Part 1
“…And you’re sure this is safe?”
The doctor
looked over the top of the clipboard she was reading. She finished the line she
was on before she answered Mortimer’s question. “You have to understand that
there are some risks involved. Temporary Death is an experimental treatment
option, so we don’t have any statistics to go by. From what I’ve read, though,
you should be just fine. Your vitals look well enough to handle the shock, and
your insurance covers the hospital time you’ll be spending here.”
“Alright,
but what exactly were the other options again?”
The doctor
rolls her eyes. She looks back down at Mortimer’s chart. “Judging by your
current state, I’d say that there’s really nothing much else we can do. Your
cancer is otherwise inoperable, and your body responded horribly to the
chemotherapy. I understand that Temporary Death is an unusual treatment, but at
this point it’s either that or permanent death. Besides, your operation is
scheduled in an hour. There’s really not much we could do to change it now.”
She simply didn’t understand. The pre-op medicine had been administered at
least two hours ago, why was he still apprehensive?
Despite the
mildly hallucinogenic drugs working their way through his veins, Mortimer
couldn’t help but feel anxious. He had been ironing out the creases in his will
a few days previously with the hospital lawyer and had been planning his
funeral out with his wife should worse come to worst. The idea of dying, no matter
how short the duration, didn’t settle well with him. A copy of SciNow, a
scientific journal, sat on the bedside tray beside him. It had been delivered
to him by his wife on her last visit. On its cover were the words, “DYING: A
Gateway to Life?” The article regarding the advertisement was printed on pages
seventeen through twenty, and went roughly as follows:
We tend to think of death as the
end. Once you lose to a disease, get too old, or happen to be casually stabbed
several times in the liver, death is the total and final destination. Dr.
Stephen Walhick, DHA of the University of Central Michigan is taking great
strides to forever change the way we look at death.
“A body is officially declared dead
when the heart is no longer able to supply vital organ systems with the oxygen
they require,” Dr. Walhick explained to one of our field interviewers as the
Doctor of Health Administration was fiddling with what appeared to be a corpse.
“In the course of natural death, often times the brain will die off long before
the other organs, causing massive irreversible damage while the rest of the
body goes about ticking happily – though frantically – along.” The doctor
gestures towards the seemingly endless arrays of tiny tube fibers hooked up to
every imaginable point on the corpse’s body.
“That is the unfortunate case of Mr.
Benjamin Hobbes here, who was admitted to Living Mercy Hospital following a car
accident with massive head trauma and a snapped spinal cord. This unfortunate
accident allowed him to slip into a comfortable coma from which there is no
return. Already the damage in his brain has rendered him a vegetable, leaving
his body behind to slowly die. Or so one might think…
“With the consent of Living Mercy
and Mr. Hobbes’ family, I began a new treatment which I prefer to call
Temporary Death. Several of my pre-med students and I hooked up what was left
of his body to this nifty little device, which supplies every last vessel with
pure, rich oxygen mixed with a conveniently electric-soluble blood thickener.
After a few days, his heart stopped working, and I had one of my students fill
out the death certificate.”
We later interviewed the
aforementioned student, who had no recollection of the event, despite
recognition of his signature on the official document. Since the completion of
this article, the student was arrested on fourteen counts of illegal drug
trafficking and possession. The editors of SciNow Magazine would like to wish
Richard Herring luck as he continues to endure the degrading torment of
imprisonment.
“That’s when things really get
started,” continues Dr. Walhick. “Once the heart has stopped and blood lies
stagnant but oxygen-rich in the cockles of Benjamin’s cold, lifeless corpse, we
are able to perform horribly invasive surgery that would kill a living man. The
first order of business was to repair the damage to his spine. Normally trauma
of this sort would render a man paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of
his natural-born life. We decided to perform an impossible surgery to restore
Benjamin with functional legs, which involved sectioning off his torso into
four pieces and growing nerve cell cultures on his exposed spinal cord.”
With this new context, the pictures
of smiling pre-med students holding what we thought to be an unusually bloody
football and an improperly cleaned prime rib steak began to make more sense.
“Next, we attempted to reverse the damage caused to Mr. Hobbes’ brain by
removing it and manipulating it with electric current. But, alas, the brain had
spent too long in a suffocating skull before oxygen finally arrived too late.
It looks as though when he comes back a zombie, Benjamin here will truly be
looking for brains.
“And that brings us here, standing
in front of the late Benjamin Hobbes. But, with the resuscitation of his heart via
electrical charge, we should be able to put all his vital organs back on-line
and free up his blood to start flowing again. We didn’t bother putting the defective
brain back in, so to prevent excessive bleeding, you may want to note the clay
lining the cavity of his head there. We decided to make it a tasteful light
blue, but needless to say he is not likely to have an open casket funeral.”
Striding proudly towards a defibrillator cart next to Benjamin’s bloody bed, Dr. Walhick shouted ‘clear’
long before he had begun to charge the paddles, most likely for dramatic
effect. This action made the field interviewer rather uncomfortable and
embarrassed to be seen with a character of such unnecessary bravado. As merely
a cautionary note, try and avoid attending fancy dinner parties with Dr.
Stephen Walhick, DHA.
Once the paddles were indeed charged
and it was necessary to clear the immediate area, the paddles were applied to
Benjamin Hobbes’ chest. After a few moments of relative silence, a heart
monitor began to beep slightly and the heaving motion of breathing could be
seen taking place on Benjamin’s chest. Behind the various monitors which all
indicated life could clearly be seen a death certificate, signed three weeks
prior by a coked up hand. Benjamin Hobbes had effectively become the world’s
first zombie, and not in the previous medical sense where the subject is dead
for a few minutes. Apparently, that doesn’t count anymore.
To demonstrate that Benjamin was
once again alive on his own body’s accord, Dr. Walhick swept his arms out
before him, ripping delicate tube fibers out of the living corpse’s flesh with
unusual force, causing what would have been read by a brain as excruciating
pain. The light blue putty was more forgiving on this point. It also looked as
though around five thousand dollars worth of damage was done to the tube
fibers, which further indicates that if you are set on arriving with Dr.
Stephen Walhick, DHA at a fancy dinner party, be sure it is not one that you
are hosting.
“While this subject was devoid of a
functional brain when we got him, I see no reason why the same process would
not bring a perfectly healthy dead man back to life. So long as conditions
could be set ahead of time, doctors could use this process to hook up some tube
fibers, kill a patient, perform otherwise impossible operations, and then flip
the switch back on. In that sense, this could very well cure cancer. Called
it!” The editors of SciNow Magazine would like to acknowledge that Dr. Stephen
Walhick DHA has officially called dibs on a cure for cancer. You all saw it.
As of yet, this new method has not
been tested on patients with functional brains or those with whom full recovery
is expected. Dr. Walhich is offering free experimental treatment to patients with
conditions previously deemed inoperable, claiming that the money awarded from a
Nobel Prize and royalties on his patent should be more than enough to cover any
arising expenses.
So,
can dying really be good for your health? Probably not, judging by the look of
Benjamin’s quartered abdomen and putty lined head cavity. But for fear of Dr.
Walhick and his misshapen zombie army, we must applaud him and his efforts to
cure every non-viral disease known to man, and wish him luck in his future endeavors.
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