The Pain (Original Short Fiction)

griff (64)in #story • 8 years ago

This was supposed to be the story that made Jeremiah’s career. To think, a malpractice suit in this day and age; they had all but dried up thanks to the good people at J&J Applied Neuronetics. When word of a suit directly related to one of their monitors had gotten around, there was a media frenzy. Now Jeremiah had an exclusive interview with the doctor himself. It was a dream come true -- or so he had thought. Now that he was actually here, Jeremiah was having some doubts.

“Can you repeat that, Mister Thompson?” he said, looking up from his notepad.

“Doctor,” Dr. Thompson growled. “My license may have been suspended, but I still have a damn M.D.”

Jeremiah nodded in placation. “Didn’t mean to offend, doctor. But please, would you repeat what you were just saying?”

“It’s The Pain,” Dr. Thompson reiterated. “That’s what this is all about. I keep saying it and nobody will listen to me.”

Jeremiah nodded as he made a brief note. “Okay, pain. What kind of pain, doctor?”

Dr. Thompson dropped his head into his hands and shook it side-to-side in aggravation.

“Not a pain. The Pain. It’s the reason I was fired. The reason my license was suspended. It’s why you’re here interviewing me now.”

“Alright, doctor,” Jeremiah said. “Why don’t you just start from the beginning? Maybe I’ll have a better grasp of what you mean that way.”

Dr. Thompson grunted in reluctant agreement. “Fine, then. This all starts about two weeks before the incident in question.”

I was several years out of medical school and had just finished my residency. It felt like a great time to be a doctor. Medical technology was advancing at a remarkable rate. The dark ages of invasive testing and guesswork were a thing of the past; our equipment was so sophisticated that we could hook a patient up to a machine and see everything that was wrong with them. In fact, we could see things that were going to be wrong with them. Diagnosis wasn’t our only advancement, of course; with the development of suspended animation, we could place any patient into a completely frozen state for an indefinite period of time. Once our monitors had detected an illness, we could operate, deliver medicine, or do any number of things in what seemed to the patient to be a fraction of a fraction of a second. It truly seemed to be the golden age of medicine. Mortality rates were dropping by leaps and bounds across the country. With the way things were going, I was sure I would see a cure for death itself within my lifetime. But that was before the anomalies began.

We had just received a shipment of new patient monitors. These were far beyond the equipment we were currently using. Once we had a patient hooked up, the monitor could show us in real time everything that was happening in the patient’s body. It was so sensitive that it could detect even the slightest arrhythmia in a patient’s heart, down to a picosecond. We thought it would be the best thing that ever happened to our hospital. It wasn’t until we had the patients hooked up that we noticed a glaring defect in the machines: seemingly at random, for just a split second, the alarm that alerted us to a life-threatening problem would sound. It seemed to happen arbitrarily, affecting every patient at one time or another. When we checked the logs on the monitors after one of these false alarms, all we found was a tiny fraction of a second where it claimed to have detected an enormous spike in the activity of the patient’s pain receptors. That was it -- no explanation, no other issues. It was incredibly disconcerting at first, but once we were sure that there was nothing actually wrong with our patients, we wrote it off as a simple glitch. We were assured that the company responsible for manufacturing the equipment was aware of the issue and attempting to fix it. In the meantime, we had to adjust to it. It was obnoxious, but before long we learned to tune it out.

It was about two weeks later when I met the deceased. Mr. Strauss had come in complaining of extreme pain. As was standard procedure, I connected him to the monitor and looked over his vitals. As far as I could see, he was perfectly healthy. He didn’t even appear to be at risk for any major health issues. I was ready to discharge him with a clean bill of health when his monitor gave an anomalous alarm. It was probably the hundredth I had heard that day, so I didn’t think twice about it until I looked at Mr. Strauss: his face was twisted in the most horrible look of agony I had ever seen on a patient; tears streamed down his cheeks; his fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles burned white. He gasped for air and grabbed at my hand, begging me to do something through his sobs. I was so taken aback, I had no idea how to respond. My first thought was that he had somehow learned about the defect in our equipment and was trying to scam the hospital for pain medication, but something about the absolute terror in his eyes made me doubt that. With no idea of what I should do, I agreed to treat him, conceding that I hadn’t the slightest idea of what might be wrong with him. That was when he first told me about The Pain.

“Okay, so this is where this pain first came in? Can you tell me what he told you?”

Dr. Thompson sighed. “The Pain. Capital letters. Yes, I’ll tell you exactly what he told me. Please don’t interrupt.”

Jeremiah nodded and motioned for Dr. Thompson to continue.

According to Mr. Strauss, at completely random times throughout his day, often several times, his vision would give out and he would be completely consumed by pain. The sensation itself was different each time; sometimes it would feel like he was totally engulfed in flames -- other times, like every cell in his body was impaled on a hot skewer. These sensations seemed to last anywhere from a few minutes to hours at a time. When they ended, he would find himself exactly as he was before they began, with not even a second of time lost.

