Posted using PostyBirb",
"writing": "The steady beeping roused Niel enough he became aware of distant voices. He looked at where the beeping originated. The sound matched the peak of a graph as it scrolled on a screen. Then he realized it was in time with his heartbeat. Other machines lined the wall, and a tube went down from a bag hooked to a pole on the side of his bed, and into his arm via a needle.\n\nThe whole assembled into the sense of where he was. He was lying in a hospital bed. What was he doing in a hospital?\n\nIt couldn’t be from the away game. He’d been woozy, but he had moved under his own power and he’d made it to the dorms. The next day, yesterday? Had been classes. He’d felt off, but had gone through the day. This morning had been training. He’d fumbled so many balls that—okay, something was definitely off if that wasn’t funny to him—the coach had sent him to the nurse.\n\nShe had…\n\nHadn’t she…\n\nHe couldn’t remember reaching the infirmary.\n\nThe lockers he was confident with, he also remember leaving them, but…\n\nSomething had to have happened that landed him here. Wasn’t he supposed to wake after arriving at the hospital because he felt better? He still felt tired, and on top of that, now he was hungry. He should have eaten before practice; that had to be why he felt out of it.\n\nHe pressed the call button.\n\nA few seconds later, a doctor entered, stethoscope hanging around her neck and all.\n\n“Mister Leslie,” the labrador greeted him. “I’m glad to see you’re awake. Your timing is impeccable; the front desk informed me your father’s arrived.”\n\n“Is it a bad cliché to tell you he’s Mister Leslie, and I’m just Niel?”\n\nShe chuckled. “This isn’t a movie, so let’s say it doesn’t matter.” She looked over the displays. “Now, while we wait, would you mind answering a few questions, so I can get a better image of what happened? Let’s start with when you ate last.”\n\n“Around nine, last night. A sandwich. I regretted it a couple of hours later. I think I have a stomach bug. Food’s going right through me.”\n\nShe wrote something on her tablet. “How long has that been going on?”\n\n“It hit a couple of hours after lunch that afternoon. It’s why I didn’t eat this morning.”\n\nShe nodded and made more notes. “Mister Horgar mentioned you said you thought you’d caught this while in Madison. Any reason why you think that?”\n\n“It’s just a guess. I woke up feeling off yesterday. At first, I figured it was just the after-effect of a tough game; I was tackled a few times. Then, after lunch, I realized it had to be a bug, and Madison’s the only place I’ve been other than my usuals.”\n\n“Just to be clear—”\n\nThe door burst open, and instead of his father, a bear barged into the room, immediately shoved out of the way by an older raccoon. A Nurse followed his father, grabbed the coach and pulled him back.\n\n“Mister Horgar can stay,” the doctor stated, “if he behaves himself.”\n\nThe silence stretched as glances and looks were exchanged. \n\nWith a look of satisfaction, she focused on Niel again. “As I was saying. Niel, would you describe your symptoms as being lethargic, having trouble focusing, and finally diarrhea?”\n\nHe nodded.\n\n“Alright.” More annotations. “I can confirm that you don’t suffer from a form of gastroenteritis, or any other flu. You have bruises, but nothing out of the ordinary for a football player. You don’t have any concussion, or show signs of having received one recently.”\n\n“Recently?” Steward asked, sounding concerned.\n\n“Once the body has healed from one, the only way to determine it happened is through the changes in their behavior. Post-concussion syndrome. We do have specialized scans we can run if we suspect that is what we’re dealing with, but at this time, I’m confident in saying that is not the case.”\n\n“Then what is wrong with my son?”\n\n“I don’t know.”\n\n“Look. He was admitted after fainting in school, and Coach Horgar mentioned the things Niel told him. Clearly, something is going on with him.”\n\n“I agree.” She folded her arms before her, holding the tablet. “But Niel was admitted less than two hours ago. We have him on a drip, and we took blood sample. Your son doesn’t appear to be in immediate danger, so we can wait for the results to show—” the tablet beeped and she looked at it. “—that they are here.” She smiled at them, then read. The smile vanished partway through. “This is odd. Niel, you’re certain it’s yesterday that you last ate?”\n\n“Yes, I had lunch and a sandwich, but like I said, it went right through me.”