Like most years, I had no travel plans for the holidays. I was always busy with dad on Christmas day, but right after that, dad would leave to spend the next week visiting with his parents and his brother and sister and their families. I used to go with him when I was younger, but as soon as I could, I begged off. I loved seeing my grandparents, but I couldn’t stand my aunts and uncles on dad’s side, or their kids.
My grandparents sold their modestly successful farm to a large co-op when dad showed no desire to do anything but blacksmithing. He was the youngest and his two older siblings had already left the house. Although they have a nice house near the coast, my grandparents spend most of their time traveling around the country. RV living. Sometimes, to change things up and take one of those ‘around the world’ cruises. They’re a lot of fun to spend time with and they get me small gifts from wherever they go.
Dad’s older sister, Dana, is married to an army officer and has been moving all over the world from base to base. As Uncle Howard has risen in the ranks, Dana has become snootier and doesn’t like associating with non-military civilians who just don’t understand the ‘pressures of being in a military family’. Their kids are all in the army and they look down on those who don’t ‘take on the duty of defending this great country’. I respect their service to our country. I just don’t respect them or their attitude. Living in North Carolina, with over a dozen military bases spread out across the state and its tens of thousands of military personnel, I’ve met many people in the military who are worthy of admiration and respect. Dana’s family is not among them.
Thomas, dad’s older brother is a lawyer living in New York. He’s been divorced twice and had a kid with each of his exes. His kids are both in their mid to late twenties and I’ve rarely seen them. Uncle Thomas is always talking about his latest case where he totally destroyed the opposing council and got his guilty client off on some technicality that only his brilliant mind could have thought up.
Neither of Auntie Dana or Uncle Thomas came to help out after mom disappeared and neither of them came to mom’s funeral service. As far as I was concerned, they weren’t family and there was no need for me to see or speak with them again. Ever.
I usually spent the holidays at Uncle Magnum’s, and he’d plan a bunch of day trips all over. We’d go bike riding in the cold or hiking or to museums. Last year we tried the polar bear plunge. Never again. I think I was blue for a week. This year, Uncle Magnum was taking a trip with Maggie. They’d officially been dating for six months and things were looking good. A week together in Punta Cana was a big step and I hoped that they had a great time.
That left me at home, by myself, once dad left. He was thinking of forcing the issue and making me go with him, but I reminded him that I was sixteen now and more than capable of staying by myself. He knew how I felt about his siblings and he let it go. He planned on facetiming me every evening.
For Christmas, dad and I always made each other fun gifts in the forge. Last year he made me a saber for Kung Fu and I made him a forge hammer in the shape of Mjölnir; Thor’s hammer. This year I gave him a set of AirPods that I made. I even painted them white, so they’d look like the real thing, and I bought him one of those charging cases to put them in. He had a good laugh when he opened his present and I knew that he’d use them; not to listen to music but to stop people from trying to talk to him.
“This is excellent work, Abby. They have the look and the heft of the real thing. I’ll be using these as a showpiece for my students.”
“Thanks. I figured that if you didn’t like them, you could always go to an Apple store and try to see if you could exchange them for a set that worked. I wonder how long it would take them to realize they aren’t real?”
“What would I want a set of real ones for? No. These are much better.”, dad hugged me and gave me my present. We never wrapped our presents or made cards. We just handed them to each other. This time, he handed me a blue foot-high replica of a Jeff Koonz balloon animal dog. I’d seen a full sized one in a museum last year and I’d been crazy for Koonz art since.
“This is amazing, dad! Thank you!” I gave him a big hug and held up my dog to the light. He weighed about five pounds.
“You don’t have to worry about this dog. It won’t burst on you, even if you drop him. He’s actually better than other dogs, because you don’t have to feed or bath him or walk him. Plus, he’s blue, just like that dog from Blue’s Clues.” Dad and I used to watch that show all the time, until they changed Steve for Joe. Joe was ok, but he was no Steve!
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I named my dog ‘Red’ and took a bunch of pictures with Red in different poses and sent them to Eva with the caption, “I Got a Dog!!” Of course, she loved my new dog and we chatted for awhile about it and then moved on to discussing Eva’s family. She had left a few days ago to spend the holidays with some of her family in Florida and James had left for his family in Tennessee.
