Chapter 513: Giving A Leg Up

I put the letter requesting a car to drive his amputee siblings into one pile.

So far, all I had read was from kids wanting something not for themselves but for others in their family or neighborhood that needed it. I don’t think anything costs even a thousand dollars. I handled those with my implant. I know I went way past what they requested, but these kids had valid requests, and I had the money to help them out.

The last one I had was a bit different. A six-year-old girl asked for ten dollars to buy her dying sister a birthday present because this may be her sister’s last birthday. The little girl loved her big sister a lot. Only my ability to read any language helped me decipher the handwriting.

I need to dig into this more.

It is probably illegal to access the dying girl’s medical records, but I did it anyway. From what I could tell, the one dying had much in common with Emily. She has survived multiple cancers. Nothing the doctors tried was having any success doing more than keeping the girl from giving up her fight and making sure her body had the resources to keep going.

At dinner, I made sure that Ariba and Rosie gave me a promise to keep out of trouble while I ran off to help some people. Ellen promised to keep the two in line, even if she had to get creative. Neither girl liked that idea.

“Can I go, Daddy?” April asked.

My parents told her she needed to ask them first, but April could go with me if I wanted.

I reached out to the man in the machine to get his minions to talk with the two amputee kid’s parents about what I had in mind. He said he had a new connector and multiple variations of bionic legs he was running through FDA trials for use with children. There would be no cost to the family.

I was paying for the new minivan to take the kids around to appointments and handle the logistics.

The family is getting two new cars.

It would take a few days to get the parent’s approval and make the logistical arrangements. I will be there to ask the kids if that is something they want to try.

April and I headed to the little girl who wanted ten dollars to buy her sister a birthday gift. I got the girls’ parents’ phone numbers, introduced myself, and told them about their younger daughter’s letter. They had no idea the little girl could even send a letter, much less had a clue who I was or how to reach me. I explained that I brought along my daughter April, who is four. They had a list of the many things their dying daughter wanted to have for her birthday, but they didn’t have the money. I explained that I wanted to help out, and I did have the money to help them with the medical bills and presents for the girl’s birthday. We agreed to meet at their house tonight so that I could introduce myself and April.

I love the reaction to me pulling up in my Camry.

“Are you the David that called us? The one that said he could help us out with our older daughter?” the dad asked. “This better not be a sick joke.”

“No jokes,” April said as she had me pick her up. “Daddy has many expensive cars at home, but he likes this one.”

I explained about getting it after my beat-up Honda got replaced. I gave them a brief overview of how I got my money.

I shrugged and said, “It runs entirely off battery power, with the engine only keeping the batteries charged. The people who gave it to me did a lot of work to reinforce the body and make it look like a piece of junk. One benefit is that no one wants to park around it, and thieves wouldn’t steal it if I left money and the keys on the dash.”

“That isn’t why my daughter and I drive out here. I could have sent you the money and paid off the medical bills from my house,” I told them. “How doesn’t matter, but I discovered that your daughter had survived multiple types of cancer. Now, nothing seems to be working at all. I have a close friend that I never knew was in the hospital with me the various times I managed to knock myself out doing something that should have killed me. She had something they found was a form of a symbiotic parasite that killed off the cancers to keep the host alive. No one knows what triggered it, but the parasite started consuming her body as it tried to fight for its life. The doctors can’t explain what caused my friend to purge the organism from her body. They did analyze the dead cells and may have found something that can do that for your daughter if she has something similar. I would love to be able to give your oldest daughter the gift of coming home to have her birthday cured.”

“Right now, she is barely hanging on. We can go to the hospital right now if you think this is similar to what your friend had inside her. My sister lives with us and watches our younger daughter. She can watch your daughter since we can’t take her into the ward where my oldest fights for her life. You are going to have to pull some strings to get in there yourself since you aren’t family,” the girl’s dad told me.

I laughed and said that I expected to have someone waiting with scrubs and an ID badge to get me anywhere in the hospital. It didn’t have anything to do with my money. It was related to my ability to adjust the man-in-the-machine’s spinal braces.

