Our Supplies are Low and I Don’t Think Help Is Coming

Director Forsythe, as you requested, I’ve done an inventory of the hospital’s remaining supplies and it isn’t looking good. In the 72 hours since the accident, we have gone through all of the spray bandages, almost all of our hyposprays, and we only have about 2 days worth of gauze left if we are going to keep changing patient dressings on the current schedule. We are running low on antibiotics and someone has liberated most of the painkillers from the pharmacy. In addition, the Reparre kits have been acting up and the Newuskin booths have been equally finicky. I’m not sure how much longer we can make it, and the stories I’ve been hearing from the wounded don’t give me much hope. I think we need to have a sitdown with the remaining staff and decided our next course of action.

I still haven’t been able to make contact with anyone outside. I thought by now we would have heard something from the military, the Navy for sure, but nobody has seen or heard anything from the base. We saw a couple of fire trucks head towards the Veil Station right after the explosions but that’s it. We haven’t seen the police or any other emergency services since. After listening to what some of our patients have to say, I’m not sure if help is coming.

We have a severely burned Veilcorp employee who says that the backup system is in emergency shutdown with people caught mid-transit. That means that we might very well have another round of injured if and when the system is restored. I’m afraid that we will have to rely on what’s already here for a while. Their damn AI Valerie keeps sending messages through the emergency system to “Remain calm and find your nearest emergency shelter until help arrives.” but I haven’t been able to reach anyone there to confirm that the veil is down.

We’ve been having all sorts of technical trouble ourselves. In the last couple days, the Reparre boxes haven’t been able to recognize the DNA from several patients. We’ve noticed that it’s mostly people who were close to the station. I think the 127 might be doing something to them. We’ve been seeing lots of strange rashes and pockmarks. Stuff I’ve never seen before except in old pictures of people with smallpox. Others have developed extremely fast-growing cysts and tumors as well as neurological effects. They have uncontrollable muscle spasms before losing all control and succumbing to partial or total paralysis. Some of them scream for hours before passing out and we don’t have enough medication to sedate them. The handheld Reparre kits still seem to work fine, with their more generic stem-cell treatments, but they can’t handle some of the injuries that we are seeing down here.

The Newuskin booths have been glitchy with some of the injured too. We keep getting errors when we try and use them like the machines don’t recognize what they’ve scanned. We’re running so low on materials for them, that we’ve decided to shut them down until we can figure out what is going on. There’s also a serious problem with the electronic medical records not storing correctly.

We are completely overwhelmed. I don’t even know what is wrong with a third of the people here. I’ve never seen some of these symptoms and I can’t believe how fast they seem to progress. We had a woman who came in suffering from burns and a broken arm right after the accident. Yesterday, the skin on her entire body turned purple and sloughed off in an hour while she screamed. Even if I knew what that was, I don’t have the medicine or the technology I need to fix it. Just about the only thing left are aspirin and bandages. We’ll run out of those soon too.

I took an oath to help people and I take that oath seriously, but I think it’s time that we consider the possibility that help isn’t coming. Like you, I don’t live on the island. If the Veil Station is down we’re stranded here, but it’s a different story for the local employees. I must say their dedication has been amazing. I’ve told a number of them to go home but they all refused saying they want to stay and work until help comes or everyone gets to leave together. However, like everyone else, they are curious about what is going on out there, probably more so. We should put together a group to see how bad things are and give them an update. We have a few patients who were initially treated at The Mission before coming here. That might be a good place to start. I’ve also heard that there was a group of people holed up at the Aloha Shores condos just down the road. Maybe they’ve had better luck at contacting someone than we have.

There is a palpable shift in mood down here in the emergency room. Have you looked at the sky lately? I’ve never seen a sky like that and the rain was orange this morning. I’m not saying that we abandon the injured or our duty here, but we need to acknowledge the serious and unique nature of the situation we are in. I think an official effort to make contact with other survivors and gather information will go a long way. Making contact with the outside and assessing our situation will do a lot for morale. We owe it to these people who have decided to stay and care for their neighbors.