However, once I was forced into thisconsultationby a five-foot-two Cajun menace, I provided the blood samples for the test results I didn’t fucking want. Turns out, I don’t have any markers for anything that would make me a bad candidate for the serum. Still doesn’t mean I want to give this next “magic cure” a try. Yeah, sure, I’d like the knee to be less painful, but sometimes it’s easier to just fucking accept your lot in life and get on with it already.
“So you’re saying you could inject my knee and it’ll get better?”
“Not quite. First off, it won’t grow back the knee you had replaced. Second, some of the things that are wrong with your knee have to do with the erosion of bone and tissue and, again, this does not replace lost material. Using it now will only paper over the issue. We’ll still need to go in, clean up the injured sites, and replace the knee…”
I cut him off. “So there’s no way to just fix it with the artificial joint that’s there?”
Anders looks at me like I smell bad. “And what? Leave the shitty VA knee joint that sticks and causes you incredible pain rather than give you an advanced, high-functioning replacement that has a half-life of two hundred years?”
“Two hundred years? Who the fuck needs a knee to last that long?”
Anders rolls his eyes. “You. Are. Missing. The. Point. It’s like buying a seventy-million-dollar mansion and putting a rotted-out Yugo in the garage.”
“What the fuck is a Yugo?”
“Exactly.”
I let my head fall back dramatically as I stare holes into the ceiling. Anders crosses his arms, glowering at me. “Look, I know you don’t want another replacement because the recovery is hell. But this will solve your knee problem with a better, stabler joint, and your recovery, pain, and physical therapy will all be greatly reduced because of the serum. But that’s still not your biggest issue.”
No shit, Sherlock. That designation belongs to my fucked-up brain. But I digress. “It’s not?”
He shakes his head. Leaning in, he places a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We’ll never get your knee right if you don’t let us address your skin as well.”
I remember something he said earlier and it makes whatever little flare of hope I have die in my stomach. “Doesn’t the serum increase cell production? Wouldn’t that just make this all worse? I mean…look at the way my skin scars. Every. Damn. Time.”
The areas of scar tissue pull on the skin, muscle, and joints around them and, yes, they’re as painful as they sound. Half of the surgeries I’ve had were to reduce the scarring, but they only resulted in making it worse. Despite my strenuous workout regimen for the rest of my body, I’m severely limited with this leg. It looks withered next to my healthy leg, and I hate it.
He scratches his chin, shaking his head. “We’re not trying to heal your skin. Your skin is fucking garbage at this point.”
“Thanks, man.”
“You’re welcome. The serum doesn’t work like that anyway. It doesn’t fix scars after the skin has already healed. At that point, it’s just an expensive injection. The skin matrix that our plastic surgeon uses in combination with the serum creates a smooth, fully healed surface. So since there won’t be any scars to build on, I believe we can generally avoid those kinds of complications.”
“Wait…you’ll be taking off my skin?”
“No. Dr. Tamashiro is going to remove all of the fucking cadaver skin that they should’ve never used in the first place. And replace it with something that will be your skin, genetically, within a matter of hours.”
“So they’ve had good results? Even on people with darker skin?”
“We’ve got a pretty diverse team and have had the same quality of recovery across the board. The skin we use takes on your skin color, and the scarring, where your healthy skin and the new skin meet, is damn near nonexistent.”
My chest tightens at the thought. “You do understand that it sounds like you’re lying to me, right? With all of the surgeries I’ve had, every time they said it’d fix things, and it never did. And they usually made something else worse. I’m tired of having to get the fixes fixed.”
Anders’ face shadows for a moment.
“What?” I ask, feeling twitchy in this unfamiliar space. The doctor who owns this office is a pediatrician, so there are pictures of kids at various stages of growth along the walls. And Anders’ concern is irritating.
“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone you were having surgeries? All anyone knew was that you had a bum knee.”
“I’m used to handling things by myself.”
He leans back in the chair, lifting his ankle to his knee—a move, by the way, I can’t do—and sits there, looking thoughtful. Which, considering it’s Anders, makes me deeply fucking uncomfortable.
“Look, I think it’s a mistake to go through this alone. Outcomes are always better for the folks who have supportive family or friends.”
I leave his comment hanging in the air, so he addresses my other concern. “Seems to me that you were getting the standard of care, but it obviously wasn’t working. You’re rich as fuck. I’m not sure why you weren’t taking advantage of the more advanced options—maybe your doctors didn’t share that information with you?”
They shared all kinds of things, but by then, I couldn’t bear the thought of another surgery.
