The Harvester

Shark Fishing

He had everything he needed now except the guts to go through with this. He wondered how the donor would react. Would the stem cell transfer hurt the donor the same way the process maimed the lab specimens? Could it possibly kill the stem cell donor? He was driven to madness on the deck of his boat, yelling profanities in the air at the science board and the panel of medical professionals. None of them in his presence now, after he yelled so loud that his throat felt of fire. Then he heard it. Continuous cries. He sat against the railing of his vessel and peered down into the hull. Hours passed. The deafening silence was broken by only by cries. Darkness crept into his heart and around him in the fading light. The saguaros on the cliffs stood like towering statues with twisted arms as the waves crashed on the mangled rocky shoreline in the distance.

The stars were dancing in the night sky as he readied his surgical table and instruments, he prepared himself by administering local anesthetics and began the tedious work. Dr. Kinsley connected the stem cell donor's circulatory system to his own via the perforating veins in his upper right thigh. After six tedious hours of surgery he had finally finished, He passed out on his own surgical table.

Several days after the surgery the doctor was feeling almost entirely recuperated. He was keeping himself on a heavy dose of sedative that effectively kept the donor unconscious. He stayed out of sight during the day, sleeping in the humid hull of his vessel. However, he was approached by villagers coming to sell him some hand made tamales. The engine noise gave him plenty of time to put on a trench coat and hunched over at the wheel. He cut the visit short.

Two weeks had passed and he was looking young and spry, his knee pain from his basketball days had subsided. His backpain was gone. His hair was starting to grow back on his head and his wrinkles were diminishing. He felt vindicated. He knew circulatory mesenchymal stem cell transplants would be a success. He had only one concern, when was his stem cell donor going to need to be renewed? The results of the studies he had conducted on specimens in his lab were based on findings over a period of three weeks. Each of Dr. Kinsley's studies lasted one to three weeks. The donors in test cases sustaining longer periods of circulatory mesenchymal stem cell transfer suffered the majority of the negative side effects. When would he need a new source of mesenchymal stem cells? More pressing was the question of what Dr. Kinsley would do with his current stem cell donor.

The answer came the next evening after dinner while he was fishing for Hammerhead Sharks. Dr. Kinsley was jolted in the groin. The donor was awake! The next spasm knocked Dr. Kinsley's water bottle out of his hand. The green glass bottle skidded across the deck clanking noisily, the tin cap glistened in the moonlight as it slid over the edge into the water. The heavy dose of sedative that Dr. Kinsley had been administering himself to purposefully keep the stem cell donor unconscious had been doing their job, however, the meds were becoming increasingly less effective. Dr. Kinsley could no longer keep the donor attached.

The procedure lasted into the night. He began to feel the sorrow for the loss of life he had been responsible for. He grieved for the donor, but not in the way a parent would for their lost son or daughter, he grieved as a scientist who had lost a specimen in the lab due to an avoidable miscalculation or data error. Dr. Kinsley sat in his favorite deck chair exhausted, he reached for his fishing pole, grabbed a 16/0 hook and began to bait it with the contents from an overflowing slop bucket placed by his feet. He poured most of the blood from the orange bucket into the water. This always brought the sharks in close to his boat. Dr. Kinsley landed some big Hammerheads in the silence of that starry night off the Baja Coast.