Oh noooooo has it only been eight hours since Samora finished getting today's spells? How? (This observation is somehow coexisting with "how is it already past 5 pm????"). 

"....Slightly less than sixteen hours, I think. Fifteenish? That makes sense, it sounds like we don't have to ration them too hard. Now is good."

And she'll put in a narrative note, again, she's pretty sure she's been remembering to do that each time, it's just annoyingly hard to search or see the times at a glance. She wonders vaguely if there's some way to, like, save different cleric spells in the electronic medication administration record as custom off-formulary meds. Possibly a pharmacist has to do that, Marian has no idea how to put it in. 

Leareth does benefit notably more from this one! It's still the case that a lot of what's wrong with him is neither injurylike nor targetable as "Endurance", including the ongoing slow life-force drain showing up to Shavri, but his life-force is now topped up to a normal brightness! It's a little harder to pick out what actual injury-healing that corresponds to, because all of the "injuries" are internal and at a very fine-grained scale, but a closer look with Healing-Sight will confirm that the endothelial lining of his blood vessels is in better shape more or less everywhere, and his lungs are functioning a bit better even with the pneumonia still there, and it might even be getting a little bit of the most acute-injury muscle damage. 

Shavri relates this while Marian finishes moving IV pumps to the fold-up IV pole on the bed itself and transferring the monitor cassette to the portable monitor. 

:I think he won't desperately need another for a lot more than three hours: she says. :If we can afford it, I'm still in favor of doing them pretty often - especially if we want him to wake up and be lucid, the damage that keeps accumulating is going to be painful for him well before it's dangerous or making him unstable. But I think he could go six hours between Cures or channels, with this starting place.: 

'This patient will die in six hours without the repeated application of powerful divine healing magic' is still, like, not a great place to be in, but it's a big enough improvement from the place they were in before that Marian is grinning about it anyway. 

Aaaaaaand they're ready to go. Marian has emergency epinephrine and backup propofol in her pocket just in case, and with the respiratory therapist and Shavri and Samora and Marian herself, they should have plenty of people to help move the bed. Field trip! 

Leareth is still not at all inclined to try to breathe on his own, and the respiratory therapist has to bag him the whole way down the hall which limits how fast they can move, but other than that, the trip goes pretty much fine with no unexpected problems.

The giant artifice is soooooooo cool. Shavri arranges herself where she can keep an eye with Healing-Sight during it, rather than where she can see the pictures they're taking on the screen, but she absolutely wants to look at it later. 

Dr Chadra and the respiratory therapist are both camping out in the room itself, and the propofol is running without issue, so Marian is inclined to stay with Samora in the antechamber with the screen and point out things on the CT imagery. That definitely looks like a totally normal brain to her, though admittedly she is not a radiologist. 

Watching a man's breath be pumped into him like he's a forge is very strange. So is getting to look at his brain while it's still in his head. What are they hoping to learn here, exactly? Just whether there's anything wrong with his brain they didn't know about? Does Marian think this machine could tell the difference between Samora with her headband on and Samora without it, or is it not set up to see that kind of thing?

If Marian were the RT on duty she would just have dug out the transport ventilator, it kind of sucks as a piece of equipment but it's not like Leareth is having a ton of trouble on the respiratory side, at this point, and it would be so much less tedious. 

"....I kind of doubt this kind of picture could see that?" she says to Samora. "If the thing it does is change how you think? This test only shows - static structure, and only at a larger scale, I think we mainly want a baseline so we know what to compare to if he has a problem later that's getting worse." She mulls on it for a moment. "Your headband effect might show up on a - there's a different kind of picture that looks at the electrical signals, like how we're watching his heart rhythm, and that might show changes in how someone is able to think? And it might show up to Shavri's Healing-Sight. There's a different kind of imaging that sees - changes in where more blood is going, over time - and Healing-Sight is kind of more like that and maybe even better than that. ...How exactly does the headband work, I think you said it makes you 'wiser' but I'm not sure how to map that to things we can study about brains." 

(And they're done! Head CTs are pretty fast, even with contrast, which they risked even though it could be hard on his kidneys. Time to hurry back!) 

Leareth is still not making any attempts to breathe spontaneously, but he does cough in response to being jostled as they slide him back off the CT table to the bed. 

SHIT FUCK he's not restrained at all– okay okay they're fine he's absolutely still very thoroughly sedated and completely unresponsive to any stimuli, Marian just got stressed out there for a moment. 

She's still going to be pretty tense and distracted until they're actually back in the ICU and she can get restraints on him. Just in case. Continuing the admittedly-fascinating conversation with Samora will have to wait. 

Shavri watches dubiously as Marian puts the soft wrist restraints on Leareth's arms. :If he wakes up with his hands tied down he's probably more likely to panic: 

"Okay, but he's going to have worse problems if he pulls things out!" 

....Hmm is that actually true. His sats are fine, and right now he has zero actual respiratory drive but probably 'awake enough to pull out tubes' would correlate with 'awake enough to make any attempt to breathe'? 

