Substitution - Chapter 7

Story by Gruffy on SoFurry

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

#7 of Substitution (TF Themes)


Substitution - Chapter 7

*

Continuing TF fun for avatar?user=82690&character=0&clevel=2 Nex_Canis - thank you for your feedback, everyone, it's been a pleasure reading it all :)

*

Alarms going off in the recombination control room was not an unusual thing. Their patients, also known as customers, were of a particularly high maintenance kind, and demanded constant attention from both the staff and the automated monitoring systems. Yet the tone that now blasted through the glass box overseeing the main floor of the clean room was the one everyone knew as the red alert signal.

The nurse in charge turned her eyes upon the screen where the warnings were displayed, and immediately felt a pang of anxiety. The flashing alerts kept popping up, and it seemed that the computer was getting worried. Yet the nurse was not supposed to leave her station - whatever the emergency, someone had to keep an eye on the rest of the patients that might require assistance or a sudden adjustment to their regimes. What she needed to do then was to hit the button that roused the response team into action.

"RESUSCITATION ALARM. ALL RESPONSE TEAM MEMBERS TO CRADLE NUMBER 7. RESUSCITATION ALARM. CRADLE NUMBER 7."

Hectic activity ensued throughout the recombination facility, as people hurried from their usual positions to convene at the site of the alarm. The staff appeared almost ghostly under the flashing alert lights, in their white clean suits and lugging along the emergency equipment carts. Their subject was still inside one of the tanks, limbs in a state of prolonged contraction, back arched into an unnatural angle.

"What do we have here?!" Doctor Shutt yelled across the room while he made his way through the laboratory floor.

"Looks like tonic-clonic seizures!" replied one of the staff who had arrived already and read out information on the tank's associated display unit.

"Damn," the vulpine physician rumbled. He took over the position by the tank and quickly tapped through different displays views to get more on the issue, "activity is through the roof."

"Load with anticonvulsant?" one of the nurses suggested.

"Yes, yes, let's infuse with 25 milligrams of Neurolexin and - "

Another alarm went off on the console. Something even more shocking happened, however, even more disturbing than the sight of the wolf inside the tank contracted in the seizure. The usually weakly yellowish, amber-colored liquid that served as the so-called growth medium was rapidly turning red.

"h shit!" Doctor Shutt yelped spontaneously.

"Did he just tear the aortic - "

"GET THE GURNEY!" Doctor Shutt yelled as he opened a small plastic protective panel on the control console and slammed his glowed paw against the series of buttons under the stenciled legend: "SYSTEM EMERGENCY EVACUATION".

Yet another alarm crackled through the air, and a blue warning light began to flash continuously over the tank in question. A rumbling rose from the base of the stainless steel vessel, and the fluid inside it began to churn.

"Everything ready!" the fox doctor sounded almost hysterical. "Oxygen, suction, SURGEON! Alert the surgeon! Alert everyone!"

The tank gurgled and the fluid level was by now visibly getting lower and lower. Soon the great lupine body within laid against the bottom of the tank, shaking upon it as yet another convulsion overtook him. The tail flapped against the window with a shocking, wet flapping motion and noise.

"Get the gurney over here!" Doctor Shutt commanded.

He moved to the foot end of the tank and released the locking bolts holding the panel closed. It opened almost painfully slowly, supported by two hydraulic arms, and the movement was accompanied by a rush of the remaining solution from inside the tank. It was warm, slippery and had an unspeakable, organic smell that even penetrated through the filters of the masks everyone wore to protect their patients from outside microbes.

"Get the gurney up now!"

The technicians moved the wheeled gurney into place and raised the adjustable platform so that it was more or less with the bottom of the hatch that had now been opened into the tank. The fox doctor was on the move again, however. He'd pulled out a stepladder and was now busily opening the top of the tank so that he could get his paws onto the patient. This too took what felt like too long, yet it couldn't have been more than seconds. The fox had practiced this procedure many times, but it was the first time he had to put it into action. The adrenaline flooding his body made his heart beat like the tail that still slapped about inside the wet confines of the tank.