\n\n“Your blood sugar’s unusually low, but your insulin’s fine. I’m not seeing the corresponding ketones looking for more glucose.” She looked up. “Alright, this might be nothing more than something wrong with the test we ran.”\n\n“But?” Steward pressed.\n\n“But I want to confirm everything before I attempt to assign a condition to your son.”\n\n“Look,” Coach Horgar said, “clearly you have an opinion. Just lay it out for us. We’re adults. We can take it for what it is, but it’s going to be a whole lot better than leaving us to imagine the worst-case scenarios.”\n\nHer expression was less than pleased as she faced the bear, but Steward interposed himself between them.\n\n“I’m with the coach.”\n\nNiel cleared his throat. “If this is going to turn into a shouting match, can you take it outside? My dad can come back once he’s done shouting at you.”\n\nSteward’s ears folded back in embarrassment, but he didn’t lose his determined expression. The doctor nodded and motioned toward the door, leaving Niel alone with the sweet mink nurse. He figured she turned the head of all the straight guys she came across.\n\n“Can I get some water? And maybe a bone to chew on, since I don’t think I should eat anything right now.”\n\nShe chuckled. “I’ll see about the water.”\n\nAlone, Niel let out resigned sigh. He should have added his insistence to the doctor telling them what she thought. But while he didn’t like being kept in the dark, he preferred answers to guesses. Just guessing he was fine was how he’d ended up here, and nothing good came from…\n\nHe raised the sheet, pulled the gown up, then smiled.\n\nOkay, if nothing else, this escapade had caused the damned cage to be removed.\n\n* * * * *\n\nVoices woke Niel.\n\nHis father, along with the labrador and another doctor, an elk, walked into his room.\n\n“Hey,” He greeted them, and his voice sounded slurred. The word had taken a lot of work, and he had to fight to keep his eyes open.\n\nThere was hardly any shadow from the window, so it was around noon. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but why was still exhausted then? And why was his father looking at the tent in the sheet? Oh Dear God. He couldn’t have morning wood in front of strangers. Worse, his father.\n\nWith a last worried glance at Niel’s crotch, Steward was at his side. “Hey buddy. How are you feeling?”\n\n“Like crap.” He didn’t even have the strength to laugh at his attempt at a joke. “What’s wrong with me?”\n\n“It’s…” Steward looked at the Elk.\n\n“I can explain what is happening to you,” the doctor said in a deep voice, filled with authority. It was a voice that promised answers. “But not why.”\n\n“I guess that’s a start.”\n\nSteward glanced at Niel crotch again.\n\nPlease let this not be that kind of dream. Niel was happy his father hadn’t been pulled into the bat’s machinations the way Roland’s father had. That was one set of memories he wouldn’t want to untangle.\n\n“You are tired, because you are starving,” the elk said.\n\n“Because everything’s going through me.”\n\n“It’s…” the elk looked at his tablet. “It’s more complicated than that. We have you on a glucose and amino acid drip. The same mixture we’d use for someone in a coma. But your system isn’t absorbing any of it. Not only that, but there are no indications of your body atrophying. We have analyzed your urine and stool—” Niel was glad he had slept through that. “—and everything we gave you came out unprocessed.”\n\n“So that’s why my shit was all those weird colors?”\n\nThe elk looked at him, then the labrador, who shook her head. “That would have been good to know earlier. Can you elaborate?”\n\n“Not really.”\n\nThe elk’s expression turned serious.\n\n“I just made the mistake of glancing in after I went. It’s not like I’m in the habit of checking or anything. There was bright green, reds, blues, and violets.”\n\n“Do you remember what you ate before that?”\n\nNiel thought back and told him about the spinach salad with his steak, there had been tomatoes in it, and other leafy green he didn’t know the name of. It was just a salad to him. Dessert had been a blueberry pie. Only once he described the meal did he realize the similarity in colors.\n\n“You have no idea how lucky you are that I haven’t eaten anything,” he said with a groan. “Cause that image is making me feel like I’m going to throw up.”\n\nThe nurse, a koala this time, place a bean-shaped bowl next to Niel’s head. Looking at that, and thinking about what dry heaving would feel like, was enough for him to order his stomach to settle, and for it to obey.