Two kids had them in this hospital. The kids weren’t yet ready to have the self-adjusting models in place and were having issues getting the ones they had adjusted correctly.

Some organizations had noticed the man-in-the-machine’s androids, and he didn’t want to risk these people capturing one of the androids. He was working on creating a variation that looked and behaved closer to humans. This was a favor to him.

I can do that.

“Mr. Jones, if you would please come with me. I will show you where you can change,” a hospital administrator said when I walked into the hospital.

I found hospital scrubs with my name embroidered on the pocket.

He waited outside and then told me, “I have no idea who you know, but you have unrestricted access to all areas of the hospital, including the pharmacy, which is odd.”

“Probably because I know how to adjust the special spinal braces and have the money to buy everything in this hospital,” I told him.

“Works for me,” he replied with a smile. “If you can do that, then you are ok in my book.”

The parents of the girl were up in her room. I found the two kids that needed the braces adjusted. I borrowed the tool from the nurse’s station and quickly had both kids wanting to do more than give me a hug to show their appreciation. They got help walking around the ward until they were exhausted. Under supervision, I gave them both a sponge bath as I showed the nurses the tricks to washing around where the brace connected to their spines. Both kids went to sleep quickly.

While walking them around the ward, I used the place in my head and implant to scan the dying girl. She didn’t have what Emily did, but it was still a form of parasite behaving similarly. This one wasn’t unknown worldwide but was not known to modern medicine. I had learned of it at some point while learning all the languages and martial arts.

I’m not going to make the pharmacists happy, but they have what is needed.

I went to the pharmacy and explained that I knew of something that would cure the dying girl, but I had to mix it precisely, and they would think I was crazy.

One of the pharmacists said, “They have tried everything else for that little girl. If you screw up, then it is your ass. Maybe something crazy is what we need.”

“You are not crazy, Mr. Jones,” an older pharmacist told me. “I researched your request and found multiple references to what I suspect you are about to mix. I hope that you can make this happen. It requires exact precision down to milligrams.”

I found I needed to make up two of this mixture and six of a slight variant. Another kid in the hospital had the same as the girl I was visiting while six had a minor mutation.

They all have the same birthday too. Very interesting. Where could they have been together at the same time?

I got the pharmacist to back me up with what he found in his research. All eight kids were here, though not all had gotten to the point of being on the edge of dying. Some of the kids were more successful in keeping the parasite at bay.

“If they have the parasite-like organism, and what I am making works, they will have black urine, tar poop, and toxic-smelling barf. We will know soon if it is working or not,” I explained.

We went to the dying girl’s room first.

I walked over beside her bed and told her, “I know someone who had what seems like you have inside you. It isn’t cancer; it helped kill off the cancers because that meant it lived too. Something changed, and now it is eating away at the insides of your body, trying to get what it needs to survive. I have something that should kill this parasite and get it out of your body, but it won’t be pleasant. You will have black pee, tar poop, and barf a lot. All of it will smell horrible. If this works, you will know it by the morning. I found seven more kids in the hospital, who you know because you all share the same birthday, with this same parasite or one very similar.”

“I’m dying, mister. It is hard to keep doing all the nasty things the doctors are doing to me each day. I’m willing to try anything to get better,” she told me.

It went into her IV. I watched with the place in my head as I waited to see what would happen inside her. I was ready to put shields around the parasite to keep it from changing energy colors and mutating, as it did in Emily.

Whatever is in this mixture looks like this parasite is recoiling in fear and trying to get away from it in any way it can.

Her intestines, stomach, and bladder were the quickest ways out of her body that didn’t put it in contact with her bloodstream, at least not for long. I then saw how this mixture killed the parasite instead of allowing it to escape. Interaction with her blood made the parasite change to different energy colors depending on how it got out of her body. The ammonia in urine and stomach acids killed it off. It had no way to defend itself against it.

