Eakran’s patient, Tommy Pine, was a man who suffered pain in two phantom limbs. He had been at the IBF in Eakran’s basement for a couple months when Dr. Frederick Cousins and Dr. Donna Moss first transferred there from positions at the Mayo Clinic. Tommy lost his limbs in Iraq when he was stationed there after walking into the home of what he believed to be civilians and setting off a bomb that took his right arm and leg. He told Eakran that he could feel the flesh of both being ripped apart and he was on the verge of insanity because of the constant pain that made it impossible to sleep and do normal things. Tommy had tried many treatments for his pain before meeting Eakran; he was averse to opioids because of the risk for addiction and he reluctantly tried cannabis for a while. Despite the relief he experienced with cannabis that at least helped him sleep, he was not a fan of the drug because he found it difficult to do things that were necessary when using the drug during his normal day. When Eakran found him, he had been doing physical therapies that were mostly ineffective.
“Mr. Pine will astound you,” Eakran said to his new assistants as he led them into their new work home that was a secured section of the institute hidden away from the majority of the other employees in the building. “He still suffers his phantom pain, there are therapies to rid him of it that have been largely unhelpful, but we’ve been working on something very top secret.”
“Why not just cure him?” Moss asked. “Mirror therapies are proven effective in these cases.” She was referring to the practice of situating amputees so that their remaining limb appeared in a mirror where their phantom limb would be and by treating the remaining limb with message while the amputee focused on the limb in the mirror, they would experience relief in the phantom limb. It was a way to fool the mind into experiencing relief that had proven effective in some cases.
“I have a theory Dr. Moss, a strange one that Mr. Pine and I have been testing and confirming. Remember, what you see here stays here. We are the Las Vegas of medical facilities.”
Moss and Cousins gave each other a look as they followed Eakran to the room where Tommy was waiting. Both Moss and Cousins were stupefied by what they saw, Tommy standing as if on two legs, holding a book as though he had two arms and two hands. His face was beet red and dripping sweat like he was struggling. Moss’s first instinct was to relieve him of the obvious stress that he was under, but Eakran stopped her.
“What moves limbs doctors?” Eakran asked while he smiled at Tommy who never acknowledged his visitors but continued his strenuous concentration.
“This man is obviously having a hard time…” Cousins stammered.
“Impulses from the brain, that’s the answer I was fishing for. And what causes pain?” Eakran asks.
“Receptor responses to the brain.” Moss said.
“We know that phantom pain is essentially a misfire of the brain, receiving imaginary signals that it has been trained to feel.”
“Which is why mirror therapy works. It can correct the misfire.” Moss said. “Which is what we should be doing right now.”
Eakran turned and practically pushed the doctors out of the room leaving Tommy to his concentration. In the hallway, Eakran smiled.
“What if it isn’t misfire at all? What if the space that the human body occupies, or should occupy, becomes entangled with our brains, our muscle fibers, skin, and nerve endings and the pain that Mr. Pine is experiencing is real? Yes, the physical limb is gone, but the mind’s connection to the space that his limb would occupy is not. What if I told you that Mr. Pine has learned to manipulate the empty space where his pain exists as if it were an actual limb? And if we were to cure his pain, or the visceral connection to that space, he would lose the ability to manipulate the entangled space.”
Moss looked incredulous. She and Cousins had no familiarity with quantum entanglement or quantum sciences at all. They were medical doctors and had been focusing on neurological disorders. “I’d say that you’re torturing that poor man for no good reason. Nothing about that theory makes any sense.”
“Said the woman who has proven the existence of mind reading.” Eakran said, smiling bigger than before. “What I do here may seem strange to you now, but that is only because your knowledge is limited to medical sciences. It’s funny to me that doctors don’t recognize the need for a breadth of scientific knowledge and imagination when working with ailing patients. My work with Mr. Pine can prove that quantum theory has practical applications in medicine that should be explored, but because of the obvious pain that he is in, most would write this work off as unnecessarily cruel. But what good thing is gained without a little suffering? Mr. Pine’s pain is managed with small doses of medication that allow him to push through and his reward is what you have witnessed; full use of all four of his limbs, even if two no longer exist in the corporeal sense. We will work magic in this basement my friends. We will push the boundaries of human knowledge, but it requires discretion; progress requires discretion. That is why I brought the two of you here. Your work with your mind reader, despite the ridicule you faced, is exactly what I need. I need you to help me push through the skepticism to expose pseudoscience for what it truly is, unproven theory.”
Cousins was skeptical, he had to observe Tommy in action for hours before he believed what Eakran had told him. But Moss was inspired. She thought of Eakran as the medical equivalent of Willy Wonka with his chocolate factory.
Tommy Pine died a year later and when Eakran performed his autopsy, he discovered that the man had suffered an aneurism from the strain he had endured under Eakran’s care; care that had allowed Tommy to utilize his phantom limbs in a limited capacity that not even his family was allowed to know about. Cousins took the death pretty hard and Eakran relied on Moss to keep him from alerting anyone to the true nature of Tommy’s death. The three doctors mourned quietly alongside Mr. Pine’s family at his funeral.
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