The call was surprisingly short. A few seconds of talking to Jill, and her dad gave the approval. Steve had already sent her dad’s phone a form to send back with his consent.

“Your dad said he was fine with my treating your eyes since there is no charge to you or your family at all. I’m going to make a few calls while you learn how to use the Light Saber. I should be able to get someone over here pretty quickly tonight to try to see if the treatment will fix your eyes,” he told her as the woman took over showing her about the Light Saber.

I had to keep biting my tongue as Jill found out a new feature of the Light Saber, which they didn’t have on the one I had. She may have been the first blind person trying to use a cane while on crutches, but Steve’s people had seen enough to create a Bluetooth enabled headband with a directional light and sensors like those in the Light Saber itself. She wouldn’t need to hold the Light Saber at all. It would be in a holder right next to her folded-up cane. With Jill up on her crutches the woman made the adjustments to have it so Jill’s head would move it the same as tapping areas she would have hit with her cane. The light used green laser diodes to mark the area where she was “tapping” as she moved and where her eyes would look if she could see. The computer guts also got a major processing speed upgrade. They were reading off anything she looked at, including the colors where it was aimed.

The woman took a few minutes to teach Jill how to calibrate and adjust the headband so the sensors pointed at where her eyes would look if she could see.

As Jill trained, Steve sat next to me to say, “You’re going to need to check on her regularly over the next week or so after we treat her condition, but nothing special is needed and this won’t be an unexplained miracle. Ophthalmologists in the know are getting wind of the treatment bouncing around at the FDA for them to give us the proper wording they want to approve us starting human trials outside of my clinics on patients who don’t reside in this country and their very presence here is mostly off the books. We aren’t able test on any animals because they can’t contract this condition, not even monkeys. We appear to be on the fast track since tribes in Africa have treated this same condition in their children for centuries. My scientists and doctors who visited these tribes called the process barbaric, even though it works marvelously. From the synopsis I read, these tribes live in areas with a large animal population which frequently knock children down as they run through their tribal lands. So far, we haven’t isolated the biological trigger which modifies the physiological structure of the intraocular fluid in the eye that causes blindness. We tested those who experienced temporary blindness to find they too had a change in their fluid structure. As their bodies exchanged the fluid in their eyes with their normal aqueous humor, their vision began to return. When the ratio between abnormal to normal intraocular fluid increase, so does their amount of blindness. Oddly, trying to remove some amount of the abnormal fluid, to try to force normal aqueous humor to backfill the lost fluid, only the abnormal aqueous humor fills that void. As the percentage of abnormal fluid increases, they patients will experience a numbing of the rods and cones in their eyes. It then progresses to numbing the retina, optic nerve, and finally the muscles which allow the lens to focus and eye dilation. A quick look in her eyes showed me the tell-tale cloudy white, syrupy color present in her intraocular fluid. The solution is exactly what the tribes used, though in significantly more sterile and less invasive. The doctor coming here tonight will numb her eyes, remove a quarter of her intraocular fluid, and replace it with a retrovirus that flags the abnormal fluid in her eyes as a harmful pathogen for her body to attack and remove. The retroviruses work is done in under an hour, but the complete replacement of the abnormal fluid varies between two and four days.”

It was critical that I checked on her frequently over the next few days because the fluid exchange can be very slow, other times it happened overnight. They had a few retroviruses for different variations of this condition. While this works in ninety percent of the patients, they may need to try one of the others. If none worked, the scientists would analyze the samples of the abnormal fluid removed from her eyes before each retrovirus injection. They were so familiar with the different mutations that they were able to synthesize a working retrovirus in hours. He didn’t get to go into more detail because one of his doctors called to say he was here to do the procedure on Jill.

“Jill if you want to get this procedure done right now, we can go right up to your room and do it there. You won’t get to do much moving around tonight. David is going to get instructions on what you’re allowed to do tonight and help you where needed. The nurses are already aware of the procedure, so they will also be available to help you anytime you feel uncomfortable having David help you. As a bonus you are getting a long-lasting antihistamine, to keep your eyes from itching, and a sedative to keep you asleep during the night so you don’t accidentally try to rub your eyes in your sleep,” Steve explained. “In the morning you will find you have protective shields, or specialized goggles, over your eyes to protect them as well.”

With the help of the Light Saber, Jill led the intern to her room where the doctor was waiting for her. He took me to the nurse’s station to explain to us all about the monitoring Jill will need overnight to keep her away from her eyes. Without the antihistamine they would really itch overnight. The sedative should keep her asleep, but they needed to check to be sure. She could really do some damage to her eyes without even knowing it.