Now that Marianna had been sedated, Ella could start the
process of removing stem cells from the liquid marrow at the rear of her pelvic bone. And with every phase of the transplant procedure firmly fixed in her mind, she was more than certain, there wouldn’t be any problems.
The first thing she needed to do was find out if an efficient amount of cells could be harvested. A normal person would have very small amounts, and would need to be harvested a number of times, but with Marianna being what she was, Ella expected a hefty crop.
After removing Marianna’s clothing and turning her over, she reset the restraints and was ready to begin. She pulled on another pair of surgical gloves, and retrieved a hypodermic needle from the lab table behind the donor, then, with a wad of cotton-wool soaked in alcohol, she swabbed the area ready for insertion.
After taking a few calming breaths, she commenced inserting the needle into Marianna’s skin, only to have it snap on contact. She was sure she hadn’t done it wrong, couldn’t have. Inserting a needle is basic; she’d done it dozens of times before. Ella replaced the needle and tried again. And again, to her total disbelief, the needle broke. Once, okay, she could live with that, but twice? She pinched Marianna’s skin around where she wanted to insert the needle; it didn’t feel any thicker, nor was it any tougher than she’d expected it to be.
Ella had a feeling there was more to Marianna than the eye alone was privy to. If her skin resisted trauma so efficiently, that could be the reason for it not being affected by water. A different test needed to be carried out. Something sharp was required, something she could use to try to break the skin. A glass vial sitting empty on the lab table behind proved to be the perfect solution.
Placing it under her booted-foot, Ella rolled it forward increasing the pressure until it cracked. She selected the longest of the pieces and pushed it against the back of Marianna’s thigh, and still her skin wouldn’t break. She dragged the thin piece of glass down towards the back of the knee, where the skin would be at its thinnest. But the long shard crumbled like a soft wafer biscuit.
Her suspicions were correct; Marianna’s skin was her amour, her shield, her barrier against … well, against anything that would be deemed intrusive. She knew at that very moment, Marianna was much more than she’d anticipated her to be, and when Martins receives her stem cells, he’ll be as she is, if not stronger. And soon, all of them will be.
After she’d blown away the tiny glass fragments from Marianna’s skin, she replaced the second broken needle with what could only be described as an industrial-strength one. Again she pushed on the syringe, this time much slower in an attempt to keep the needle straight.
Slowly but surely, she reached the pelvic bone, where applying a little more pressure got her into the narrow cavity beyond. Once she’d gained entry into that cavity, she withdrew the plunger, extracting five mils of liquid bone marrow.
Over at the lab table, Ella released a small amount of the specimen she’d taken onto a glass slide, before placing it under a microscope. She knew what to look for, and how to calculate the amount of stem cells present. And after following the instructions she’d been given, she was astounded to find over fifty times the amount expected. Instead of Martins taking weeks to recover, as he’d said it would, she felt within a day or two, he could at least be well enough to rise from his bed.
The next step for Ella would be to fill a number of transfusion bags with the contents of Marianna’s veins, and withdraw sufficient amounts of bone marrow to introduce into the collected blood. Then, using the normal intravenous methods, she could get the contents of the bags into Thomas Martins.
When Ella had finished filling four half-litre bags with Marianna’s blood, she stored them in a refrigerator standing at the end of the lab table. She then commenced extracting the rest of the precious bone marrow. She used four, fifty-mil syringes, managing to fill each one to ten mils, and without breaking another needle in the process.
She injected the marrow directly into the four bags containing the blood, one ten mil dose to each of them. The first of these bags was placed on the apparatus, and the drain needle inserted into Martins’ left arm. She checked his pulse, his body temperature, and his breathing. Too weak, too high, and too shallow, were her conclusions.
She also checked on Marianna, her pulse was fast, her respiration looked to be normal, and her skin had a paler tone than it did before, but she had just donated two litres of blood. Other than that, she looked fine.
The drip rate Ella set would have the first bag drained in around thirty minutes, so she would wait in the chamber until the time came to replace the bag with another.
