by G. Wulfing
We Are Both Mammals
Published by G. Wulfing at Smashwords
Copyright 2015 G. Wulfing
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Table of contents:
We Are Both Mammals
About G. Wulfing
We Are Both Mammals
Waking was a haze: I cannot say when I first woke or what happened or what I felt. At some point I opened my eyes; I can remember doing that, and seeing light from the window of the clinic, and realising that I was in a hospital bed. It may have been morning or afternoon; I cannot tell. There were people in the room with me: the nurses, I believe, and perhaps the surgeon who had operated on me.
On us.
I know that they spoke to me, but I have no recollection of what they said. Everything is blurred and vague in these memories. At some point, I woke up more coherent, and found that there were no tubes in my mouth nor an oxygen mask on my face. Presumably this means that I was conscious of those things being there at some earlier point, but I don’t remember them.
“Oh, you’re waking up,” remarked a kindly female voice. My whole body ached dully. I think I asked where I was and what had happened. The nurse – she of the kindly voice – informed me that I had undergone surgery. I remember nothing further.
The next memory is more vivid: of waking again, and asking where I was and what had happened. A nurse – possibly the same one, I have no idea – informed me that I had undergone surgery. I processed this, and asked again, somewhat dazedly, what had happened. The nurse told me that I had been in an accident. Slowly, she explained that I had sustained severe injuries to my internal organs, and that I had undergone life-saving surgery.
The third time I remember waking up, I felt fear. Previously I had been too dazed and bewildered to feel much of anything except some anxiety, but the nurses had sounded so reassuring that my dozy brain had subsided back into unconsciousness without experiencing much arousal; this time, my body seemed to feel that something was wrong. The dull aching in my body also felt more intense: I was aware of what felt like bruising and swelling, seemingly throughout my body, and vague pains that seemed like they were screened off, or coming from underwater, somehow; not immediate, but still very present in my body. I could only breathe shallowly, and I was not sure why.
“What happened?” I demanded, feebly, of the nurse in the room. I could now see the room more clearly: it had light blue walls, a couple of doorways leading off into more brightly-lit areas, and a couple of white things that might have been boxy machines, or furniture like chests of drawers, positioned about the room. The lighting was somewhat dim.
“You’ve had surgery,” the nurse replied, approaching the bed. He was dark-skinned, and wore a pale blue uniform.
“Why?” I asked anxiously, not remembering the previous explanation I had received.
“You were in an accident,” he said simply.
“Why?” I croaked stupidly, suddenly feeling that my throat was rasping and dry.
“Would you like a drink of water?” the nurse offered.
I whispered, “Yes”, and there was a faint humming as he made part of the hospital bed tilt upwards so that my head and torso were raised slightly and I could drink. As the bed moved, I registered that my ribs and midriff, from beneath the pectorals, seemed to be covered in bandages and dressings. My fuzzy mind reasoned that maybe that bandaging was the reason why I could not seem to breathe properly.
I could only manage a mouthful from the disposable cup that he held to my mouth. The effort required seemed enormous, and exhausting. I felt weak and drained; weaker than I had ever felt in my life. I seemed to doze after that.
I woke several times in the next twenty-four hours: I know this because there was an analogue clock on the light blue wall in front of me, above one of the doorways, and each time I woke I had the feeling that I had not slept long. The wakings all blur, however. At some point I discovered that there was a drip inserted into the back of my left hand. A nurse told me that there was a pad near my right hand, with electrical cords leading off it, which I could press if I needed anything, and a couple of times I pressed it to ask for water. My throat was so dry. I was thirsty, but I was glad of that, in a way; it was somehow good to feel something definite, something other than vague pains and bewilderment and grogginess. My thirst reassured me that I was alive. Sometimes, half awake, I would hear calm, quiet voices in the room, but they didn’t seem to be talking to me.
The next thing I remember with any degree of clarity is that the clock on the wall read five o’clock, and I could tell by the gloom that it was early in the morning. I blinked, feeling more awake than before, and pressed the pad under my hand.
In a moment a pair of nurses arrived, both female, wearing pale blue uniforms, and they seemed vaguely familiar somehow. They put on a dim light, raised the upper part of the bed a little, and helped me to drink. There was a cabinet at my left that held the disposable cup from which I had been drinking.
As one of the nurses, standing at my left, helped me to drink, I realised that the other was on the other side of the large bed, on my right, doing something. As my brain cleared a little more, I looked sluggishly in that direction, and realised that there was another patient in the bed with me: a thurga.
For an instant my drug-addled brain thought it was an animal, as thurga-a do resemble brushtail possums in many ways, though they have longer limbs and are the size of a large domestic cat; and it was mostly covered by the bedclothes, as I was, as it lay on its back over a metre away from me. Its furry, dark brown arms, with their hands like a rat’s forepaws, lay on the sheets that reached to its chest. As the creature’s bright dark eyes looked back at me from its dark-furred face, I recognised it as a thurga: a native of the planet on which I was living and working.