\n\n“Yes, somehow, it seems you are excreting what you eat without processing it; beyond masticating, the stomach’s acids, and the mashing of the intestine. Quite baffling. Another interesting phenomenon is your near-constant erection.”\n\n“Can we not talk about my junk?”\n\n“Actually, it is quite interesting.” The Elk didn’t look at that while he spoke. “Erections in all levels of sickness will happen; it is an independent system, after all, and only requires the body to have sufficient blood for it to—”\n\n“Doctor, my son said he doesn’t want to hear about it.” Steward was the one looking sick now.\n\n“Of course. My apologies.” He folded his hands over the tablet and held it against his stomach. “As I said. We know what is happening, but not why, or even how it is possible. If it was only the food you ate, I could hazard a guess that somehow the lining of your digestive system has become impermeable, but even what we inject into your bloodstream is flushed out unaltered. It is as if your body now considers what is essential for your nutrition foreign.\n\nNile listened, but watched as his father’s nose-pad lose its sheen and he was the one looking about to throw up. Steward noticed the attention and straightened.\n\n“I’m taking my son home.”\n\n“Mister Leslie,” the elk replied. “I advise against doing that. Your son is in dire condition and must be monitored.”\n\n“No. My son needs to be out of here so I can—” the raccoon closed his mouth and rubbed his face. “My son needs to be home.”\n\n“No.” The elk’s deep voice turned commanding. “Your son needs to be under constant care and supervision so—”\n\n“You can watch me die?”\n\nThe doctor’s mouth snapped shut audibly.\n\n“I mean, that’s what not getting any nutrition means, right?” Niel asked. “You said it. I’m starving and my body isn’t even eating itself to keep me alive. How long do I have?”\n\nThe elk’s calm broke, and his voice lost its authoritativeness. “My job is to ensure you have the best chances of survival.”\n\n“Okay. So what are you going to do?” He looked at the two doctors. “Unless you discover how to put me in cryogenic sleep over the next two days, what’s left that you even think might work?”\n\n“We may be able to synthesize a combination of amino acid your body will accept.”\n\nSteward snorted.\n\n“Dad?”\n\nThere was a second of embarrassment and fear, then the older raccoon’s expression became mocking. “You haven’t heard them flounder about. They probably don’t have any idea what to do.”\n\n“I know not to give up,” the elk stated.\n\n“I’m not giving up on my son!” Steward threw his hands in the air. Then visibly held himself back from yelling something more. He calmed. “But I’m not leaving my son here when it’s clear you can’t do anything for him.”\n\n“Mister Leslie. Just because I don’t know, at this very moment, what is the correct course of action. It is not a reason to act like I will never find it.”\n\n“But how long?” Niel asked.\n\nWhat was it he’d heard, or maybe read. Someone could survive a week without water, a month without food? But that was when the body fed on itself. His didn’t, so how long did he have? Fuck, how was he still alive?\n\n“There is no way to know,” the doctor admitted. “But giving up is not the way to handle this.”\n\n“But that’s our decision, right?” Niel understood his father’s reaction now. How many days and nights had he spent in a hospital room like this at his wife’s side as she wasted away from cancer? Every doctor promising they were doing everything they could, that if he kept hope, they were sure they would find the right mix of chemical and therapy that would send it into remission. In the end, she’d still died in a bed like this one.\n\nNiel didn’t want to put his father through that. And he didn’t want to go through that himself. Dying with only his friends visiting on set hours.\n\nHis friends.\n\nFuck, he didn’t have to rely on science. He had access to magic. Olavo had to be back from his trip right? If he wasn’t, this would qualify as an emergency. Kuno could talk him into coming back. \n\nHe could be fucked back to health.\n\n“… decision falls on you.”\n\nShit, he’d missed most of that, but it sounded like the doctor agreed.\n\n“I will advise again that you should remain here so we can treat you.”\n\n“I appreciate it, Doctor. But I want to go home.”",
"writing_bbcode_parsed": "The steady beeping roused Niel enough he became aware of distant voices. He looked at where the beeping originated. The sound matched the peak of a graph as it scrolled on a screen. Then he realized it was in time with his heartbeat. Other machines lined the wall, and a tube went down from a bag hooked to a pole on the side of his bed, and into his arm via a needle.
