Practicing Medicine // Complete

Chapter Twenty One: The Barking Iron

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2075 ROBCO(R)

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HOLLOW TAPE LOADED: "THE-BARKING-IRON"

INITIALISING...

SUCCESS!

STATUS

Battery Level: 100% (CHARGING)

Wireless Signal: (?)

Operating Temperature: 92F

HEALTH

BP: ?

SPO2: 92%

Temp: 98.5F

RR: 16

HR: 50

WARNINGS
Pulse: Weakened
Airway: WARNING
Temperature: WARNING
Circulation: Weakened
Blood Pressure: WARNING
Blood PH: WARNING
Respiration: WARNING
Liver: Weakened
Circulation: Weakened

TIME

Day: 3 October 2279

Time: 01:23

CLIMATE

Current Temperature: 53F

Atmospheric Pressure: 762 mmHG

Background Radiation: 1.833 RAD

WARNINGS

Dangerous radiation level!

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"Hey Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me;

I'm not sleepy and there ain't no place I'm goin' to.

Hey Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me,

In the jingle jangle morning, I'll come followin' you..."

"Could you turn that off? I'm tryin' to focus!" I snapped. Another late night, and things were falling apart faster than ever. Tandi was off sulking, Savanna was nursing her head injury, and here I was, struggling to get an IV in on our fearless, completely comatose leader's wrinkly arm in the back of the crashed NCR med-evac chopper where we'd set up camp. Savanna leaned out from the cockpit.

"Oh, but it's Bob Dylan! This song's a classic!" Her protests fell on deaf ears. I was on my sixth unsuccessful stick now, and I wasn't in the mood to pretend that I liked her stupid Folk music. I loved that girl, but we were seriously gonna need to find some middle ground with the music...

"Ha! Gotcha now, you paralyzed raisin sonofabitch!" I held up Gram's freshly stuck arm triumphantly. Despite his absolutely mystifying biology, I'd managed to feel out a juicy vein for some of that totally necessary peripheral access. Never mind that I could have just as easily gone for IO infusion directly into his humerus with the cool little drill that I'd found in one of the helicopter's many compartments- No, I was still the best phlebotomist this side of the Mojave, which meant that it my sworn duty to constantly remind myself! I started pushing the Doxapram.

"How's Gram doing back there? Do you think the venom caused any real damage?" asked Savanna. I shrugged.

"Prolly not. He's already absorbed and pissed out most of it, which makes me think he's got some sort of body-mods to help fight this kind of thing. That'd explain why he didn't tell us that he was hit back there." My Doxapram IV was running a little slow given the low molarity of the solution, so I very gently adjusted the titration knob. "Titrate to effect," my father had always said, though in retrospect I'm pretty sure that he had been making fun of doctors like me. No matter how chaotic the situation, the pretentious fucker always manually calculated his drip rates.