"Oh, damn...oh crap..." the fox repeated while staring at the bloody mess forming around the wolf's stomach. He could see the source, too, a tear in the connectors on one of the tubes coiling towards the patient's belly.

"Shit!" the fox yelled again. His paw moved instinctively to squeeze on the tube, in a desperate effort to quench the bleeding. The blood kept oozing from between the white fingers that now clutched the source of the bleeding. "Good God!"

"Blood pressure is collapsing and the pulse is rising!" one of the technicians reported from the side of the tank, eyes fixed on the display screen. "Patient's going into shock!"

"We have to get him out of the tank!" Doctor Shutt called out. "Bentley! Open the crash instrument tray!"

Nurse Bentley, whom was a slim lion, quickly pulled open one of the drawers on the resuscitation equipment cart. The draw contained instruments neatly packed on a plastic tray, each in their sterile wrapping.

"What do you need?" she yelled.

"All the DeBakey clamps and the shears! I need to cut him off the umbilical system!"

"Jesus..." the nurse muttered while she gathered the instruments."

"Still going south!" the technician's voice was as alarming as the beeping tone of the monitor.

"Get the epi ready and the crystalloids!" Doctor Shutt muttered. The lion handed him the instruments one by one, which he immediately put into action by snapping them onto the tubes protruding from the wolf's abdominal region. "We need the hemostatic four by fours too!"

Blood gushed from the tubes as the fox cut them and they flopped down, oozing fluids from them.

"Alright, pull him out!" the fox jumped down from the top of the tank.

The unconscious wolf was hauled by his feet onto the plastic-covered surface of the gurney, which was then adjusted down to a height that made it easier for them to work at their patient.

"Trendelenburg! Roll him over to get the fluid out of his lungs!"

The scene that created was truly horrific. There laid the huge, twitching wolf, with blood covering both him and the furs in white clothing surrounding him. It looked like there was blood everywhere, and even more of it kept dripping from the tubes that slipped out of the tank. The floor was covered in a viscous mixture of blood and amniotic fluid. One of the technicians even managed to slip on it, coming over to offer further assistance, and skidded across the floor before landing against a water cooler.

"Hook up the leads!" the fox doctor was still going at it. "Suction the airway! He's gonna have to learn to breathe, fast, or we're losing him!"

With one paw clutching the tubes, the fox used the other, formed into a fist, to rub the wolf's chest vigorously.

"Come on...come on..."

*

Doctor Peter Cordon had been in his office, when his pager gave him the alert that something troubling was happening in the recombinant room. A glance on his computer screen had told him enough to make the Rottweiler run all the way to the changing rooms and to go through the process of dressing into a clean suit with maximum haste. He was fogging up his respirator faceplate with his huffing by the time he was finally through the airlock and onto the laboratory floor.

Only five minutes had passed since the initial alarm had gone off, yet things seemed almost calm by now. The staff of the laboratory surrounded the gurney, and upon it laid the wolf, a mask held over his muzzle while one of the nurses squeezed the bag that did the breathing for him. A portable monitor displayed a steady heartbeat, sitting atop one of the carts that had been rushed over to the scene of Frankensteinian proportions, with the bloody fluids, soiled bandages and mysterious tubes and cables littering the floor by now.

"What's the patient status?" Doctor Cordon panted by the time he reached the site of pod number 7, patient Roman Kyle, total recombination. "What happened here?"

Doctor Shutt was standing by the the wolf still. His paws held stainless steel instruments as he was currently in the process of trimming the tubes that still poked out of the wolf's stomach, with associated clamps hanging off them like some sort of strange ornaments. The blood that covered his clean suit made it look like he'd tried to dismember the wolf.

"He had a seizure and tore his arterial umbilical line," Doctor Shutt replied, matter-of-fact. "We had to take him out to fix it. The seizure was controlled with Neurolexin while we started resuscitation."

Doctor Cordon shook his head.