The whole assembled into the sense of where he was. He was lying in a hospital bed. What was he doing in a hospital?
It couldn’t be from the away game. He’d been woozy, but he had moved under his own power and he’d made it to the dorms. The next day, yesterday? Had been classes. He’d felt off, but had gone through the day. This morning had been training. He’d fumbled so many balls that—okay, something was definitely off if that wasn’t funny to him—the coach had sent him to the nurse.
She had…
Hadn’t she…
He couldn’t remember reaching the infirmary.
The lockers he was confident with, he also remember leaving them, but…
Something had to have happened that landed him here. Wasn’t he supposed to wake after arriving at the hospital because he felt better? He still felt tired, and on top of that, now he was hungry. He should have eaten before practice; that had to be why he felt out of it.
He pressed the call button.
A few seconds later, a doctor entered, stethoscope hanging around her neck and all.
“Mister Leslie,” the labrador greeted him. “I’m glad to see you’re awake. Your timing is impeccable; the front desk informed me your father’s arrived.”
“Is it a bad cliché to tell you he’s Mister Leslie, and I’m just Niel?”
She chuckled. “This isn’t a movie, so let’s say it doesn’t matter.” She looked over the displays. “Now, while we wait, would you mind answering a few questions, so I can get a better image of what happened? Let’s start with when you ate last.”
“Around nine, last night. A sandwich. I regretted it a couple of hours later. I think I have a stomach bug. Food’s going right through me.”
She wrote something on her tablet. “How long has that been going on?”
“It hit a couple of hours after lunch that afternoon. It’s why I didn’t eat this morning.”
She nodded and made more notes. “Mister Horgar mentioned you said you thought you’d caught this while in Madison. Any reason why you think that?”
“It’s just a guess. I woke up feeling off yesterday. At first, I figured it was just the after-effect of a tough game; I was tackled a few times. Then, after lunch, I realized it had to be a bug, and Madison’s the only place I’ve been other than my usuals.”
“Just to be clear—”
The door burst open, and instead of his father, a bear barged into the room, immediately shoved out of the way by an older raccoon. A Nurse followed his father, grabbed the coach and pulled him back.
“Mister Horgar can stay,” the doctor stated, “if he behaves himself.”
The silence stretched as glances and looks were exchanged.
With a look of satisfaction, she focused on Niel again. “As I was saying. Niel, would you describe your symptoms as being lethargic, having trouble focusing, and finally diarrhea?”
He nodded.
“Alright.” More annotations. “I can confirm that you don’t suffer from a form of gastroenteritis, or any other flu. You have bruises, but nothing out of the ordinary for a football player. You don’t have any concussion, or show signs of having received one recently.”
“Recently?” Steward asked, sounding concerned.
“Once the body has healed from one, the only way to determine it happened is through the changes in their behavior. Post-concussion syndrome. We do have specialized scans we can run if we suspect that is what we’re dealing with, but at this time, I’m confident in saying that is not the case.”
“Then what is wrong with my son?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look. He was admitted after fainting in school, and Coach Horgar mentioned the things Niel told him. Clearly, something is going on with him.”
