LIFERS Chapter Forty One

With Marianna sedated, Ella could start the process of removing stem cells from the liquid marrow at the rear of her pelvic bone, and with every phase of the transplant procedure firmly fixed in her mind, she felt certain there wouldn’t be any problems.

The first thing she needed to do was find out if an efficient amount of cells could be harvested. Any normal person would have very small amounts and would need to undergo the procedure a number of times over separate intervals, but with this donor being one of her own, Ella’s expectations were high.

She removed Marianna’s clothing and turned her on to her front then reset the restraints ready to begin. She pulled on another pair of surgical gloves and retrieved a hypodermic from the lab table behind her then swabbed the area ready for insertion. She took a few calming breaths and attempted to insert the needle into Marianna only to have it snap on contact. She assumed the needle faulty and replaced it, but again it happened.

Once, okay, she could live with that, but twice? She pinched Marianna’s skin to find it no thicker or tougher than she’d expected it to be. So was she right to believe there was something exceptional about Marianna? Could she have something that no one else in Martinsville possessed?

If her skin resisted trauma that efficiently, that could be the reason it wasn’t affected by water. And so, in order to be certain, a different test was needed. She took an empty vial from the lab table and placed it under her booted foot and leaned on it until it cracked.

She selected the longest of the pieces and pushed it into the back of Marianna’s thigh but still her skin refused to break. She applied a little more pressure and dragged the thin piece of glass down toward the back of the knee where the skin would be thinnest, but all it made was a faint white line that disappeared as soon as it showed. She tried one more time but it was the shard of glass that gave up first, as it crumbled like a soft, wafer biscuit.

So Marianna’s skin was indeed her amour, her shield, an impenetrable barrier against anything that would be deemed intrusive. She knew then that her granddaughter was much more than she’d anticipated, and, after Thomas Martins receives her stem cells, he’ll be just like her, if not stronger, and very soon after that, all of them will be. And the one thing Ella looked forward to was the day when she wouldn’t have do what she had to do just to stay alive.

She blew the tiny glass fragments from Marianna’s skin and replaced the second broken needle, and again she pushed down on the syringe, this time slower in an attempt to keep the needle straight. Eventually she reached the pelvic bone and entered the narrow cavity beyond where she withdrew the plunger and extracted a miniscule amount of liquid marrow.

Over at the lab table she released the specimen into a test-tube and placed it on a centrifuge. Two minutes later she had a glass slide smeared with the result clamped under a microscope. She knew what to look for and how to calculate the amount of stem cells present, and, after following the instructions given to her by Thomas, Ella was surprised to find over fifty times the amount she’d expected to see.

She allowed her curiosity to the fore and smeard the slide with alcohol from a hypodermic to see the cells disintergrate and reintergrate themselves in half an instant. She tried it a second time but the alcohol had no affect whatsoever on the cells, which could only mean they were not merely capable of instantaneous regeneration, but able to learn from and modify themselves against trauma as it happened to them. So, instead of Thomas taking weeks to recover, as he said it would, she felt that within a day or two he could at least be well enough to rise from his bed.

The next step for Ella would be to fill a number of transfusion bags with the contents of Marianna’s veins and withdraw sufficient amounts of bone marrow to introduce into the collected blood. And then, by using the normal intravenous methods, she could get the contents of the bags into Thomas Martins.

Over the next twenty minutes, Ella filled four half-litre bags with Marianna’s blood and stored them in a refrigerator at the end of the lab table. She then extracted the rest of the precious bone marrow using four fifty-mil syringes which she filled to ten mils each without breaking another needle in the process.

She injected the marrow into the four bags, one ten mil dose to each of them and placed one bag on the apparatus and inserted the drain needle into Martins’ left arm, she then checked his pulse, his blood pressure and his breathing. Too weak, too low, and too shallow were her findings. She also checked on Marianna, her pulse had risen, her respiration looked to be normal, and her skin had a paler tone than it did before the extraction; other than that, she was fine.

The drip-rate Ella set would have the first bag drained in around thirty minutes, in which case she decided to wait in the chamber until the time came to replace the bag.