Faster than they could see, I had the girl’s IV clamped off, her out of bed, and her into the bathroom on the toilet with her Christmas Tree. I grabbed a trashcan with a bag I held in front of her. She barfed first. Once I saw that she had gotten it all out of her stomach, I quickly tied the bag off to stop the smell.

I triple bagged it.

I heard her start to pee and then her intestines gurgling with what was to come.

“I remember having to pee so badly that I didn’t care who saw me, but pooping was always something I wanted to do in private. You aren’t going to barf anymore, and it will be a little while before you finish pooping it all out. Do you want me to stay, or would you prefer some privacy?” I asked.

After letting out a long, wet fart, she said, “I want you to stay, but I don’t want you to have to hear me poop. Can you come back in a little while?”

I got her to stand up, helped her wipe off some of the black pee, and did a quick flush before she was back on the throne.

There was a tech with a hazmat bag waiting to take the barf.

“That was sooner than I thought, but I saw the signs. As you noticed, I can quickly move when needed,” I explained.

Each kid that got the mixture in their IV had the same quick response. Two kids had to suffer the embarrassment of having someone with them as they shit the dead parasite out. They didn’t have the energy to sit on the throne without support.

It was two hours after the first girl got the stuff to purge the parasite when I got back into her room.

“Perfect timing,” a nurse said. “She is asking when you returned if you would help her bathe. The patient won’t even let her parents help.”

I couldn’t stop laughing when I found the girl had a rubber ducky in the bathtub with her. That got a dirty look from her. Nurses and her parents were soon crowding into the bathroom.

“I’m so sorry. That rubber ducky brought back a lot of memories,” I explained. “I did many things that should have killed me but only made me unconscious for days. My friend had a similar parasitic thing inside her, like you. She always seemed to be getting treatment for whatever cancer she had at the time. Her mom’s insurance sucked, and they wouldn’t let them admit her during treatment, only after surgery. She needed overnight care and a place to rest during the day. I always had a private room with two beds, so they started putting her in my room. After a few times, they found that she recovered faster when she was in my room than anywhere else. One time we were both conscious. We were little kids, and the nurse put us in the bathtub together. The tub only had enough water in it to cover our legs. We got left alone for around ten minutes as she helped with another patient. I was a boy, and she was a girl. The nurse found us comparing each other. Instead of getting upset, she got a rubber ducky from somewhere and tossed it into the tub. My friend and I went after it. The next time I was in the hospital, I had a meltdown about wanting my rubber ducky. It wasn’t until my friend got that parasite out of her that she told me she had won the ducky all those years before. They kept it for her, and she told the nurses that I could borrow it when I was there. I had never noticed the fading permanent marker where they wrote her name on it.”

The girl blushed down to her chest when I told her why I laughed.

A nurse said, “Someone has a wicked sense of humor. We got those about an hour before you came up to try out your mad scientist cure. The note said to give them to the kids when we put them in the tub. None of these kids have been able to take a bath in the tub for weeks. We removed all the stitches from any of their most recent surgeries over a week ago, so they are all safe to bathe. It also explains why they said to tell you that you caused them to make this mess, so you have to clean it up. You don’t mind washing kids, do you?”

“As long as I don’t have to get in the tub with them, I’m good to go,” I answered.

They left the girl and me alone to help her take a bath with some modicum of privacy. It wasn’t like the girl had any modesty left after all her times in the hospital. We worked on getting her clean, her hair washed, dried, and then lightly powdered between her legs. Someone brought her another gift, children’s hospital pajamas.

Someone brought the hospital a truckload of kid’s hospital pajamas of every size, and some made it to this girl’s room.

I moved back through the kids I had given the parasite-evicting mixture to bathe them.

One boy got embarrassed about it getting hard, so I made sure to joke, “I will have the nurse check that off as working. If you think that is embarrassing, wait until you hit puberty. It will pop up for no reason at all. You had a lot of poop stuck on your balls that I had to work to clean off. It would have happened if a nurse or your parents were helping you clean up.”

“I’ve never had any male nurses or my dad help me take a bath, at least none that I can remember. I didn’t want you to think I was gay,” he said softly.