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chapter, chapter 2, craft, Eden, Eden's Gate, Godfrey, laporoscopic, literature, novel, story, surgery, writing
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The Lab, Eden’s Gate, Present Day – October 11
He felt a throb of excitement as the scalpel sliced through his flesh.
In spite of the circumstances, and to say nothing of the risk, there was always that thrill of the first cut, and he lived for it as much now as he had in his youth.
His hastily concocted anaesthetic cocktail was holding steady, and his heartrate was stable. He’d lost so much weight in the last week, his skin elasticity was practically nil, but there was no use worrying about such things now. The rest of his life would be measured in weeks, not years, and there was too much to force into the remaining time to fret over his long-term health.
Only one person concerned him now.
His heart sped up at the thought, and he forced himself to be calm, to focus on the task at hand, and to be perfect as he had always been. So much was still locked in his mind, too many problems embedded in his future to solve in the next few weeks; he could only work on the largest, and by far the most important.
Eden.
His eyes blurred as he tried to focus on the mirror suspended above his makeshift operating table.
“Not now,” he muttered, squeezing his eyes shut.
The spike in his heart rate must have been accompanied by a surge of adrenaline. In any other situation, it wouldn’t matter, but not when one was performing laparoscopic surgery alone, and on one’s own body. It was an arrogant act, and he’d recognized that from the first instant the idea entered his head. But he was Godfrey Meredith, a miracle worker among men. He should be able to perform this one procedure, even if it was on himself.
As the adrenaline gradually dissipated, he was able to open his eyes and concentrate on the mirror once more.
In his mind’s eye, he recalled his full-body scan from that morning, after he’d awoken and gone through his normal routine. Perhaps he was more tired than usual, his brain in a fog, his ankles a bit thick from fluid retention. But when he saw high levels of bilirubin in his daily lab results, he knew it went beyond his recent illness.
His liver was failing, and the scan had revealed the likely cause.
He envisioned exactly where it was in his stomach that he’d spotted the damn thing, and eased the trocar through his incision until it went deep enough to reach his stomach without risk of perforating it. He hoped.
Fingers trembling, he grasped the scope he’d modified and threaded it through the trocar. The camera at the end fed a steady image to the monitor suspended above his head. When it reached the end, he noted with dismay that he’d miscalculated the depth of his stomach, and the pointed tip of the trocar had scraped his organ.
Too late to stop now.
He activated the laser scalpel in the scope and gently incised a cut in his stomach wall, a millimeter at a time. With any luck, the object would be out in a matter of minutes, and he’d have bought himself a few weeks.
He finished the incision and gently retracted the scope until it was free of the trocar.
A trembling fit overcame him and he dropped the scope on the ground.
“Damn.” His shaking fingers gripped a second scope, this one with a camera and set of pincers built into the end. For the first time since he’d begun to suspect something was wrong, he wished he wasn’t alone.
But he wouldn’t be alone for much longer. Hildegard would come back, ostensibly delivering him from his impromptu meeting in Melbourne. He would be expected at home, and he would try to behave as if he wasn’t a member of the walking dead.
Of course, if he wasn’t successful today, he might not make it home.
He took a deep breath and tried to thread the scope through the trocar when a steady, gloved hand covered his.
“What are you doing?” He gasped.
She gently pried the scope from his fingers. “Sir, you instructed me to take over if any of your vital signs became dangerous.”
“Is anything critical?”
She didn’t blink. “All of them.”
“That doesn’t mean I was serious,” he muttered as her fingers deftly took over the procedure. Within minutes, they were looking inside his stomach again. “Leave the green one,” he said sharply as the pincers closed around the wrong object on his monitor. “That one’s from me.” And it was the only reason he’d been able to pull the surgery off.
She detached the offending object from his stomach lining and carefully delivered it through the trocar. He winced, not from pain, but from the reality of what it represented.
Someone wanted to kill him.
“Did I teach you that bedside manner?” His eyes slid down the length of her arm to her empty left hand. Who knew the sin of refusal would be the one to end his life?
Sweat coated his skin, and the tremors were almost uncontrollable as the anaesthetic cocktail steadily wore off.
“Close everything up.”
She dexterously manipulated the stapler inside his abdomen and sutured his incisions before he could count to twenty.
“You will not be well enough to move for another seven hours, sir. I will alert Miss James to assist you.”
“No.” Eden would ask too many questions, and she wouldn’t let it go until she had the full truth out of him. He had to be sure of the facts before he could tell her the truth. “Give me a sedative, monitor my vitals, and bring me around in four hours. Do not alert Miss James for any reason.” His mind made one last connection before the sedative entered his bloodstream. “Check her recent labs for bilirubin and wake me immediately if anything comes back positive. And put that damn thing someplace secure. I need to see Atticus about it.”
“Understood, sir.” She dispassionately examined the object locked in the pincers. Without a word, she opened the pincers and dropped her prize into a metal collection tray where it landed with a clank.