**Liquid Balance: A Riveting Tale of Wealth, Speed, and Unseen Perils**
Embark on an adrenaline-fueled journey into the opulent and treacherous world of "Liquid Balance," the gripping novel by Viktor A. King. In this spellbinding narrative, follow t...
"Madame, please come forward." A doctor in a green uniform, elderly, canine, pudgy, joined me.
"I am Professor Giuseppe Arnoldi of the Veronesi Foundation, and I specialize in spinal cord injuries and their reconstruction."
"Pleased to meet you, I'm the wife." He looked me straight in the eyes, they were coal black, the accent sounded Milanese, but mostly he had hidden it from clear speech, spelling out vocabulary with precision.
"I see you are fatigued. We will retire to the parlor, come with me. Then I will allow you to visit your husband."
"Whatever," I had given up for several hours already.
"Where can I sit with the lady for peace of mind?" he turned to a doctor beside him.
"I'll have a nurse take you, Professor," and I understood the hierarchies of intervention on my husband.
He was the Professor.
A zealous nurse pushed me in my wheelchair to a small, brightly lit room down the hall.
I assumed that there they communicated the deaths or the terrible news, the ones you would never imagine hearing, the ones that radically change your life.
"Please leave us alone."
The nurse walked away, closing the door, obsequiously.
"As you may have been informed, the patient suffered a spinal cord injury due to the severe impact. Now, trying to be as clear as possible, these injuries can lead to four heterogeneous groups of clinical pictures.
Paraplegia is defined as a sensory motor disorder that contemplates the lower limbs and sphincter control, followed by quadriplegia to which the upper limbs and neurovegetative disorders are added. Following may instead involve only the clinical picture of paraparesis and tetraparesis, incomplete paralysis of the lower limbs and four limbs, respectively."
He paused.
He asked with his gaze if I was absorbing the news.
I motioned for him to continue.
"It would appear from the x-rays that only the lower extremities were compromised and that the patient still feels sensation in the upper extremities and sphincter and has maintained cognitive ability intact."
He paused. He was watching me. Maybe he was afraid I was going to faint. Honestly, I thought it was good news.
"Shall I continue?"
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"Yeah sure." came out my voice, faint, sick.
"We have to wait for him to wake up and submit him to sensitivity testing."
"Is he in a coma?"
"No, just under anesthetic. In a few hours, the effect will become mild, it will be under gradual administration for shock and postoperative pain, but the doses will be gradually decreased."
"So he lives?" I was a little girl at the doctor's.
A child in need of certainty.
"Yes, of course. But the spinal injury unfortunately was there and it was unavoidable, the nerves were severed, not cleanly, maybe one day we can recreate the interruption in the lower limbs, but for now, we can only intervene with therapy. Even effective therapy like Hydrokinesiotherapy, but of long benefit."
Silence.
What do you want me to say.
What you want me to think.
"Later on when he's back in his life, and he's recovered from the shock, we can intervene with nano genetics. I don't recommend it now. Patients who go through such operations, rejecting their condition, generally do not promote recovery."
"I don't think a man like that will accept being reduced like that." My voice cracked, a cripple.
So he was the equivalent of a cripple, in a wheelchair, assisted entirely.
"I realize, but we performed a miracle in the operating room, the nerves seemed to be severed cleanly, that would have meant he was enslaved to a neurovegetative condition."
"Yes of course. Thank you."
"Now she can just stand by him."
"Yes, I do that naturally," I was blown away.
Stand beside him as he learned the impact of his transformation?
"You'll have to make him feel loved all the time, it's important that his status as a man towards you, doesn't change."
Beloved?
Ours was a doctor contract.
"Yes." I bowed my eyes. Tears were welling up from the dimness of acceptance.
Has she been hospitalized?"
"I had an abortion."
"I'm sorry. I can prescribe a sedative to help you master the anxiety and uncertainty of this moment."
"Yes please." Knock me out.
"Just for the first few days, then your husband will need you."
"Can I go to him?"
"Yes, of course. I think he will be pleased to see you when he regains consciousness. Before we sedated him, he was insistently requesting your presence."
"Yes?"
"Yes Ma'am, you will see that you will work it out. When you are discharged and return to Vienna, call me. I'll leave you my number. We are studying how to implant new self-reproducing cells that regenerate nerves over time. These are invasive techniques, but in the lab, they are resolving."
"Yeah okay. Give it to me." Did you know, Professor, that when you're drowning, you hang on to the twig?
Have you ever drowned Professor? I recommend genetic nano, a small and expensive lie, to save yourself and become a man again.
"Thank you, I'm going to Hans now."
"Be sure, when you wake up, don't say anything. Let them call me and the operators intervene. It may be intolerable initially."
"Yeah sure."
It was incredibly ironic the situation, they wanted to tell Hans about it, to keep her from freaking out on him alone.
He opened the door and led her in her wheelchair, to his bed. The rhythmic beeping of the monitor to the right of the bed, was somehow, comforting.
He became hypnotized.
"I'm going to go now, they'll call me immediately as soon as he wakes up."
I didn't answer.
I observed.
He was so pale. Full of bruises on his face and cuts that they had disinfected and stitched up.
