We would nothave a name for the condition until far too late. A slew of symptoms, which even now I must hesitate to call anything but psychosomatic, would manifest: a stare fixed at some point in the middle distance, a high-pitched keening of which the patient themselves did not seem to be aware, an intermittent licking of the lips, almost tic-like. The slight fever was undeniable, as was the racing pulse, the widened pupils: something was not quite right.
We lost our first patient, a nondescript brown-haired former runner turned management consultant, on the way to the emergency room. His grieving relatives had no objection to an autopsy: how could they? both we and they simply wanted answers. What could have cut down someone on the cusp of career triumphs, with so little warning? A new disease?
From the moment we opened the chest cavity, it was clear that something had gone awry. But I swear to you, upon all my training, that as we cut the heart muscle TURNED INTO a spongy mass of bread, soggy with heme; that the blood, sluggish with no animating force to pump it, eddied like melting processed cheese laid over a collapsing mass of tendons, draped over themselves like thin-sliced ham...
I still struggle to explain the sight. And while the hospital administration says, with a false solicitude, that long hours, the overwork that our missing contract should have protected us from, had taken their toll, I and the other survivors of that room would all swear that we saw this mass of unholy tissue -- struggle to beat --
Perhaps a holiday would do you good.