1. Dr. Tom Bardino
Dr.
Tom Bardino is a one time virtuoso physician who now sits at a dim
lit office at the end of the hospital´s emergency hallway. He sees
patients in cases where his front line colleagues fail to make the
diagnosis. They feel like the case is lost anyhow, so why not give it
a last shot?
A young woman and her mother sit and wait for an opening sentence from Dr. Bardino. All they see is the strange doctor holding his forehead with one hand and fumbling a pen over a sheet of paper with the other. They begin to feel uneasy and after some minutes explode in a burst of anger asking what the hell did he think they sat there for.
Bardino conjectures that a young woman complaining of severe abdominal pain showing no lesion in medical imaging and no clues in her blood work up could be under emotional distress. He asks her a series of personal life questions but these result negative. But when he asks her whether she sustained sexual abuse from her father, the young woman´s wide eyes and muted face are accompanied by an outrageous remark from mother sitting next to her.
At this point Bardino is deeply connected to the patient´s inner workings. He falls into a dark space where he finds himself attached to a mass of entangled tissue about to engulf him. His seems unable to fire off the red immune darts that could defeat it. Later, Tom Bardino meets the emergency medical supervisor and tells him the woman suffers from retroperitoneal panniculitis. His colleague looks at him suspiciously only to hear Bardino emphasizing that if treated accordingly she should be fit within the next 24 hours.
A young woman and her mother sit and wait for an opening sentence from Dr. Bardino. All they see is the strange doctor holding his forehead with one hand and fumbling a pen over a sheet of paper with the other. They begin to feel uneasy and after some minutes explode in a burst of anger asking what the hell did he think they sat there for.
Bardino conjectures that a young woman complaining of severe abdominal pain showing no lesion in medical imaging and no clues in her blood work up could be under emotional distress. He asks her a series of personal life questions but these result negative. But when he asks her whether she sustained sexual abuse from her father, the young woman´s wide eyes and muted face are accompanied by an outrageous remark from mother sitting next to her.
At this point Bardino is deeply connected to the patient´s inner workings. He falls into a dark space where he finds himself attached to a mass of entangled tissue about to engulf him. His seems unable to fire off the red immune darts that could defeat it. Later, Tom Bardino meets the emergency medical supervisor and tells him the woman suffers from retroperitoneal panniculitis. His colleague looks at him suspiciously only to hear Bardino emphasizing that if treated accordingly she should be fit within the next 24 hours.