Obviously, the story was a bit too fantastic for me to immediately accept, but my curiosity already had the better of me. I started Mr. Strauss on a synthetic morphine drip and agreed to investigate his condition. He gave me his tearful thanks and laid his head back as the drug began to take hold.

I was at a loss as to where I should start. Seeking the advice of my fellow attendings gained me nothing; they all agreed that I was being scammed and that I should boot Mr. Strauss before the Chief of Medicine got wind that I was giving drugs to a man with no verifiable symptoms. They were right, of course -- dumping Mr. Strauss would have been the logical thing to do; I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was something about that look he had given me -- the desperate, pleading look of a helpless child. I’ve seen my share of fakes. No actor in the world could be so convincingly frightened as he was.

With no other ideas, I decided to pull up his patient history to see if it yielded any clues. After a few hours of fruitless searching, I finally stumbled onto something I thought looked interesting: a psychological evaluation he had received as a child.

Jeremiah held up his hand as he rifled through his notes. “Ah, not to interrupt again,”

“You are interrupting again.”

“...but I have that evaluation here. Mr. Strauss suffered from a rare neurological condition, correct?”

“Yes. This was all in the case report.”

“Would you mind explaining the nature of his condition? In layman’s terms, please.”

Dr. Thompson tapped his foot for a moment in mild agitation. “Alright. Well. Basically, it affected his ability to dream. Everyone knows that feeling of dreaming for hours, only to find they’ve just been asleep for a few minutes. It’s well known that the brain processes dreams at an enhanced rate to ordinary sensory experience.”

Jeremiah cocked his eyebrow, practically radiating an air of perplexity. Dr. Thompson rolled his eyes.

“Compared to what we experience while we’re awake. The thing is, in a typical person, the brain has neurological blocks that impede its ability to process dreams. In other words, even though we experience dreams at a much faster rate than our everyday lives, they’re still significantly shorter than they could be. Mr. Strauss’ condition meant that he had no such blocks. In the span of one of our dreams, he could have thousands. While we might dream about a day, he could dream about an entire lifetime, or several lifetimes, all over the course of a single night.”

Jeremiah scribbled furiously in his notepad. “That’s incredible. And he was taking medication for this, yes?”

“He had been prescribed an experimental inhibitor when he was a child that was supposed to correct the condition. When I asked him about it, he told me it had worked when he was young, but that it had gradually lost effect as he had aged. He was no longer taking it while I was treating him.”

“That’s good to know. Thank you for explaining. Please continue.”

I spent the rest of that day watching my patients. I had become curious about these so-called anomalous readings. Whenever I caught one, I saw the same thing: the patient shuddered briefly, then went back to what they were doing as though nothing had happened. When I asked them about it, they all admitted to feeling a bit of a twitch, but nothing more than that. Everyone wrote it off as having simply been startled by the alarm. It was a reasonable explanation, but I wasn’t convinced. To complicate matters further, I gradually became aware of the fact that only some of the patients experienced the anomalous readings. My first instinct was that only some of the monitors were malfunctioning, but I was able to disprove this by switching a functional monitor with a dysfunctional one; the monitor that had been working fine suddenly began giving anomalous alarms, while the monitor that had been giving alarms all day suddenly fell quiet. This was proof enough for me that the alarms were not a malfunction at all, but that something was going on with some of our patients -- yet it still left me with no indication of a cause. With no other thoughts, I returned to Mr. Strauss to question him further. It was then that I received possibly my greatest clue to this mystery: when I asked when he first experienced The Pain, he told me it was immediately after his first treatment with suspan.

Jeremiah held up a hand. “‘Suspan’?”

“Our shorthand for suspended animation,” Dr. Thompson said. “It got kind of cumbersome saying the whole thing every time. I think it was actually an intern that started it.”

Jeremiah nodded as he jotted down a quick note. “Very well. Continue, please.”

With a new lead, I went back to watching my patients, making a note of which ones experienced the anomalous readings and which ones did not. A quick look at their patient histories confirmed my suspicions: it was only those patients that had been treated with suspan that gave false alarms. Now I had my causal connection, but I still lacked an explanation. That night was spent researching Mr. Strauss’ neurological condition and the inhibitor he had been taking. I wasn’t sure, but I had a hunch that it was connected to the pain that he was experiencing, which I knew was connected to the anomalous alarms somehow. Nonetheless, I still needed hard evidence that he was telling me the truth, or I would be forced to discharge him. With that in mind, I came to him the next day with a suggestion: I would take him off the synthetic morphine, disengage the alarm on his monitor, and wait. If he had another episode and it matched up to an anomalous reading in the logs, I would know that he wasn’t just trying to scam me. I would also know that there was something more to the readings than I had originally thought. He was on board with the idea at first, but as the morphine wore off, he became significantly more apprehensive. We waited together in terrible silence for nearly twenty minutes before it happened: he suddenly seized up, his hands clutching at the bed sheets and his jaw clenching shut. I made a quick note of the time, thinking that it would be over almost immediately, but he suddenly began thrashing about on the bed, foam ejecting from between his teeth. I rushed to his side and checked the monitor -- his pain levels were off the charts. Before I was able to administer anything, he succumbed to cardiac arrest. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to revive him. Ivan Strauss was dead.