“Daniel,” said the nurse on my left, very gently, “have you met Toro-a-Ba?”
In that instant, a curious and terrifying thing happened. It was as though my brain realised long before I did that something was horribly wrong. Whether it was the nurse’s tones or the puzzling sight of the thurga sharing my hospital bed or something else, I do not know; but a sick chill gripped my heart. I stared stupidly at the thurga, which held my gaze.
“No,” I murmured, not understanding why I felt such trepidation.
“Daniel, you and Toro-a-Ba have undergone the same surgery.”
“Oh,” I mumbled, wondering vaguely why the thurga’s surgery was relevant to mine.
“Hello, Daniel,” the thurga said to me softly, in English, and there was what seemed like great tenderness in its voice, almost as though it knew me well. Something about this seemed very wrong to me, but I could not understand what. Perhaps I was supposed to know this thurga. To a human, many thurga-a look very similar, so perhaps I did know this one and simply didn’t recognise it, or something … My head felt so muzzy and bewildered …
“Hello,” I mumbled blankly in reply, still regarding the thurga.
But I was weary already, just from being awake, so I rolled my head back to its normal position of looking straight ahead, and my eyes closed almost without my command, and drowsiness subsumed me. I barely felt the hospital bed being lowered gently back into its almost-horizontal position beneath me.
And even as I drifted to welcome sleep, something in the back of my mind squirmed uneasily.
When I woke again, it was full daylight. A large window on the left side of the room had its curtains drawn back to let light into the room, and someone in a white coat was present with two nurses in their pale blue uniforms. As I was lucid enough to speak and be spoken to, my bed was raised slightly, and the new person stood at the left of my bed and introduced herself: Sarah Fong, who informed me that she was one of the primary surgeons who had worked on me, and a specialist in synthetic organs, transplants, and the human digestive system. She was petite, dark haired, and seemed to be of Asian descent. She wore casual business clothes underneath her white coat. “We were working on you for a good twenty-five hours,” she told me pleasantly. “I’ve been checking you over every day since then, and everything seems to be going smoothly. You’re stable, and that’s excellent. At this stage, that’s all we ask.”
I had so many questions that I did not know where to begin. So once again I repeated, “What happened?”
“You were in an accident.”
Yes, I knew that, but: “What kind of accident?”
“There was a malfunction in the laboratory where you work, and you fell under some machinery that crushed your abdomen. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but no doubt your colleagues and the other people who were present can explain it to you later.” Surgeon Fong paused for a moment, regarding my abdomen. I was watching her face, and I saw her eyes flick to the thurga that lay beyond arm’s reach beside me. “You suffered massive trauma to both intestines, your liver, kidneys, gall bladder, and stomach – pretty much your whole digestive system,” she told me frankly. “You also had five broken ribs. Your major systems were all failing as a result of the trauma, and you would not have survived if we had not performed this surgery. Thankfully your spleen was intact, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to save you.”
I tried to take all this in. My breathing was still shallow and awkward, and it was difficult to concentrate. The surgeon paused again, and turned to the two nurses in the room. In a low voice I heard her ask them, “Has he realised?”, to which both of them shook their heads.
Surgeon Fong consulted a clipboard for a moment. Then she turned to me again. “Have you met Toro-a-Ba?” she asked, almost offhandedly; a little awkwardly, even, without quite making eye contact.
I nodded gingerly, not sure why that should be important. I still did not know why a thurga was in the hospital bed with me, but it was hardly the most pressing of my concerns.
“He underwent – similar surgery to yours,” Surgeon Fong said. She cleared her throat, glanced at the nurses, and gestured toward the bedclothes, leaning over me a little. “Perhaps now would be … er …?” she murmured.
The nurses nodded, and moved forward. The bedclothes were peeled back, and I saw that it was not just my ribs and midriff that were bandaged: my entire abdomen was covered in various bandages, dressings and tubes. I gulped, and gave a slight gasp of distress, feeling light-headed with the shock.
From my sternum to my thighs, the skin that was not hidden under bandages was discoloured with bruising. The flesh of my torso was swollen and puffy. A dozen or more slim, transparent flexible hoses were embedded in my skin, leading off my body, bearing assorted fluids – clear, bloody, yellowish red, and even greenish brown; they were held in place by adhesive dressings or visible black stitches. Many were looped around to make sure they entered my body at the correct angle, and the loops were bandaged in place. I was hideous. I gazed at the infestation of dressings and hoses in dismay and dizzy bewilderment, feeling sick, wishing that someone would explain why this had happened and whether I would ever recover to full strength. Would I be all right? Were my organs all still where they should be? What exactly had been done to me?
“Are you all right, Daniel?”
I looked up groggily to see Surgeon Fong studying my face, probably noting the fact that I was feeling nauseated. I gave a couple of small nods, though ‘all right’ was most definitely not what I felt.
“It looks a bit of a mess, doesn’t it,” one of the nurses supplied sympathetically.
I nodded again; tiny, careful nods, directing my gaze elsewhere for a moment.
