Or like the Salvation Army had furnished the dump.
The doctor's expression was frozen in place. Oh he fake smiled once, but that was it. The man looked bored, distracted-like he was remembering another time and place. Borland was forced to repeat himself whenever he asked a question or answered one. The doctor had an accent…Eastern Europe? He had to be 35.
But the man's disinterest was soon getting under Borland's skin.
" I saved the world once, you know…"
He muttered this under his breath, but the doctor wasn't listening. The man sat at his desk across from Borland, scrolling around on his e-reader like he didn't care.
Borland froze.
A kinderkid? It's possible!
Then Borland realized he might have been studying the man too closely, but the doctor just glanced at him from time to time, looked up from his file to ask a question without focusing his eyes on anything.
What's his problem?
Borland wondered if the Shomberg Clinic had received the Variant Effect Alert bulletin that HQ was sending out to all health care providers and hospitals. That was bound to rattle anyone holding a doctor's license.
Maybe he was afraid of Borland. Especially with the doctor's age being what it was: did he think his patient was cooking the Variant molecule? Or was he afraid that the new hybrid in the bulletin might set off his own inner beast?
Borland shook his head and took a deep breath.
"I know too much," Borland mumbled matter-of-factly.
The doctor looked up then, asked more questions about Borland's health: Do you take any medication? When was your last physical? Do you have any allergies?
After much repetition, Borland managed to provide answers and clear up a few questions of his own, or at least as much as he wanted to know. He'd didn't care for the play by play.
Cut. Snip. Whatever.
That was when the doctor slipped in a bulletin of his own-how the Shomberg treatment stood up so well to scrutiny because it depended on the patients being awake during the procedure and did not involve dangerous anesthetics or lengthy recovery times
Borland's mouth dropped open.
"What?" he asked.
"Drop your pants please." The doctor circled his desk and pulled a short stool over as Borland got to his feet.
The doctor sat and pointed at Borland's groin. " And underwear."
"I'll be awake for the surgery?" Borland grabbed at his belt.
"Pardon me?" the doctor asked, slipping on a pair of vinyl gloves. He peered up over his glasses as Borland repeated the question, and then answered: "Oh, yes. It simplifies everything. People do not realize how risky anesthetic can be during a procedure and post-operatively."
"But-I'll be awake when you do it?" Borland asked again, lowering his pants and underwear.
" I won't be doing it." The doctor contemplated Borland's hairy crotch and swollen belly.
"You really should have lost some weight," he sighed, looking up, sheathed fingers reaching out and abstractedly manipulating Borland's testicles. "We shouldn't even operate."
"I lost 15 pounds…" Borland grumbled defensively, feeling his face flush unexpectedly when the doctor told him to turn his head and cough.
"Not enough," the doctor replied, shaking his head, his gaze shifting up to Borland's navel. He stared at the swollen lump of flesh that protruded. Then he reached out and forcefully pushed it in.
"Hey!" Borland gasped, coughed and stepped back. He almost lost his footing when his pants tightened around his ankles, but he caught himself against his chair.
"You could lose 30 more." The doctor grabbed his e-board from a short side table and tapped something on the virtual keys.
"Inguinal hernias, left and right," he said, checking something off on the cartoon abdomen displayed on the e-reader's color screen.
He reached into the breast pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a large pen. He uncapped it, and then stroked it deftly across Borland's belly, leaving a thick horizontal line of black ink above the protruding navel.
"The surgeon will cut here," the doctor said, gesturing at the line before turning away. "He's not going to like the fact that you're obese."
Borland stared down at his swollen navel and sighed.
Obese?
He felt a sudden urge to hit the bottles tucked away in his bags. Call an end to the whole drama.
The hell with this!
But from Borland's point of view the doctor's black line appeared to curve down to either side beneath the plum-sized hernia like a frown.
He had to get this done.
"That's all there is to it," the doctor said, saving the information on his e-board and copying it to Borland's file.
Wincing at the painful throb in his abdomen, Borland pulled his clothing back into place, loosely fastening his belt.
The doctor held out his file-the flash card on it flickering as the data saved. He set it on Borland's palm. "Take this down to accounting. They'll tell you were to go from there."
CHAPTER 5
Borland had read the background on the website.
The Shomberg Clinic sold unique soft tissue dissection and repair that had an almost zero failure rate, so sufferers came from all over the world to receive the famous treatment. They used industrial production techniques in their war on hernias because the injuries were so common.
Dr. Shomberg had developed his innovative surgical repair techniques during World War Two to help young men who were unable to enlist because of their hernias. His repair soon fixed these recruits for service, and before long all branches of the military wanted his aid. His methods soon became the favorite of construction workers and anyone in a strenuous line of work.
And the repair was so solid his patients could get back to work or service in record time with little chance of re-injuring themselves.
Shomberg founded the clinic and the clinic grew into a hernia-repair factory.
Day surgery at most hospitals, the repair as Dr. Shomberg saw it required an extended stay for lasting results. So he developed an assembly-line method that involved constant waves of injured patients arriving and entering the clinic to match the waves of recuperating patients leaving after the three- or four-day repair cycle.
The various stages of overlap that occurred were responsible for the strange population Borland found wandering the clinic halls.
There were check-in and orientation day patients, operation day patients, healing day patients and final day- get me out of here -patients. The result was a motley crew of anxious, wounded and relieved individuals-all of them wishing they were anywhere else on the planet, but all of them thrown into a weird brotherhood of embarrassing injury, violation and release.
Everybody had a limp or soon would.
Check-in day caused a lot of stress as new patients inserted themselves into the clinic's production line and bore witness to patients a day or days ahead of them in the process.
Operation day patients were the worst. They could strike terror into any heart-tumbling out of their beds and shuffling through the ebb and flow of arrivals and departures smelling of disinfectant and body odors, and sporting grime and fear and various fright-wig hairstyles.
Each of them moving gingerly; fearing that any jarring motion might damage their recent repairs of flesh and steel thread, or worse, according to rumor, start a gory cascade of abdominal wall and intestines.
Borland hated it all and decided to do his best to avoid identification with any group. He wanted to go in like a Sneak Squad. Keep his head low, have the treatment and get out of there without experiencing any but the absolute bare minimum of human contact.
As he stumped along the carpeted hallway after the nurse, careful not to jingle his hidden cranking materials, he mused over his ill luck and growing thirst.