"- We can maybe afford to not have him restrained when we're actually trying to wake him up, if we have several people in arms' reach the entire time and the spell to keep him calm if he starts getting agitated?" she allows. "But right now he's not even going to notice, it's - mostly for my peace of mind." 

She switches to Celestial. "Samora, when you were scared that you were being held prisoner or something, did being tied down make it a lot worse?" 

"Yes, definitely. It was one of the major pieces of evidence pushing me to conclude that I was being held prisoner for nefarious purposes. I might have thought so anyway just from the tubes--on Golarion people basically never attach machines to each other for good reasons--but it certainly didn't help."

Nod. "It - makes a lot of sense that it's a scarier and more confusing situation for both you and him. I think we can do this safely without the restraints, once we're trying to wake him up." He's not just a 1:1 patient, he's a "half the staff of the entire ICU are focused on him all day" patient. Man, Marian hopes the rest of the unit is actually fine, she's been so underwater with Leareth that she hasn't paid it the slightest bit of attention. 

:He may not even be strong or coordinated enough to succeed at pulling out any tubes: Shavri adds. :There's a lot of damage.: 

Dr Harrison is reviewing the CT imagery and, shortly later, on the phone arguing with the radiologist. Yes it's grossly normal, he too is capable of determining that by looking with his eyes. Yes he's aware that makes no fucking sense. He's worried about subtle deficits, the patient has a lot of metabolic shit going on, can they stare at it harder please. 

Eventually there is a report up, for more crowding-around-the-computer to read. 

....That might be one of the funniest radiology reports Marian has read in her entire life. The poor confused radiologist! Did Dr Harrison...at any point...consider explaining to him what was going on....? 

She does her best to convey the results to Samora. "It does sound like his brain doesn't look completely normal? It could just be temporary problems that will get better on their own now that his blood is normal and his body is working better, or it could be damage to the cells that isn't enough like an injury that the Cures help with it but that won't go away by itself. They're not sure just from the pictures. ...To be clear it's way way better than we have any right to expect, the report is saying that multiple times, your spells are doing amazing work, without that we would be expecting to see really obvious horrible damage that we can't fix. It sounds like he should at least wake up and be responsive, he just - might have some deficits in his ability to think." 

Shavri is so impressed!!!! Not with the image quality itself, she got a look over Dr Harrison's shoulder and it seems strictly worse than Healing-Sight, but with the training and skill of whoever did the interpretation. Shavri doesn't know how to do that! She probably could if she'd spent ten years staring at people's brains, but she hasn't and this other doctor clearly has and it shows. 

:...My guess is it's a mix of both. Some - sticky damage from the cells being dead or messed up, that I guess the Restoration didn't get because it's not strictly speaking affecting his Endurance in any way - and some temporary problems that will go away on their own eventually. I should be able to see more when he's more awake, like I said the energy-flow is suppressed right now anyway so it's harder to look.: 

Dr Harrison is hurriedly typing up an email to Dr Chen, with the report pdf attached. 

Subject: RE: Radiation case - urgent questions

CT head report attached. Pt off ECMO, off pressors, BP 105/68, making urine, CRRT on hold. But our specialist says underlying cellular damage still progressing, expects improvements to wear off over 12-24 hrs. Need pt conscious & able to transport himself to facility with more advanced treatment options.

Questions for you:

1. ECMO cannulas still in (fem art/vein, clamped). Remove before wake-up? 
2. Neuro assessment ASAP or wait? what neuro deficits most concerning given exposure? 
3. Pneumonia - pip/tazo, vanco, cipro, metro, micafungin, acyclovir all running. ANC 925. Can cure all infections but only once before am. Now or wait? 
4. Keep strict NPO with TPN vs trickle feeds? Specialist says gut cells currently alive but can't divide.

-JH

That's going to complicate the diplomacy somewhat, but a lot less than if he was fixably wrong in the head and she didn't know about it.

"It's possible to do a Restoration aimed at the mind, in a few different ways. I'm not sure which way if any would be the most helpful, but I might have a better idea once he's awake and can have a conversation. Even if he can't have a conversation, I might be able to have a better idea of what might help from seeing how he fails to have one." If nothing else, sticking her headband on him for a minute and seeing if that helps would be a pretty good clue.

(She's still living in both the world where they're potential allies and the world where they're going to be enemies, but the way to end up in the former is to extend help and trust and demonstrate that working with her is a good idea for all but the worst goals. Also it's nearly always a good idea for Evil people to get more Wisdom, because that's how they figure out that being Evil is a bad idea actually.)

"- That's really good to know."

Marian is going to go inform Dr Harrison right away, actually! ....She gets a look at the email on his screen and just barely manages not to sporfle. Did he really send that! From his actual professional hospital email account! Dr Rebecca Chen from Vanderbilt University Medical Center is probably going to be losing her mind. 

"Um, Samora says she can do the Restoration spell targeting brain damage," she tells him. "Obviously not an option until tomorrow - I guess until the supplies arrive tomorrow, I don't know if 'one-day shipping' means first thing in the morning - but it's on the table. There are a 'few different ways' and Samora isn't sure what would be the most helpful but she thinks she can assess it by talking to him." 

"Great." Dr Harrison goes back to ignoring her and refreshing his email.