"He's opening his eyes!" Jenna squealed into the phone. "What should I do?"
Sometimes, I worry about my sister.
I mean, I really love her. She is only six minutes older than me and a real brainiac. She is the one that always blew the curve for the rest of the class. And she's the one who made all my teachers speculate on whether I was adopted. Jenna was about to graduate high school with a super-high GPA. High enough to be valedictorian of our class, and high enough to earn a full scholarship to Georgia Tech. Without a doubt, one of the smartest people I know, and yet...
... And yet sometimes she could be so obtuse.
She paused for just a moment.
"Okay. First, I'll call the nurse. Then, call Mom," she repeated. "Are you sure Mom won't be upset that it's so late?
I figured she was talking to Kelly Ann, my eldest sister and a freshman at the University of Georgia. I'm not sure what her major is, but so far, it seems to be mostly boys and parties.
"You're right, Kelly Ann! After all ... he is finally waking up."
The next few hours were both hectic and hazy. First came a stream of nurses and technicians, followed shortly by a couple of the on-call doctors, then my parents, and finally, near sunrise, my family doctor and a couple of specialists, a neurosurgeon and a burn specialist.
Through it all, I begin to piece together what had happened. Evidentially, I had been hit by lightning.
Jenna described to me how I had been unconscious when another golfer found me shortly after the lightning strike. My left palm had some very painful second-degree burns, probably from where it was resting on the clubs in my bag, while there was some minor first degree burns under my arm and on my ribcage from how I was carrying my bag.
My dad explained how my bag was gone. Disintegrated. And the clubs inside it fused into a molten mass of twisted metal. Even the rubber spikes on the bottom of my golf shoes had melted. But the biggie, the thing I was having the hardest time accepting, was that today was March 21st.
I had been in a coma for ten days!
By the time my doctor, Dr. Peterson, arrived, I was sitting up in bed, with the bandages on my left hand freshly re-wrapped and a partially empty breakfast tray on the rolling table beside my bed.
"Welcome back, Alex," Dr. Peterson said, smiling. "You gave us quite the scare."
Then, after introducing the two specialists, they all went to work, prodding and poking. They gave me a sedative that they said might make me sleepy, then began hooking me up to various machines. The burn specialist checked my hand and under my arm and then left without a word. Dr. Peterson left shortly thereafter, promising to be back tomorrow. The neurosurgeon grunted a couple of time as he examined the EKG and then ordered a battery of tests before disappearing.
Then the techs with their myriad machines rolled in and the serious testing began. Somewhere in all that, my dad left to take my sister to school, and I finally dozed off.
I woke when the room suddenly became still as all the tech weenies disappeared about lunchtime. That left just my mom and me.
"How are you holding up, Sweetheart?" she asked. "Are you hungry?"
"I think I'm okay. I feel a little funny, like I'm about to start floating, but I'm not. And yeah, I'm a little hungry," I told her. "Any idea what they're looking for? And when do I get to go home?"
"A little. It seems that when they did an MRI on you, the second day you were in the hospital, you somehow fried their machine. The hospital was very upset, and the doctors were very confused," she said, hesitantly.
"I fried it?"
"Yes. And a lot of their machines will not work on you, so they have to find alternative ways of testing. That's why they slightly sedated you this morning before they started testing. And that's not all."
"It's not?"
"It seems that cell phones will not work around you," she added. "It's all very confusing."
"That's weird," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say.
"They wanted to transfer you to the University of Georgia Research Hospital in Athens to do more testing, but your father and I have said no," she revealed. "At least for the time being. So that's why they called in Dr. Weinstein. He's the head of neurology at Emory."
"What's neurology?" I asked.
"That's an excellent question, Alex," came a smooth baritone voice from the doorway. "Mostly we operate on brain disorders such as tumors and other abnormalities. But in order to operate, we first have to diagnose the situation. And therein lies our problem with you."
"We cannot find anything that needs fixing. At least by operating. As far as we can determine, the only thing that the lightning did to you was to change the electromagnetic field that surrounds your body.
"I'm sorry. What did you say?" my mom asked.
"Mrs. Masters, our tests this morning showed very little change from the testing we did last week while Alex was in a coma. Every living person, in fact, every living thing, is surrounded by an electromagnetic energy field. We don't understand what causes it. Or where it comes from. Or even what its purpose is. However, we have been able to measure it. And in humans, it usually measures from six to eight hertz."
"Isn't that like six-to-eight cycles per second?"
"Very good, Alex. I see you did well in your physics class," Dr. Weinstein said.
"And Alex...?" my mom asked.
"Unfortunately, with Alex, his EMF is so great that we do not have the technology or the equipment to measure it accurately. If I had to guess, I would say that it is two hundred billion times normal. But it could be a thousand-billion times normal. We just have no way to tell."
"Then what's his prognosis?" my mom asked with increasing alarm.
Dr. Weinstein leaned against the bed and removed his glasses as he rubbed the bridge of his nose before softly saying, "I don't know."
"Shit!" I said.
"Alex!" my mom said quickly.
"Sorry," I murmured.
"Well, Dr. Weinstein, what DO you know?" she asked.
"We know that normally, any increase to the EMF, that's the electromagnetic field, causes the cells in the body to begin deteriorating, starting with the skin and the other organs. It does this by allowing the electromagnetic energy to increase the size of the molecules that can pass through the tissues, causing them to break down. But in Alex's case, the EMF seems to have strengthened his cells, blocking anything from harming his skin and other organs. This phenomenon is also evidenced by the minimal damage to his body from the actual lightning strike and also the advanced tissue regeneration in the areas where there was damage."
"Tissue regeneration?" mom asked.
"This is all just theory at this point, Mrs. Masters, but under normal circumstances, the burns Alex received on his body should have been much more severe. And his rate of recovery should have been measured in months, not days. As it is, the tissues on the trunk of his body have all but healed and the damage on his left hand is months ahead of where we expected it to be. At this rate, he'll probably be gripping a club by next week, instead of next summer."
"I'll be damned!" I exclaimed as I automatically tried flexing my left hand. No matter what the doctor claimed, it hurt!
Mom gave me the 'look', but let it pass as she focused on the doctor.
"So ... what do we do now?" she asked.
"Well, we would like to transfer him to the research hospital in Athens..."
"No!" I told him abruptly."
"But we..."
"No! I will not be a guinea pig for you to run your shitty little experiments on!" I was almost screaming.
Suddenly, the lights in the room began to flicker and the monitor I was hooked to begin a loud whine as smoke began pouring out of it.
"Interesting..." mused the doctor without any sign of excitement.
"Alex," my mom said softly as she gently stroked my hand, "Honey, I love you."
My parents had always been very free and demonstrative of their love for me and my sisters, and my mom's words were both familiar and soothing. As quickly as I had become upset, I began to calm down. And as I did, the lights quit flickering and the hospital's machinery all went back to operating normally. All except the smoking monitor beside my bed.
"Interesting..." mused the doctor once again.