A morbidity and mortality conference was called to determine if anything could have been done to prevent Mr. Strauss’ death. I made my case as best I could: I informed the board of the mysterious nature of Mr. Strauss’ condition; I cited his death as evidence that he suffered from a condition that we had no means to detect; I mentioned that I had been by his bed when he experienced his seizure, a fact that was corroborated by several nurses. Ultimately, the board found that I could have done nothing to prevent his death. However, the fact that I had disengaged the alarm on his monitor meant that the hospital was now liable. Because of that, I was charged with willful negligence and fired. It wasn’t long after that Mr. Strauss’ surviving family brought a malpractice lawsuit against me. I was sued into destitution and my license was suspended. It wouldn’t have mattered either way -- no hospital would have taken me after the trial went public, and I don’t think I could have gone on knowing what I know anyway.

“But wait,” Jeremiah said, looking away from the daggers Dr. Thompson was shooting him, “you had Mr. Strauss’ permission to disengage the alarm, correct? Would that not be a factor?”

“Under ordinary conditions, maybe. However, Mr.Strauss was under the influence of a synthetic opiate at the time, so any agreement on his part could not be taken as legitimate consent. That was in the case report, too.”

Jeremiah flipped through a few documents. “Ah, yes. Here it is. It also says that your reason for disengaging the alarm was related to Mr. Strauss’ neurological condition, which was found inadmissible in court. Could you elaborate on that?”

“It all comes back to The Pain. I had a feeling that those ‘anomalous readings’ were all related to it -- that the monitors were detecting legitimate spikes in pain levels. The thing is, they’re so brief that we don’t even notice them. Or, at least, we don’t remember them. But Mr. Strauss was different. His condition meant that his brain had the ability to log incredible amounts of information in a very short time. While The Pain is nothing but a blip on the radar for us, it was a marathon event for him. His death was directly related to that, I think.”

Jeremiah raised his eyebrows and looked up from his pad. “Oh? In what way?”

“This is just a hypothesis -- I obviously can’t verify any of it now. But I think that, whatever it is that causes The Pain -- it’s intelligent. It saw Mr. Strauss as a threat. With his experience, I could have proven the existence of The Pain. It killed him to prevent me from doing that. It doesn’t want to be exposed.”

Jeremiah stared unblinking at Dr. Thompson for a moment. “Okay, then. I guess that’s all I need. Do you have anything else you want to say?”

Dr. Thompson leaned forward, a look of intense sobriety on his face. “Yes. The Pain is real. I know my story might not be the most convincing, but it’s true. This thing -- whatever it is, somehow it finds us when we’re placed in suspended animation. That’s why I could never go on as a doctor, and why I have urged my colleagues to stop using suspan. When it finds us, it gets a little piece of our soul, and it hangs on. For the rest of our lives, it delights in causing us torment, like a small child with a magnifying lens; it sees our lives as no more meaningful than an ant’s. Perhaps it justifies the agony it causes by the fact that we can't remember it, or perhaps it simply doesn't care. What I do know is that we're nothing more than toys to this creature -- this child. Children eventually tire of their toys. I have to wonder -- what will it do when it tires of us?”

Jeremiah nodded, thanked Dr. Thompson for his time, and headed back to the office. He walked inside, tossed his notepad on his desk, and slumped into his chair with a sigh.

“Hey, Jeremiah,” Sally said as he sat down. “What’s up? Interview not go well?”

Jeremiah blew a raspberry in exasperation as he ran his hands through his hair. Sally gave him a sympathetic look.

“That bad, huh? What happened?”

Jeremiah looked at her pathetically. “He’s a damn lunatic. I got nothing out of him except what I already had from the case reports, and some insane babbling about this ‘pain’ thing. I’m almost afraid to print anything he said. I’ll be relegated to the tabloids for the rest of my career.”

“That’s a shame,” Sally said, offering him a cup of coffee. “I know you were looking forward to it. You fought like a shark for this case.”

Jeremiah nodded, then shuddered briefly. Sally gave him a concerned look.

“You alright?” she asked, setting the cup down on his desk.

“Hm? Oh. Yeah. Just a weird feeling, I guess. It’s gone now.”