“I agree.” She folded her arms before her, holding the tablet. “But Niel was admitted less than two hours ago. We have him on a drip, and we took blood sample. Your son doesn’t appear to be in immediate danger, so we can wait for the results to show—” the tablet beeped and she looked at it. “—that they are here.” She smiled at them, then read. The smile vanished partway through. “This is odd. Niel, you’re certain it’s yesterday that you last ate?”
“Yes, I had lunch and a sandwich, but like I said, it went right through me.”
“Your blood sugar’s unusually low, but your insulin’s fine. I’m not seeing the corresponding ketones looking for more glucose.” She looked up. “Alright, this might be nothing more than something wrong with the test we ran.”
“But?” Steward pressed.
“But I want to confirm everything before I attempt to assign a condition to your son.”
“Look,” Coach Horgar said, “clearly you have an opinion. Just lay it out for us. We’re adults. We can take it for what it is, but it’s going to be a whole lot better than leaving us to imagine the worst-case scenarios.”
Her expression was less than pleased as she faced the bear, but Steward interposed himself between them.
“I’m with the coach.”
Niel cleared his throat. “If this is going to turn into a shouting match, can you take it outside? My dad can come back once he’s done shouting at you.”
Steward’s ears folded back in embarrassment, but he didn’t lose his determined expression. The doctor nodded and motioned toward the door, leaving Niel alone with the sweet mink nurse. He figured she turned the head of all the straight guys she came across.
“Can I get some water? And maybe a bone to chew on, since I don’t think I should eat anything right now.”
She chuckled. “I’ll see about the water.”
Alone, Niel let out resigned sigh. He should have added his insistence to the doctor telling them what she thought. But while he didn’t like being kept in the dark, he preferred answers to guesses. Just guessing he was fine was how he’d ended up here, and nothing good came from…
He raised the sheet, pulled the gown up, then smiled.
Okay, if nothing else, this escapade had caused the damned cage to be removed.
* * * * *
Voices woke Niel.
His father, along with the labrador and another doctor, an elk, walked into his room.
“Hey,” He greeted them, and his voice sounded slurred. The word had taken a lot of work, and he had to fight to keep his eyes open.
There was hardly any shadow from the window, so it was around noon. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but why was still exhausted then? And why was his father looking at the tent in the sheet? Oh Dear God. He couldn’t have morning wood in front of strangers. Worse, his father.
With a last worried glance at Niel’s crotch, Steward was at his side. “Hey buddy. How are you feeling?”
“Like crap.” He didn’t even have the strength to laugh at his attempt at a joke. “What’s wrong with me?”
“It’s…” Steward looked at the Elk.
“I can explain what is happening to you,” the doctor said in a deep voice, filled with authority. It was a voice that promised answers. “But not why.”
“I guess that’s a start.”
Steward glanced at Niel crotch again.
Please let this not be that kind of dream. Niel was happy his father hadn’t been pulled into the bat’s machinations the way Roland’s father had. That was one set of memories he wouldn’t want to untangle.
“You are tired, because you are starving,” the elk said.
“Because everything’s going through me.”
“It’s…” the elk looked at his tablet. “It’s more complicated than that. We have you on a glucose and amino acid drip. The same mixture we’d use for someone in a coma. But your system isn’t absorbing any of it. Not only that, but there are no indications of your body atrophying. We have analyzed your urine and stool—” Niel was glad he had slept through that. “—and everything we gave you came out unprocessed.”
“So that’s why my shit was all those weird colors?”
The elk looked at him, then the labrador, who shook her head. “That would have been good to know earlier. Can you elaborate?”
“Not really.”
The elk’s expression turned serious.
“I just made the mistake of glancing in after I went. It’s not like I’m in the habit of checking or anything. There was bright green, reds, blues, and violets.”
“Do you remember what you ate before that?”
Niel thought back and told him about the spinach salad with his steak, there had been tomatoes in it, and other leafy green he didn’t know the name of. It was just a salad to him. Dessert had been a blueberry pie. Only once he described the meal did he realize the similarity in colors.
