A light gasp emitted from Ellie as she finally understood the implication of what was being side. Her eyes grew huge. "You mean . . . I"m really confused. I can"t move my legs. I don"t feel anything. It"s something that I just came to terms with that was done. I don"t have legs anymore. If I"m not really paralyzed, what did the doctor"s do to me? What"s my medical problem? Why can"t I move? If there was a mistake, why didn"t anyone tell me?""I"m telling you right now. Science isn"t perfect. We don"t know for sure a lot of things. Remember they just added a new organ. We don"t know what the appendix does. It"s ok. It happens sometimes. My initial guess is that you are probably currently suffering from a buildup of a couple of phenomenon. The metal pieces is definitely significant but it is a secondary issue. Your primary symptoms are probably resulting from having too much morphine in your system." Dr. Wu"s eyes flashed to the I.V. bag that was hanging next to her. "This wasn"t the fault of the doctors necessarily as you were given as much morphine that would make you stop screaming. But due to your spinal injuries and subsequent emergency surgeries you were just overloaded with that drug. And it is a marvelous drug. You needed anesthesia to undergo those surgeries as I don"t think you would want to be awake during that procedure or want to be aware of anything going on during that time. But the problem is that every medicine has side effects. It is very possible that you are suffering from the effects of extreme morphine addiction. You have extreme muscular atrophy, a lack of appet.i.te, and you"re fatigued."
Ellie"s mouth dropped. She had been living on jello and water for weeks just to reduce her pain levels. The nurses had been nonchalant when she had refused to eat. Only Nolan with his infinite patience to make very soft rice had prevailed in coaxing her to take the pain. No one paid attention to her because they knew they had thought she was going to die anyways.
Tears began to fall from the edges of Ellie"s eyes like a river bursting out of a dam. "I was in so much pain for no reason. The worst of it is the less I ate, the more morphine I was given basically making it worse. It was an anorexia of the mind." A faraway look came into Ellie"s face as rage distorted her face before subsiding to helplessness.
Nolan hated watching every minute of it. He thread his fingers through Ellie"s intending to comfort her. But she pulled away her hand as she leaned toward Dr Wu.
Wu continued and turned around to demonstrate using her own spine, "In the timeline of your injury when the foreign body"s presence stabilized. This means there was no more swelling so theoretically it would have been possible for you to move. You were already so weakened by your addiction and by the numbing properties of the aforementioned medication that you lost your whole sense of lower body."