Welcome to the Madhouse

Welcome To The Madhouse: Chapter Five

Chapter Five: Scored

Grace woke up the next 'morning', or actually 'next shift', disoriented and groggy. The previous day had been grueling in terms of hours in the operating room and she barely recalled shooing that sweet corporal away, so that she could stumble into the nearest vacant call room. She had collapsed onto the pallet, still in her scrubs, and was probably asleep before her head had hit the pillow.

Her wrist-comp had woken her from a deep sleep, leaving her a grand total of thirty minutes to shower, change, eat breakfast, and do her patient rounds, before having to be in the operating theater again - M5 OR2 this time. Luckily, she only had two patients to look in on, so hopefully it would not take her too long. She could always skip breakfast.

Grace showered and changed into clean operating room scrubs in record time, despite all of her aches and pains from her arrival, and she charged out of the call room, almost barreling into a SAMM-E android.

"Oh! Are you SAMM-E 777? If you are, please let Dr. Al-Fadi know I will meet him in the OR in half a bell. Just rounding on our patients from yesterday," Grace said, and she rushed off, not waiting for a reply.

Grace keyed in the patients' names into her wrist-comp and the locator directed her to their intensive care suites. Thank goodness she had slept in one of the call rooms! If she had gone to the quarters initially assigned to her, she would never have had time to see the patients before surgery!

Dr. Al-Fadi would, of course, want to know how they were doing this morning, and would have expected her to have checked on them, before showing up at the OR. The M7 Surgical Intensive Care Unit was mere steps away from the call room she had used!

The first patient on whom she had assisted in surgery, the tiger soldier, Captain Damien Lamont, was sleeping quietly in an intensive care room just in front of the nurses' station. The room was relatively dark, indirect light coming in from the doorway and through the observational glass wall that faced the nurses' work area. Small lights blinked from the monitors above the patient's bed. Astonishingly, the tiger soldier was off of the ventilator already, breathing on his own! Grace could hardly believe it. She would never have expected anyone so badly damaged to have survived not only the bomb blast, but also the reconstructive surgery! This tiger soldier was now more genetically-engineered replacement parts and bio-prosthetic equipment, than original human material. It had taken nine hours of operating time to piece this man back together! After that, they had then gone on to replace one lung and both upper limbs on a jaguar soldier. Grace could not remember what she had actually said to Corporal McMullen, when she had emerged from the operating room and had encountered him, dutifully waiting at the nurses' station to show her to her quarters. She hoped it had been polite or, at least, relatively coherent. The conversation was a complete blank. She had probably been sleepwalking at that point!

Grace stared down at the peaceful face of her patient, Captain Damian Lamont. She had never operated on a genetically-modified tigerman before. His face was lightly furred with the orange, black, and white coloration of a real tiger, but his features were handsome and totally human except for the fine, silvery whiskers and long, white fangs whose tips just showed between his closed lips. His body, which had huge, powerful musculature, had slightly denser, short, tiger-striped fur on his back, neck, and limbs but finer, soft white downy fur on his chest, abdomen, inner thighs and groin region. His hands, which were massive, were also lightly furred in tiger pattern on the backs and his thick, powerful fingers possessed razor-sharp, retractable claws, which were indrawn at the moment.

Encircling his wrists and ankles were thick titanium manacles with chains which were attached to the bed frame. Grace was standing beside the left hand side of the tigerman's bed, facing towards the observation glass. The manacles made it very difficult for Grace to palpate the captain's pulse on his left wrist, the only original human limb he still possessed. As she pushed the manacle as far up the arm as it would go, she touched the luxuriant, down-like fur of the captain's forearm. The texture was velvety soft, overlying his radial pulse.