She picked up the two blue-and-white clips from the cart and stood up. “You have been in a resting position for long enough that you should all be ready to measure your blood oxygen saturation. Your symptoms lead me to believe that it will be atypically low. Please clip this to your index finger.”
The doctor handed Noah and Brian each their own oximeter, and they clumsily secured it to their fingers. They sat quietly for a minute. Noah swung his finger back and forth, feeling odd that he couldn’t feel the device itself yet was able to sense the slight weight resistance, the tiny amount of extra force required to move the digit.
“That should be sufficient,” Dr. Jansen said, glancing at the readings and bringing up her pen to write them down, then pausing and looking back at the oximeters. Her eyes narrowed.
“If the data these are displaying is accurate, I am unsure how you are still conscious, let alone alive,” she said bluntly. “Quite frankly, it’s impossible. A human is not able to survive off such a low saturation of oxygen in their blood. Your heart rate is reasonable, if surprisingly low, but the oxygen levels are just absurd. Are you even breathing?”
She paused, and looking like she could hardly believe what she was writing, made a note of each of their readings.
It was the same story with May and Leah.
Looking dazed, Dr. Jansen put the two oximeters back on the cart and grabbed the mallet.
“I’m sure you’ve done this before. It will just be a light tap on your knee.”
She knocked the mallet against Noah’s knee. He felt nothing, of course.
“Relax your leg,” the doctor said. “You’re too stiff for this test to produce accurate results.” She knocked once more in the same spot, then to Noah’s surprise started tapping around his knee and adjusted herself so that she could tap several points along his arm. After a minute she stood up and ran a hand through her hair. “Alright, for one reason or another, you’ve got zero deep tendon reflexes. None that I tested, at least. What on earth is going on with you?”
Noah felt like he was watching her carefully composed persona gradually fall apart at the seams as she struggled to understand the information being presented before her.
She rounded on Brian and administered the same array of taps against his legs and arms. As she moved between muscle tendons, growing ever more flustered, Brian looked sideways at Noah with a bewildered expression, making him laugh.
“There’s nothing funny about this,” Dr. Jansen said testily without looking up. “The four of you should be on the verge of death. You should need to be hospitalized. You should not be sitting around laughing at each other as if nothing is wrong.”
The doctor moved to Leah and began rapping on her with the mallet.
“It doesn’t feel like anything is wrong,” Noah said. “Except when I’m supposed to be feeling something. And then that just feels weird.”
“You should be-”
“Look, I get that we should be freaking out. But this obviously isn’t your average sickness. There’s as much happening here that shouldn’t be as things not happening that should be. So let’s all agree to forget whatever assumptions we might have about how a sick person is supposed to behave and work together on getting us back to normal.”
Dr. Jansen stopped midway through knocking on May’s ankle like she was trying to hammer a nail into it and looked at Noah with a stricken expression. “You’re absolutely right. I apologize for my unprofessional behavior. May I ask what your names are?”
“It’s Noah.”
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“Brian.”
“Leah.”
“May.”
The doctor smiled. “Nice to meet you all. I’m Dr. Iris Jansen.”
“I know,” Leah said, and Brian elbowed her.
“We’re making a fresh start,” he muttered under his breath.
Ignoring them, Dr. Jansen sat down in her chair and gently set down the mallet. “I wonder if this is how the first doctors to discover the Wager felt. Completely out of their depth, like none of their training was enough to prepare them for something so different. A whole new paradigm of medicine that nobody has even begun to understand.”
Brian nodded hesitantly. “After the patient died, maybe. They wouldn’t have known anything was wrong until the person had passed away without warning.”
Dr. Jansen nodded. “Yes, of course. We’re lucky in that regard; there’s still time to figure out what’s happening. Right now I’m thinking the best course of action is to contact the medical center downtown to get you moved there for further testing. They have equipment leagues above anything we could hope to get our hands on here. I’m sure they would be just as interested as myself in discovering how you’re still alive.”
She picked at her surgical mask and added, “To be honest, I’m starting to wish I had put on a full-face gas respirator mask, if only we had any. This escalated quite a bit further than I was expecting.”
“I think we can all say the same,” Leah said.
“Speaking of which, have you interacted with many people since you began displaying symptoms? Depending on how contagious this sickness is, we could find ourselves with a serious problem on our hands.”
Suppressing a sigh as he thought back to how many people they had run into in the past several hours despite their dubious efforts to stay out of the way of the general public, Noah could only give the doctor a worried grimace. “Too many people to count. Pretty much the only thing we can do at this point is hope that it doesn’t spread easily. If the sickness is transferred to another person as easily as them inhaling some of the dust we’re producing, then things are going to get bad really quickly.”
The doctor nodded. “Best case scenario, you have all somehow picked up a noninfectious disease. You are, however, wrong that the only thing we can do now is hope.”
Noah glanced up. “How so?”
“Preventative measures. I plan to have the four of you stay at a housing complex at the edge of campus. Have you heard of the spot we used to send students who came down with the Wager, before it was known if the sickness was contagious?”
They all nodded.
“We get to stay there?” Leah asked excitedly.
Dr. Jansen inclined her head. “It is the best way to ensure you do not come into contact with any more people until we have additional information.”
She stood and stepped closer to the cart next to the door, opening a small drawer under its top counter. “One last thing. I would like to take a blood sample from each of you.” As she spoke she extracted four vials and four needles from the drawer.
Noah couldn’t help a shudder from passing through him at the sight. He had always hated needles. It’s fine, he told himself. This is the best possible time to get poked by one. I won’t even feel it.
Even so, he grew nervous as she pulled on a fresh pair of gloves and approached him with a needle in one hand and an elastic band in the other. She swiftly wrapped the band around his arm and poised the needle over his flesh.
“You won’t feel a thing,” she said with a smirk, and inserted the needle.
He winced in spite of himself as he watched the small vial fill with red liquid. The problem isn’t that it hurts, it’s that there’s a needle sucking blood out of my body. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to object to.
Soon enough it was finished, and Dr. Jansen calmly released the pressure on the elastic band and withdrew the needle. She stoppered the vial, labeled it quickly with a permanent marker she procured from seemingly nowhere, and laid it on the cart. “Put this on,” she said, passing Noah a band-aid.
He nodded faintly and began picking at the wrapper as she grabbed another needle and vial and began to wrap Brian’s arm.
Noah quickly realized that he wouldn’t be able to get the band-aid open on his own. His fingers felt like they sometimes got when he stayed outside in the bitter cold for too long, and got back indoors only to find he was so numb he couldn’t untie his own shoelaces. Embarrassed, he was about to lean over to ask Leah for help when he remembered she wouldn’t fare any better. He placed the bandage back on the cart instead, feeling silly.
He glanced down at the puncture spot on his arm, mollified to see it wasn’t bleeding at all. He settled back in his seat to watch Dr. Jansen finish drawing blood from each of his friends.