"How much did he lose?"

"We estimate maybe a liter, a liter and a half at most," Doctor Shutt said. "We're infusing with lactated Ringer's and got him on epi, 5 micrograms per minute. He's stabilizing now, BP and pulse rate are quite good for the moment. He's also exchanging gasses sufficiently enough, with a pulse oximetry value of 91."

"How the hell could this happen?" Cordon growled. "Those lines are checked every day!"

"He had a powerful seizure," the fox replied without defence in his voice, "he was thrashing all around the tank, it's a good thing he didn't hurt himself while he was at it. The tear on the subcutaneous graft was only a small one, thankfully."

"Shit like this can't happen or we are done!" Cordon's snort fogged up his faceplate even further. "Especially not with this patient! The insurance company is going to chew our tails off - "

"Doctor, he is fine," Doctor Shutt said, "he's stable. The patient is doing fine for now - "

"He had a seizure and then he almost bled to death in his tank, this is not fine!" the Rottweiler yelled, his ears flat inside his protective hood. "This is wholly unacceptable!"

The gathered staff stared at this scene with interest and consternation. The two doctors seemed to be having a standoff, amidst this extraordinary backdrop. The wolf was unconscious and fully unaware of what was taking place, of course, his broad chest rising and falling slowly with the pace set by the paws pumping oxygen into his lungs.

"I'm sure the patient thinks so too, Doctor," Dr. Shutt said. "But he's very much alive."

The fox gestured at their patient with a bloodied paw that clutched some surgical forceps as well for extra sinister effect.

"And a very fine specimen, too," the fox added. "He's perfect. Musculature, bone structure..."

The Rottweiler let out a deep grumble.

"Of course he's goddarn perfect, I designed him! I could have given him two heads if I wanted but I didn't!" Doctor Cordon snapped. "And now it's all getting messed up! If we got this far and he's going to be lost due to birth complications - "

"Pulse ox has been over 90 consistently ever since we opened the airways, he's perfusing adequately," Doctor Shutt said, "there hasn't been any long-term hypoxia. Peripheral blood flow is good."

"We can't know what the effects might be neurologically!" Cordon grumbled. "He's borderline to begin with, any kind of a disturbance of circulation might cause permanent irreversible damage."

"It's impossible to do a neurological status examination at the moment," Doctor Shutt said, "the hypnotics are still in his system, his GCS is 3."

"You get that for for being alive," said Doctor Cordon. "And looks like you're making it as hard for him as possible!"

"What do you want us to do then?" Doctor Shutt muttered. "Put him back into the tank?"

"He's 139 days post-fertilization," the Rottweiler harrumphed, "you've cut him off the induction sequence, he's going to be in shock in a matter of hours if we don't start weaning him off right away."

"So let's get him to the OR to fix the graft and then start him back on the sequence," the fox retorted, "we can start the steroids and get his lungs up to full speed. We can worry about other things later."

The Rottweiler seemed torn. The fox was obviously stating what was the reasonable course of action, yet he hesitated. He was probably annoyed that the one time things were truly going wrong in the facility, he wasn't there to immediately jump in and save the day.

"Who's on call?" Doctor Cordon rumbled.

"Campbell," Shutt said. "She's ready to scrub in. She was alerted automatically when this started."

"Alright," said Doctor Cordon, "let's get the DNA infuser into OR 1 and let's start him right away on the respiratory steroids! And let's make sure that he doesn't start bleeding again!"

Since the Rottweiler was obviously taking command now, nurse Bentley dared to step forward to make a question.

"Doctor," the lion murmured, "who is going to inform the next of kin?"

Doctor Shutt glanced at the aggressive dog. Doctor Cordon shrugged.

"His case worker, of course," the dog said. "Get Naylor on the phone, Doctor Shutt, and explain the situation. He can make the next call. I'll be in surgery with Doctor Campbell."

"Yes," the fox said.

"And get this goddamn mess cleaned up, this is a health hazard to the rest of the recombinants!" the Rottweiler sneered.