CHAPTER 4
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Pale face of Dr.Jamal , the Pakistani professor of neurological surgery and frequent long pauses in his speech, did its best in terms of making the parents anxiously nervous. As pause lasted almost half a minute, overhead clock inside mosque shaped framework penetrated the silence with its gradually hearable ticking sound.
“Is it so bad, doctor?”- father asked begging for some positive response.
“You see, transplantation of one third of donated temporal lobe and one seventh of cerebellum which mainly serves for body control, motor functions and all- was totally successfully but …”
“But?”
“There’s one but, in his matter. Because of age differences of organ donor and his recipient – your teenager son in this case- how me to put it mildly , imagine that you bought a new memory for your personal computer having old generation motherboard. As a surgeon we did our best for plugging new part into so called motherboard – thereby I try to depict the surgery and transplantation . These are all that we do as a medics. Now it is up to system to decide whether to process or not with new integrated memory, as we turn power on. His body has to form synapses – hook up and communication between existing neurons and implanted brain cells. So it’s almost the same with your son, Me with the help of globally respected, well-trained and sophisticated neurosurgeon team, conducted this surgery following your written consent as legal parents , operation was successful. However its normal that patients fall into temporal comatose condition after surgery is finished, which is result of integration of transplants to a new – alien if you will – body. Now it’s up to God and your son be able to wake up from “dead space”. He must be strong and overcome let’s say visual and projective mind attacks of his donor, ‘cos if you asked me to describe it for your, I would say that his dream is nothing but realistic battleground of conflicting memories and characters. He can lose mind battles but has to win the war for his survival, in order to wake up as your son – totally cured of dementia, not as 45 year old Latvian philanthropist who donated his brain before smashed in car accident.”
“How long it would take?”
“Only God knows exact day…You see, this is an unprecedented turning point in the history of transplantation. We don’t know for sure whether transplanted brain cells – neurons will reverse the damage caused by dementia. Although, I can dare say that, after similar surgeries on clones, it took nearly 2-3 days…” Dr.Jamals face went totally red, and couldn’t complete his sentence
“Clones? What clones?”
“I’m sorry but I must rush to second floor, surgery is waiting for me.”
For illiterate mother of Tural the words uttered by Dr.Jamal, was nothing but bunch of encoded letter combinations, and because of her limited knowledge of modern terminology she confused the word “clone” with a“clown” and therefore couldn’t notice the fail made by surgeon himself. On the other hand, Tural’s father was horrified to hear his son be some kind of first human “lab rat” who underwent first multi-brain transplantation of its kind.