That was probably too much to expect of him right now, wasn't it. 

Market updates: 

Prediction on mild damage: 70%. They lost a lot of ground just then, and thus probability mass on literally the best outcome, because as expected, while Merrin is fighting machines for the next ten minutes, for one it's adding delay and for another, there is the expected bump in cellular damage markers. 

Moderate damage: 29%. Closer to 1:3 than 1:4 odds, but still not that likely. 

Odds of severe damage: a very small jump to 7%. 

Merrin feels awful about this!!! Sorry Kalorm sorry sorry sorry – also now is not a good time to be upset, she has him vaguely approximately stable again and they have to keep moving. 

Sawing open a patient's chest! While they are really low on platelets and their clotting factors are not really functioning normally! Is sort of a fraught plan! They don't really have a choice but still! 

The markets don't think that massive bleeding is very likely – one in ten odds, maybe – and they're super ready to react appropriately if it does, it won't by itself be catastrophic. But given that Merrin just barely has the patient re-stabilized, it won't be great either, especially happening in such short succession. Call it a 4.5% increase in odds of minor damage, 9% increase in odds of moderate damage, maybe a 4.5% increase in severe damage too. 

(If it goes smoothly, the situation is mostly unchanged, but looks very slightly better, call it by 0.5% and 1% and 0.5% respectively.) 

STRESS 

No bleeding! 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand now Merrin has to do the hard part. (STRESS!) 

They think it's a little more likely than even odds – 60% probability – that Merrin can time it well enough that they don't lose any more ground. But the patient is still really quite fragile.

In the 40% of worlds where she loses his blood pressure, even very briefly, there are probably a lot of neurons and neural support cells that are just barely hanging on, just barely maintaining membrane integrity and ion gradients, and losing control of that again will push more of them over the edge – the markets are guessing it would send the likelihood of mild damage up by 12%, to 80.5%, and of moderate damage up by 9% to 37%, a little bit above 1 in 3 odds. Severe damage...still less affected, relatively speaking, but maybe a 3% increase there. 

If it goes smoothly, they're one step closer to starting the actual protocol, more of the risky parts behind them rather than ahead – the markets expect to react with an 8%, 6%, and 2% decrease respectively.

Merrin is only a LITTLE bit internally screaming because she does, in fact, super need to be focusing here. 

It goes about as smoothly as it could have! 

Merrin - finishes securing everything really well, first - and then does a little happy dance before she remembers that there are CAMERAS.

Merrin DESERVES a little happy dance! That was genuinely objectively very hard and impressive, and Personnel is so proud of Merrin, not that she’s going to say that. She probably can’t even say it later.

(Merrin feels that this was a TEAM EFFORT with Kalorm, actually, but he did so well and she can provide honest, if unheard-by-Kalorm, reassurance that that was the worst scariest part.)

Literally how is Merrin so adorable? Weird, and you want to bap her with a banana and tell her to have a higher opinion of herself and then you DO that and it doesn’t even WORK (…it is possible this story has been retold rather widely among the Exception Handling staff) - anyway she is a very confusing alien, but, like, an adorable one.

Kalorm's entire family is now in the Family Room prepared for them. (It's roughly just their summer vacation home including bedrooms, plus a room for Finnar set up with LCD screens to fully mirror all the displays in the main command center, plus another room for Finnar with the requested projectors and wall screens.)

Finnar is pacing between those two rooms and the living room where most of the family is huddled together, on the edge of their seats, watching just the basic camera footage of the room. The atmosphere is....tense. 

Kurthin and his father keep exchanging abjectly miserable looks. No one else is acknowledging this. 

Khemeth might or might not be able to do some steering to smooth over the tension (there is kind of a lot to be tense about!), if he weren't too busy having multiple simultaneous text conversations, while his mental Merrin is very very stressed and his mental Kalorm is veering around between a dozen different strong emotions, none of which are pleasant to have playing out in his head. 

He's impressed with Merrin, though. Not especially surprised, but a little surprised, that was really smoothly done for someone who is just definitely below-average on physical dexterity and reflexes. She's clearly using various strategies to compensate for that, but the fact that she has those strategies, and can execute them even under conditions of intense cognitive load, is a testament to just how many hours she's put into drilling this. It's not even just that most dath ilanis don't have the stamina to have put in that much sim time at her age. Most dath ilanis would get painfully bored after repeating variations on this procedure several hundred times.

(He looked it up. Merrin has done variations on heart-lung bypass setup in sims 384 times - and like a dozen times in real life, though never with a patient starting out this unstable or with stakes this high. It's only, like, a twenty-minute procedure, so it's not hard to work it into a wide range of sims. She's done it outdoors in 40 degree heat, in "earthquake wreckage", in a flooded hospital, in a cave with only the equipment she could carry on her. These are, comparatively speaking, almost optimal conditions.) 

You watch Merrin work, every part of her fully engaged with the task at hand, and - while it's clearly a draining emotional roller coaster for her - you end up feeling like maybe the thousandth patient case would feel just as important and real, even new, as the first. 

His mental Kalorm is grudgingly impressed, which is saying a lot, Kalorm is deeply unimpressed with most people. But he did always respect stubbornness. 

It's terrible how she doesn't have enough arms to hug all of her children and it's EVEN WORSE that she can't hug Kalorm at all, or even be in the same room - there are a lot of medical staff working on him, it's already crowded, and they really don't need the distraction of hovering emotional family members. 

Their Medical Crisis Liaison (who on request introduced herself by name to Khemeth, but absolutely does not expect anyone else to remember her name) can provide a running commentary. 

"What the opper said is right," she can confirm, when Merrin murmurs to Kalorm's unconscious body that the riskiest part is past. "It's– well, we're going to be getting a lot of information over the next few hours, about - how well we can expect this to work. But there's much less room for things to actively go wrong." 

On the screen, Merrin is unhooking the no-longer-necessary ECMO circuit, avoiding any blood pressure disruptions via the fact that she has, like, literally a dial for that on the bypass controls. Brain surgery is happening, other medtechs placing the sensor array that will tell them what they need for real-time protocol dosing adjustments. 

These are not nearly as high risk. The prediction markets place a pretty low probability on anything going wrong, and in fact nothing is going wrong. 

Nerdel wrings her hands. 

- and abruptly looks over at their Support Worker. "- Can we see him? I, just for a minute, just for ten seconds, it would - I don't know how to get through the next twelve hours otherwise..." 

She is sort of crying right now. Quietcrying. 

Finnar nods emphatically. "You should let us see him." 

"I - it's going to depend if they think he's stable enough right now - I'll send a message..." 

(Actually, Fanthim thinks it mostly depends on whether the lead opper is okay with crying family members! It seems like it might be really distracting! Also asking her the question seems pretty distracting in itself! Fanthim...is going to run this by Personnel first.) 

It would probably be a little distracting! But Merrin is juggling fewer total machines now, and is pretty much just keeping things in a holding pattern while they start what one might call phase 0 of the protocol, which mostly consists of administering some low dose immunomodulators while they calibrate all the new sensors and wait for results on an extremely thorough panel of lab tests, which will inform some final parameters. 

Also, Merrin will super understand this being important to the family, and Personnel actually models that she would be upset if she learned after the fact that the request was made and no one had even asked her for fear of distracting her.