“All of this is temporary … erm, most of it is temporary,” the other nurse assured me, and cleared his throat slightly.
I took a slow, steadying breath, as deep a breath as I dared, feeling in the back of my mind that I would probably be sick soon, and forced my gaze to return to the wreck that was my body. I wondered in the back of my mind which bits of it were ‘not temporary’, but I was too overwhelmed by the general view to focus on the question. Beyond my bandaged torso, my legs, though showing signs of fading bruising, appeared to be intact, though my feet were still hidden under the bedclothes. I was nearly naked: the bandages et cetera ran from my chest to my hips, and a lightweight white cloth of some sort was tucked around my lower hips and upper thighs, apparently to preserve some of my modesty without placing any pressure near any of the bandages.
“Are my feet … My feet?” I mumbled incoherently.
After a second or two of puzzlement, the nurses realised that I was trying to say that I wanted to see my feet to be sure that they were all right. They rolled back the covers still further, and I beheld that my feet and lower legs were covered by lightweight white socks. I stared at the socks in bafflement.
“Oh, your feet are fine,” said Surgeon Fong, as though I should take her word for it and need no further assurance.
“These are compression socks,” one of the nurses was helpful enough to explain. She patted the front of one of my ankles lightly. I saw her do it, but I could not really feel it. “They’re there to keep your circulation going.”
After I had satisfied myself with regard to my feet, I prepared myself to return my gaze to my abdomen, as it appeared to be the seat of the trauma. I gulped again as I took in the gruesome sight. This time I registered that there was another, larger, hose, sprouting from bandages on the right side of my waist just under my ribs, about as thick as my thumb and carrying some fluid that seemed brownish in colour, lying on the mattress to my right. I followed it with my eyes, and it led across the mattress to the thurga. The creature’s bedclothes had been rolled back, like mine, to reveal the thurga’s body. Much of the creature’s dark brown fur had been shaven, revealing startling pale-pink skin, coated with the fuzziness of regrowing fur, from his chest to his flanks. He, too, was heavily bandaged around his abdomen, and had a few thin hoses attached to him, leading to various medical devices as mine no doubt did. The larger hose seemed to disappear under the bandages on his left side.
And still I did not realise.
There was a moment of silence in the room. Feeling so, so ill, I tried to summon the strength to ask more questions, and I registered vaguely that everyone was looking at me. Including the thurga.
The feeling of sick dread hovered at the edge of my brain. Something was wrong, something was awfully wrong, but I did not know what.
My body was starting to hurt; a more intense, precise pain than previously. I glanced again at the thurga, who was gazing at me with the great dark soulful eyes typical of his species. There was something – pitying in his gaze.
I was expecting to vomit at any second, but it did not happen. I was breathing more heavily by the moment, and feeling more and more light-headed.
“I think we’ve got some shock going on here,” one of the nurses said, not to me, and then things went dark.
The next time I awoke, only one nurse was present. I did not recognise him, but at this point I was barely recognising anything. He was checking some kind of machinery that stood nearby making a soft, intermittent hissing noise. It was daylight; perhaps midday.
“Oh, hello,” he greeted me, when he noticed that my eyes were open. He turned toward me. “How are you feeling?”
All the response I could manage was something that sounded like “Mmph”.
“Would you like a drink of water?” he offered.
I nodd
ed gingerly, and he raised the bed slightly and helped me to drink a few sips.
Then I looked with anxiety at the sheet and light blankets that covered me.
I didn’t want to see the mess that lay beneath, but I wanted to know that everything was all right. I wanted to see again that, although my body was riddled with tubes and stitches and who knew what else, I was still intact, from head to toes.
“Do you want to see?” the nurse inquired.
I took a breath, steeled myself, and nodded. “Let me just call the other nurse in to help,” the nurse said calmly, and he left through one of the doorways. I heard him speak, and in a moment he returned with another nurse, a lady with blonde hair in a tight ponytail. They made the bed raise my head and shoulders a little more, so that I could look down and see my abdomen, then carefully lifted and flipped back the covers so that I could see.
I gulped again. It was as bad as I remembered it. How could so many tubes, hoses, bandages and dressings be necessary on one person? My flesh looked awful; I barely recognised my own body …
But my legs were still there, albeit covered by those odd, medical-looking white socks. I stared at my legs, making doubly sure that they were mine and still attached to me. I could not really feel them; there were moments when I could barely feel my own fingertips without thinking hard about them. I tried scrunching my toes, and to my delight I saw my toes move under the synthetic material of the sock. I did it again, and then repeated the exercise with the other foot.
“Take care how you move,” the male nurse cautioned me. “You’re very delicate at the moment. We don’t want you overdoing anything.”
“Don’t try to move your legs,” the blonde nurse added. “Your body needs to remain as still as possible.”
I nodded my acquiescence, keeping my breathing slow and steady. I did not want to feel the nausea and light-headedness that I had experienced previously.
“We’ve been massaging you to keep your circulation going, but I think you’ve been asleep for most of it,” the male nurse supplied.
