Welcome to the Show: Part 8c – Stress Simulation 7.0
Joe woke up on a gurney.
Heads in a surgical masks hovered over him. Joe was being rolled through double doors that folded open at their approach.
“What…?” he managed to get out. The pain was making him delirious.
“You’ll be fine,” said one of the men. He patted Joe on the shoulder.
“Do we have any more anesthetic?” asked one of the other surgeons.
The other one slowly shook his head back and forth.
“…for what?” asked Joe.
“Ready?” The chief surgeon asked the others. “One. Two. Three.” They lifted him together and placed Joe on a cold metal table.
One of them tied a tourniquet around the top of his thigh. The cinch of the tightly drawn rubber tubing put pressure on his femoral nerve and he started to struggle.
“Wait, what the hell are you doing?”
“This leg’s coming off,” said the chief surgeon with steel blue eyes. “The quicker, the better.”
“What?” shouted Joe before an assistant shoved a piece of plastic into his mouth. They strapped it around his head.
Another strap went over his forehead and he was lashed to the table, one limb at a time.
The surgeon lifted a scalpel. He made an incision above Joe’s knee, slicing through the skin and into the quadriceps. As the scalpel entered, severing nerve fibers along the way, the pain was a flash of white-hot searing agony, moving like a wave across Joe’s thigh.
Joe groaned and made an inhuman noise. He clamped down on the plastic but it didn’t help.
The surgeon cut almost completely around the leg to the hamstring muscle in the back, leaving just a small flap of skin on one side.
When the surgeon lifted the scalpel away from Joe’s leg, he was granted a temporary respite from the agony—until he caught a glimpse of the bone saw.
The surgeon placed the saw on Joe’s femur and started it up. It wasn’t the feeling but the sound and smell that drove him mad—a heavy scraping noise from metal gnawing through bone. And the smell, oh the smell! He would never forget that smell, of hot bone and flesh sizzling, protesting against the metal blade.
Joe’s heart sped up again, his blood pressure dropped, and shock slowed the supply of oxygenated blood to his brain. He blessedly lost consciousness.