In Case of Emergency by Courtney Moreno Read Free Book Online Page B

ability of your neurons to remap themselves, to change their strength and connection, is thought to be the reason you can form and retrieve memories or learn new behaviors. You’re constantly creating pathways that can get triggered, recalling information voluntarily or at random.
    For example.
    For paperwork purposes, you memorize hospital, treatment, and medication codes. You learn the fire station numbers and addresses for five battalions, as well as all the freeways, major streets, and zip codes in your district. You memorize your rig, assignment, and employee number.
    “Okay, ma’am,” you say.
    Height, age, weight, date of birth, phone number, social security number, address, zip code, medical insurance number, phone number of an emergency contact. What your patient rattles off by rote is just the beginning of our memory vaults. These digits are nestled in with those of bank accounts, passwords, pin numbers, and credit cards. This little computer chip sits alongside old addresses and phone numbers, security questions and answers, email addresses, and mothers’ maiden names.
    “Please sign here.”
    Roughly translated, the average patient looks like this: (323) 467-8792, 555-66-9827, 5′7″, 42 y/o, 145 lbs, 01/13/1968, 34689 103 rd Ave, 90044, 555-66-9827A, (818) 227-6900.
    When you’re giving the report at the hospital, your partner wanders over in the middle of it. He’s been standing next to your gurney-riding patient in the ER hallway, using the portable vitals monitor to collect “a fresh set of numbers.”
    “Ready for her?” he asks, and you nod, pen ready. “She’s 156/90 on the blood pressure, 102 beats per minute, about 18 breaths per minute, a temp of 98.6, pain scale is 7 out of 10, and 99 percent oxygen saturation on room air. Hospital medical record number is M110462890.”
    Consider a neuron, its cell body a spiderweb suspended in brain matter, its axon sending signals to one or several of one hundred billion other nerve cells. A conduit for the electricity running through your body, the translator for how to make electrical signals meaningful, a neuron’s physical structure fortifies with each memory stored. One pluck of the spiderweb’s string and all the neurons involved in a single memory light up. They reconstruct the visual—the shape of the numbers on a page, or on the card in your wallet—and they reconstruct the action. With kinesthetic sensibility, your tongue gallops across the roof of your mouth for “twenty-two”; your lower lip sweeps against your upper teeth for each “forty-five.”
    You watch the memory traces come alive in another human being and you want to believe it’s enough, these numbers; you want to believe there’s something meaningful, even altruistic, behind the reduction. You look at your patient, rolling the pen between your callused fingers. She looks blankly back at you.
    323-467-8792 555-66-9827 5′7″ 42 145 01-13-1968 34689 103 90044 555-66-9827A 818-227-6900 156/90 102 18 98.6 7/10 99 M110462890…
    You suddenly want to tell her: “Ma’am,” you’ll say. “You are an abacus. A license plate. A chi square. You are an exponential equation, a rosary, an irrational number, a fundamental theorem. You are singular simply because you represent a combination of numbers not represented by anybody else.”
    You are unique only because the possibilities are endless.
    9
    As soon as the glass double doors slide shut between me and the night air, I spot her: she’s in the bulk section, refilling plastic numbered vaults with grain and flour. To do this, she hefts large barrels onto her shoulder from a skinny metal cart and pours from them into the propped openings. Shemakes it look easy but it isn’t. The sound of heavy barrels slamming against the metal cart attests to their weight.
    It’s not too late to run away. The closer I get, the more I catalog her features. Olive skin, strong jaw, pursed lips, perfect ears, a small birthmark on her straining