“You have no idea how lucky you are that I haven’t eaten anything,” he said with a groan. “Cause that image is making me feel like I’m going to throw up.”
The nurse, a koala this time, place a bean-shaped bowl next to Niel’s head. Looking at that, and thinking about what dry heaving would feel like, was enough for him to order his stomach to settle, and for it to obey.
“Yes, somehow, it seems you are excreting what you eat without processing it; beyond masticating, the stomach’s acids, and the mashing of the intestine. Quite baffling. Another interesting phenomenon is your near-constant erection.”
“Can we not talk about my junk?”
“Actually, it is quite interesting.” The Elk didn’t look at that while he spoke. “Erections in all levels of sickness will happen; it is an independent system, after all, and only requires the body to have sufficient blood for it to—”
“Doctor, my son said he doesn’t want to hear about it.” Steward was the one looking sick now.
“Of course. My apologies.” He folded his hands over the tablet and held it against his stomach. “As I said. We know what is happening, but not why, or even how it is possible. If it was only the food you ate, I could hazard a guess that somehow the lining of your digestive system has become impermeable, but even what we inject into your bloodstream is flushed out unaltered. It is as if your body now considers what is essential for your nutrition foreign.
Nile listened, but watched as his father’s nose-pad lose its sheen and he was the one looking about to throw up. Steward noticed the attention and straightened.
“I’m taking my son home.”
“Mister Leslie,” the elk replied. “I advise against doing that. Your son is in dire condition and must be monitored.”
“No. My son needs to be out of here so I can—” the raccoon closed his mouth and rubbed his face. “My son needs to be home.”
“No.” The elk’s deep voice turned commanding. “Your son needs to be under constant care and supervision so—”
“You can watch me die?”
The doctor’s mouth snapped shut audibly.
“I mean, that’s what not getting any nutrition means, right?” Niel asked. “You said it. I’m starving and my body isn’t even eating itself to keep me alive. How long do I have?”
The elk’s calm broke, and his voice lost its authoritativeness. “My job is to ensure you have the best chances of survival.”
“Okay. So what are you going to do?” He looked at the two doctors. “Unless you discover how to put me in cryogenic sleep over the next two days, what’s left that you even think might work?”
“We may be able to synthesize a combination of amino acid your body will accept.”
Steward snorted.
“Dad?”
There was a second of embarrassment and fear, then the older raccoon’s expression became mocking. “You haven’t heard them flounder about. They probably don’t have any idea what to do.”
“I know not to give up,” the elk stated.
“I’m not giving up on my son!” Steward threw his hands in the air. Then visibly held himself back from yelling something more. He calmed. “But I’m not leaving my son here when it’s clear you can’t do anything for him.”
“Mister Leslie. Just because I don’t know, at this very moment, what is the correct course of action. It is not a reason to act like I will never find it.”
“But how long?” Niel asked.
What was it he’d heard, or maybe read. Someone could survive a week without water, a month without food? But that was when the body fed on itself. His didn’t, so how long did he have? Fuck, how was he still alive?
“There is no way to know,” the doctor admitted. “But giving up is not the way to handle this.”
“But that’s our decision, right?” Niel understood his father’s reaction now. How many days and nights had he spent in a hospital room like this at his wife’s side as she wasted away from cancer? Every doctor promising they were doing everything they could, that if he kept hope, they were sure they would find the right mix of chemical and therapy that would send it into remission. In the end, she’d still died in a bed like this one.
Niel didn’t want to put his father through that. And he didn’t want to go through that himself. Dying with only his friends visiting on set hours.
His friends.
Fuck, he didn’t have to rely on science. He had access to magic. Olavo had to be back from his trip right? If he wasn’t, this would qualify as an emergency. Kuno could talk him into coming back.
He could be fucked back to health.
“… decision falls on you.”
Shit, he’d missed most of that, but it sounded like the doctor agreed.
“I will advise again that you should remain here so we can treat you.”
“I appreciate it, Doctor. But I want to go home.”",
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