The Grant Application: Part 2
In which a scientist collides with medical science.
When Ladbrook awoke his first instinct was to reach for his phone.
Except that he didn't know where his phone was, and it wouldn't have mattered if he did, because he couldn't move his arm.
Now that he paid more attention, he realised that there was very little that he could move.
One rare fully operational facility was his voice. “Help!” he roared.
The duty nurse appeared promptly.
“I need to get to my office!”
The nurse was sufficiently well trained to suppress both a smile and any hint of sarcasm. That left her with the blatantly obvious. “You've been in an accident. You need to stay in the hospital until you recover.”
Ladbrook glared at the nurse, and at himself, as if hoping to harness the magical healing powers of anger. “When will that be?”
“You will have to ask the doctor. He will be along shortly.”
This was untrue, but Ladbrook moved to another topic
“Where is my phone?”
“In your bedside table. Would you like me to get it for you?”
“Yes, of course!”
Given the pain and apparent paralysis in his arms and hands, he had to tell the nurse the code to unlock his phone, and the number to dial. She set the phone to speaker mode and lay it on his chest, and then left.
“Grey!” he yelled, when his call was answered. “I'm in hospital!”
“I know,” Grey replied. It was hard to hear him over a lot of background noise.
“Where are you?”
“In the pub.”
“What!”
“I gave everyone the weekend off.”
“What!!??”
There was a rise in the background noise, and some muffled talking and laughter, then Rob Grey said, in a not entirely serious voice, “Everyone was in a lot of shock after your accident.”
“Listen to me. I have no idea how long I will be in the hospital, but”—
“They told us it would be a week.”
“A week! We have to finish the calculations, and we have to finish the grant. I can't stay in here for a week!”
Rob did not answer. He might have been shrugging.
“Now. Listen to me. I plan to be out of here on Monday. In the mean time, this is what has to happen.” He began to deliver a series of instructions. As he talked, he became more agitated, and spoke increasingly loudly. He also started to feel a little delirious, which meant that he was unaware of just how long he was talking for, or how loud he had become, or how incoherent his instructions were, until the nurse returned and switched his phone off and took it away.
“You need to rest.” She told him.
He yelled after he, but she did not come back.
The doctor arrived instead. He explained that, all things considered, Ladbrook was extremely lucky, and if he rested well and followed all of the guidance from the hospital staff, he might be able to leave, as Rob had said, in a week. To assist his recovery, not to mention the recovery of everyone else within earshot, they would not return his phone.
Then the doctor left as well, and also did not come back.
After Ladbrook had been yelling for 45 minutes another nurse arrived to administer an intravenous drip, and five minutes later he was asleep.
On Tuesday — four days later — they removed the drip and he became fully conscious. They told him that they could not bring back his phone, because someone from the university had come to collect it. That was Rob Grey, who had arrived on Monday and claimed that the phone was university property, and he had been instructed to retrieve it. Fortunately for Rob he met the same duty nurse who dealt with Ladbrook on Friday, and she was happy to send Ladbrook’s phone out of the building. Grey also took some photos of Ladbrook sleeping peacefully, to show to the rest of the group, and to use for memes.
Ladbrook was surprisingly sanguine about his phone, probably because he was so relieved to discover that he could now move with only moderate searing pain.
On Wednesday he could get out of bed.
On Thursday he decided to leave.
He was unsuccessful.
He was able to find his clothes in the dresser next to his bed, and make it to the bathroom to get dressed, and make it down the ward without being spotted by any of the staff. However, by the time he got to the end of the ward he was feeling woozy, and was also frantically turning from side to side to look out for doctors, and this provided the perfect set-up for him to turn a corner and collide with an orderly pushing a trolley, in a miniature reconstruction of his original accident.
The result: another week in the hospital.
He was beaten. There was no way the grant could be completed now. The group was in the hands of that buffoon Grey, who it seemed was no longer protecting Hornby from a pill-popping relapse while carousing in a pub, let alone co-ordinating an intense attack on a formidable research problem. And even if they all were working on the necessary calculations, they had no idea how to write a grant — not just the text of a science case, but the myriad support documents, and finance tables, and the slew of funding-agency categories and acronyms to navigate, and so much more.
The catastrophe was too enraging and depressing to contemplate. His only solution was to resume yelling until they put him back on that drip, and to make sure to start yelling again whenever they tried to take it away.
After a second week of more rest and sleep than he had experienced since that time he got the flu at age 12, Ladbrook was discharged from the hospital.
With his energy restored, he felt a surge of determination to make one last desperate attempt on the grant. His subconscious had been working overtime while he had drifted in and out of sleep. He was bristling with ideas. Maybe, just maybe, there had been enough progress on the calculations that he could achieve the miracle of writing an entire grant in the only six hours remaining until the deadline.
His hope evaporated, however, when he arrived at the research group's office, and found it deserted.
If only he had known why, he might have felt a little better. But only a little.
Is this going to end with the fake surprise that his supposedly incompetent research group were perfectly competent after all? If only it were so simple!
Great, on pins and needles!