Dad and I spent the day together like we always do on Christmas and had a great time. Christmas had been mom’s favorite holiday and so we made a special effort every Christmas to remember her in a special way. One year, when I was little, we wrote her a long letter of everything that we’d done that year. Another year, when there was a lot of snow, dad made a video of us making a snowman family and we narrated as if mom was going to be watching it later. Most years we worked together to make her something in the forge. A heart shape with her name on it or a plaque that read, ‘We love you Mommy!’ It helped keep her in our hearts and minds. This year we made a windchime with different metals formed into teardrop shapes because dad had remembered how she’d been planning to get one before she was taken.
The next morning, dad left to see his parents and I was on my own. I didn’t mind at all, as I had the vacation all planned out. I was going to volunteer at the hospital. I had worked out all the details with Pierce a few weeks ago. I was interested in learning more about the different departments in the hospital and he scheduled me for the morning shift everyday at the pediatric oncology center, followed by another half shift shadowing a nurse in a different department every day or two. I figured that this would expose me to a large variety of medical problems, and I’d be able to scan the people with those problems and let my brain learn to interpret what the field was sending it regarding those issues.
Pierce started me off slowly by making my first day’s half shift in the maternity ward. What an incredible and frightening experience! I’d seen pregnant women before but seeing them with the field scan was another matter all together. First off, scanning pregnant women was ‘loud’, in that there was a ton of information being sent over. Had I not improved my scanning ability, it would have been a ten on the scale I used to use, and I’d have been incapacitated by a monster headache in seconds. As it was, I had to limit the scans to the baby to ease the information overload. The baby scans didn’t produce nearly as many alarm bells as their pregnant mothers did. I’d never realized how stressing being pregnant was on a woman’s body.
Throughout the day, I encountered women having ultrasounds, women going into labor, and women giving birth and by listening carefully to what the doctors and nurses were saying and comparing that to my scans, my brain was able to interpret a good number of the alarms that the field was telling be about. I also started getting a feel for how far along the pregnancies were and how the baby was sitting in the uterus. That was the wonderful part.
Not everything was wonderful though. Scanning an obviously pregnant woman and knowing that she was about to be told that her baby died in the womb was devastating. She’s been so alive when she came in with her husband for her ultrasound appointment. It would be weeks before I could get the heartbroken look on her face as she left out my head.
The next two weeks continued to remind me why it was dangerous to be a doctor. They did so much good, but the losses were too painful and the powerlessness to do anything for so many was maddening. I’d seen this for years at the pediatric cancer centre. Now I was seeing it in almost every other department as well. One minute you felt amazed at what was possible and the next you were humbled by what was still out of reach.
I asked Pierce how he managed, and he said that every year new discoveries and techniques were making more and more things possible and that for now we just did what we could. You’ve got to hold on tight to the good memories and look for ways to make the bad ones stop happening. You can’t save everyone, but it’s better than not trying at all, because the bad things are happening regardless.
That was really good advice to take into my foundation. No matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to save every victim of human trafficking. I’d just have to focus on those that I could.
By the time everyone was back from vacation, I had learned to recognize and differentiate between many types of tumors and to know if they were benign (not cancerous or growing, but needed to be watched) or malignant (cancerous, growing and dangerous), or if they were metastasizing (spreading to other parts of the body). I could also use my scans to detect broken bones, ripped tendons, torn ligaments, some liver problems, kidney failure, skin cancer, swallowed objects, fever, lung damage, various infections and inflammations in the body, and much more.
It was a good start and scanning people was becoming easier and less ‘loud’ as my brain was learning to understand what the field was saying. As with my scans of objects, I’d even started getting a 3D map in my head of the people that I scanned, and I could immediately see where the alarms were. If I continued with this, I could eventually be the best diagnostician ever, only I wouldn’t be able to explain to anyone how I knew what I knew.
I could see this becoming a problem very quickly, as I was bound to scan someone that I knew with a medical problem that I shouldn’t know about or that I would feel compelled to say something about. How do you tell someone that they have cancer or liver disease when there’s no reasonable explanation for your knowing that? I didn’t have an answer to that, but I had a feeling that I’d better find one soon.