Read Online Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life by Thomas T. Thomas - Free Book Online

asked.
    “About six weeks,” Adamson said. “That’s the organ’s incubation period in a bioreactor.”
    “Come again?”
    “How long it takes to grow a heart in a jar,” Peterson said.
    Praxis didn’t have to think about it. “When do we start?”
    “Don’t you want to hear the downsides?” Jamison asked.
    “All right. What are they?”
    “This is all still experimental—”
    “But will I remain on the UNOS list?”
    “Well, yes. This procedure won’t invalidate—”
    Praxis plowed ahead of him. “So if the new Frankenstein heart flops or something, you can always rush me into surgery, cut it out, and put back this little two-stroke pump while we wait for a suitable human donor. I don’t lose my place in line, and I only waste about a month and a half—time that I would spend lying here anyway.”
    “Well, you must understand,” Peterson said, “there’s a limit to the amount of ‘cutting out’ and ‘putting back’ your body can tolerate.”
    “Yeah, sure,” Praxis replied. “But you wouldn’t have brought these gentlemen here if you didn’t think I was a good candidate. So I presume they brought along the appropriate forms for me to sign.”
    Dr. Anderson reached for his briefcase.
    All the rest was details.
    * * *
    Antigone Wells had lost track of the days—more than four, less than fourteen. But she was almost certainly aware of several visits at odd intervals by the physical and speech therapists, renewed passages through that white tunnel filled with beeping noises, and repeated, one-sided consultations among her doctors just beyond the door of her hospital room. It had become clear, even to Wells herself, that she was getting better—stronger, clearer, more precise, more focused—in some ways but not in others. So Dr. Bajwa’s original assessment was proving to be only halfway a lie.
    She was regaining feeling and controlled movement on her right side: tongue, arm, hand, leg, foot. She still had difficulty smiling on command—but then, hadn’t she always? She was able to form words more clearly, now that her tongue was working properly, or at least it did not curl around inside her mouth like a wounded snake when she tried to use it. But these were still only the words that popped into her head from that gray place behind her eyes. The words that she really needed, the words that lived out there among people and inhabited those twisting and branching graphic images, they still eluded her.
    So after those many days of waiting to get better—more than four, less than fourteen—Dr. Bajwa came to consult with two new doctors. And this time they included Wells in the conversation as a person rather than an object.
    “Ms. Wells, I’d like to introduce William Anderson and Peter Adamson,” said Dr. Bajwa. “They’ve come up from the Stanford Medical Center.”
    Antigone Wells nodded at the new men, immediately forgetting which one was which. She did not offer to shake hands, because her right hand was still not fully under control. Anyway, neither of them seemed to expect the social contact. They just smiled at her. She told them slowly, meaning it as a way of greeting, “Don’t … words …”
    “That’s because you’ve had a stroke, ma’am,” Bajwa explained quickly. He seemed to be speaking for Wells’s benefit, although he half-turned to the two other doctors. “We’ve mapped out the areas of—well, nonresponsiveness—in your left hemisphere. There’s some damage to the motor functions, accounting for the obvious loss of physical control. Overall, the darkest region of the scans touches on Broca’s area, which governs the brain’s ability to recognize and recall words and put them into speech. You’ve also acquired some spottiness in areas which might account for your alexia, or receptive aphasia with regard to text. We think you might have some damage in pathways connecting the visual cortex to Wernicke’s area, which interprets what you hear into language