I wanted to save lives.
It’s why I became a trauma surgeon so that I could save people and give them a second chance or a hope of recovery.
I wanted to save lives.
Now I just want to forget.
About a month ago, I got a call about a patient in need of urgent care.
Some asshole on a motorcycle had run a red light and hit a pedestrian outside of a bar. The idiot on the donorcycle was dead, but the pedestrian survived. He was circling the drain, but he was still alive.
I got there about as fast as I could and immediately got prepped for surgery. The patient had suffered numerous fractures from the impact, severe internal bleeding, and one hell of a concussion. I was going to need to stop that bleeding and set their broken bones. I’d hate to call something like that routine since it technically wasn’t routine. But I’d dealt with this kind of thing before.
The patient in question was sedated and waiting for me when I walked into the operating room, and just looking at them I knew that I had my work cut out for me. I could barely see their face underneath all of the blood. They looked to be a young man, somewhere in his mid to late twenties and he had a fairly fit physique. I figured that if we could maybe stop the bleeding, then he might just have a half decent chance of pulling through, so that was my first priority.
Some shrapnel from the crash had penetrated the patients abdomen, so I started there. I cut gently, only wide enough to remove the shrapnel and try to stop the bleeding. We had hooked up an IV to transfuse fresh blood into him to keep him alive, along with something to help his blood clot. So far it seemed to be working, and I was able to get most of the shrapnel out before I finally noticed that something else was wrong with him.
I first noticed them clinging to some of the pieces of shrapnel. At first I thought they were just bits of tissue… but bits of tissue didn’t move like that. They didn’t writhe like that. These were something else. Something alive.
Just looking at them, they almost resembled some kind of thin, stringy worm. And once I saw them, I knew I needed to investigate further.
Something was living inside of him.
And I had to find out what.
The patient was somewhat more stable than he’d been when we’d started, and after making sure that his bleeding was under control, I took a closer look at his shrapnel wounds.
I’ve heard some surgeons use the term ‘Cut and Paste’ before. It’s not the most common term out there, but I have heard it. A ‘Cut and Paste’ (also known as a ‘Peek and Shriek’ to some) is when a surgeon gets a patient on the table, opens them up, and finds that there’s nothing they can do. There’s no saving them from the inevitable. The only thing you can do is stitch them back up and prepare to deliver the bad news to the next of kin.
It’s a heavy feeling, realizing that you can’t help the person you’re standing over, the person you’re supposed to save. But sometimes, there truly is nothing that you can do. Either their injuries are too severe or their illness has progressed too far.
As a surgeon, you learn to live with it. You don’t like it, but you do the best you can and you make your peace with that. I can deal with the deaths. I can accept when I’ve done the best I can to save someone and failed.
But the things I saw as I explored those wounds… the things I found writhing inside that patient’s guts… the things that were living inside of him.
I couldn’t accept those.
Once I disturbed them they… they started to come out.
I could see them slithering out through his wounds, large, thin worms, most of them far longer than the ones I’d found on the pieces of shrapnel I’d pulled out of the patient. I’d never seen anything like them before, and judging by the screams of the other doctors in the room with me, they clearly hadn’t either.
The worms were coming out of him.
They pushed through his wounds, and I could hear some of them plopping wetly to the floor as they writhed and squirmed.
All the while, the patient’s broken body lay motionless on the operating table, only twitching as the worms tore through him, making the tears in his flesh wider as they escaped him. I didn’t need to tell the other doctors in the room to leave.
They ran the moment they saw his stomach tear open and watched more of those worms come spilling out of him.
And as they did, all I could do was stand and watch in horror. I backed toward the door, my hands trembling as the worms twisted on the ground. I looked back up at the patient on the table. His vitals indicated that he was still alive… all of this and somehow he was still alive.
I didn’t know how he could possibly still be alive! He had lost so much blood and now… what those worms had done to him… there was no way he could have survived it! He should have been dead!
But his vitals didn’t lie.
I watched the patient’s body twitch and froze, looking up at him. Part of me still felt obligated to help him. Obligated to save him somehow, although I didn’t even know where to begin with saving him, assuming he could even be saved.
He twitched, and I saw his eyes opening. For a moment, I thought that somehow the anesthesia was wearing off and he was waking up. But no. As I soon realized, this was something else entirely.
The patient lifted his head slightly and his eyes fixated on me. I stared back at him, frozen to the spot in terror. And then I heard the crack of his skull breaking.
His vitals flatlined, but his head remained slightly lifted, his eyes were still locked onto me. Part of his head seemed to… come undone. As if the skull underneath had shattered and only his skin was holding it together. His eyes rolled back into his skull before he finally collapsed, and a moment later I saw something crawling up onto his face.
Some other bug… this one ivory white. It wasn’t a worm like the others were. This thing was more like a cross between an isopod and a house centipede, with long, spindly legs and a thick shell. I could feel its beady little eyes on me, watching me. And I swear I could see it thinking. Sizing me up.
Deciding if I was right for it.
Then quick as lightning, it raced toward me.
My heart skipped a beat and finally I ran, bolting through the door behind me and slamming it shut. I heard the isopod thing thud against the door, and as I backed away, I saw it climbing up toward the window. It seemed to stare at me for a moment, before crawling up toward the ceiling and disappearing.
Needless to say, we put the hospital in quarantine.
Both I and the other doctors who had been in the room with me spent three days in isolation, getting tested over and over again to make sure we didn’t have any trace of those parasites… whatever the hell they were in our bodies. Then after that came the interviews.
First the police spoke to us, then some kind of specialist spoke to us, asking us to go over details over and over again. We told them everything we knew, and they said they’d be in touch if they needed us for anything.
And that was it.
That was one month ago.
I haven’t been in an operating room since. Hell, I haven’t even set foot in the hospital since I got out of quarantine.
I can’t.
I’m too afraid of finding those worms in the next patient I try to work on. I’m too afraid of being thrust into that nightmare all over again, not understanding what was happening or why. I’m afraid of that creature I saw crawling out of the patient’s skull. The creature that only I saw, and that nobody ever seemed to find.
There was evidence of it, of course. The patient’s skull had been split right open and there was almost nothing left inside. Something had clearly been living in there, feeding on his brain matter and puppeteering his body. And whatever it was, it was still out there.
I think it’s unlikely that I’ll ever get any solid answers about what I saw in that operating room. I’ve tried to do some research online, but I’ve come up with nothing. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any documented encounters like mine. But based on my limited experience with the creatures living in that patient’s body, I’ve come up with a few theories.
I suspect that the thing living in the patient’s head was connected to those worms somehow. Farming them, maybe… growing them in the body of its host, although for what, I couldn’t even begin to speculate. Whatever it was… there was an intelligence to it. Something about the way it looked at me after it emerged from his skull, the way it seemed to size me up. It almost seemed to be thinking.
I can’t help but wonder if it found another host. Another doctor or maybe a patient.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s walking around in their skin right now, letting more of those bloody worms gestate in their guts.
I can’t help but wonder what it intends to do with them.
And I can’t help but dread what the answer might be.