As Ken dried and warmed the youngster, he found there were numerous cuts on the lad's hands and arms and even a large slash on his stomach, as if made from a very sharp knife or scalpel. He also noticed blood was coming from the youth's rectum and now Ken was afraid he had an emergency that was completely beyond his ability to handle. Even with his Basic Emergency Management Training, he knew this was out of his league, so he packed the rectum area with a towel and used another one to tie the legs together in order to keep that one in place to stem the flow of blood. He then called the Rescue Squad for help, and they told him the roads were impassable into his area. He then called the hospital for help but they told him they relied on the Rescue Squad for patients to be brought there and anyway, they had no more space and he would have to do his best to stem the flow of blood and dress the other wounds.
Ken was now at his wit's end! He had no idea of what to do next. He felt he already had stemmed the flow of blood, and he'd bandaged the teen's other obvious wounds, but he was afraid the boy could bleed to death before the storm was over and the roads were reopened. Chief stayed with him the entire time and watched as he took care of the boy. She also sensed the stress in his voice while he was on the phone and she tried to calm him down some by licking his face and then the boy's.
It was while Chief was licking him that Mr. Thomas remembered meeting a fortyish old doctor at a Welcome Reception for him when he moved into the neighborhood. Ken went rummaging for the man's phone number, but couldn't remember where he had placed it. 'This was no time to panic' he said to himself, but panic he did, as it began to set in before he finally remembered where he had left that important business card. He quickly ran up the stairs to the Foyer and sought out the sofa table where he usually laid his car keys and mail and stuff. As soon as he arrived, he pulled the table drawer open and began to rummage through its messy contents.
He couldn't believe all the 'junk' he had allowed to accumulate in that small space since he had moved in only four months prior. Then he found it. The white business card with the doctor's name on it: Richard Powers, MD., Pediatric Medicine. It included the man's office phone numbers but not his home phone number or his cell phone number. Then panic really began to settle in all over again as his mind screamed he needed the man's local phone number, and it wasn't listed there.
Disgusted, he threw the card down onto the table and the force of the air under it made it slide and fall off and onto the floor. He then cursed that it had fallen and as he picked it up, he turned it over in his hands and there, on the back, was the doctor's home phone number. "Yes", he silently said to himself and he quickly ran to his Study.
Ken nervously punched in the number and immediately all he got was a busy signal. 'Not good', he said to himself, hoping and praying that it was just that, a busy line, and not the phone lines being out. He waited about 30 seconds and tried again but it was still busy. He then tried the cell phone number but that didn't even ring. Going back to the land line Ken prayed that the phone would not be busy and this time it wasn't. It just wasn't being answered.
Now Ken was immensely frightened for the boy. He went back to the youngster who had begun to wake up and talk some but was shivering so bad now he was incoherent. Ken put some more towels into the dryer in order to warm them up and after a minute on HIGH he removed them and placed them all over the child and told the lad he was trying to get some help. He then told Chief to stay there with the boy as he raced to the nearest phone to call the doctor again. Ken was becoming frantic and on the verge of a major panic attack.
Ken dialed the phone number and again heard the phone ring and ring and ring. With no one answering, he was on the verge of crying, for now he felt the life of the boy was in his hands. Finally, someone picked up the phone and not thinking he became very nasty to the person who answered, because of the time they took answering it. Ken quickly yelled over the phone that he had a badly bleeding, naked boy who was going to die and he needed help!! All Ken heard then was the phone being dropped and someone running calling "Doc, Doc, hurry."
A few seconds later, Doctor Powers picked up the extension and asked who was calling, and thinking it was a prank call said very loudly, "What is this naked boy stuff all about?" Ken quickly identified himself and where he lived and Doc Powers immediately knew who he was talking to. Mr. Thomas explained quickly what he had and that he needed help desperately, as he was afraid the boy would bleed to death. Doc Powers explained he couldn't go out in that storm, even though he only lived about a fifteen minute drive away. The doctor explained he was afraid for his own life and wasn't afraid to tell Mr. Ken that. Ken pleaded with him, but he didn't get any further than his offer to help via the phone. Having nothing else, he took the portable phone and went to the boy who was almost convulsing on the floor and bleeding even more, with blood all over.
It appeared the boy's extremely cold body had kept the blood from flowing, but now that it was warming up, the blood was beginning to flow more freely now. Upon seeing that, Ken sat down on the floor next to the lad and openly cried for the boy. He held the phone close to his chest as he cried and spoke openly of all the wounds he was seeing and all the blood that he couldn't stop. Everything he described went out over the open phone line. Doc Powers couldn't help but hear the desperate prayers of the crying man, along with the description of the youth's wounds. The doctor then began to pray as well.
The doctor had to loudly yell, to get Ken's attention and told him what he needed to do and apologized that he couldn't come out in that weather. He explained he had a house full of people who were counting on him to keep them safe during the storm. He reassured Mr. Thomas that if he stemmed the flow of blood, the boy would be okay for now, and he would get there as soon as he could. Ken took down the information from the doctor and then thanked him and hung up. For the next fifteen minutes Ken did what he could to stem the loss of blood from flowing out of the young, frail looking boy.
Twenty minutes later, the front door bell began to ring and ring and ring. As busy as he had been taking care of the boy's wounds, it took a few moments for Ken to recognize what it was. Even Chief hadn't alerted to it as she normally would, as she was next to her 'boy' and didn't want to move. She found him, after all, so he was hers.
Ken finally realized the front door bell was ringing. He quickly ran to the door, not knowing who it was, but he was sure that whoever it was out there would have to be drenched to the bone by now. Swiftly opening the door, Ken found the doctor standing there with handfuls of supplies and yelling at him to get the rest from his car. Quickly doing so, a thoroughly drenched Ken then led the equally drenched Doc Powers to the Laundry Room and the bleeding boy.
The doctor immediately got down on the floor next to the gravely injured boy and looked over the wounds and saw that some of them looked worse than they actually were. Some of the wounds he immediately identified as knife wounds, and that those would need sutures. Turning the youngster on his side to view the anus, he was appalled at the sight. Lucky for the boy Mr. Ken had stuffed a towel there and had tied more around the boy which gratefully stemmed the loss of blood. After making his assessment of the youngster's multiple shallow stab wounds and the major bleeding from his backside, he asked Mr. Ken to lift the lad onto the Laundry Room counter. Later, the doctor would commend Ken for his quick thinking to stuff the area with the towel and then not to remove it. He said it was what probably saved the youth's life that night.
As soon as the boy was lying on the high counter, the first thing that Doctor Richard "Rick" Powers did was start an I.V. to push some fluids into the battered boy. He quickly followed that up with some antibiotics and then something to keep him sedated for when they performed some surgery there in the laundry Room. He also inserted a Foley catheter to handle the boy's urine as the boy would be bed bound for a few days after they were finished. While Rick placed butterfly bandages on the smaller wounds to help close them off to infection, he asked Ken to find any flood lamps he had and to place them shining onto where the injured boy lay. Ken moved quickly to find all the flood lights he had in his garage.
As he waited for the lights, Doc Rick began to unwrap his surgical instruments and laid them out on the tall laundry basket lid he was going to use for his table. In a few minutes, Ken returned with two sets of 500 Watt high intensity industrial strength portable halogen tripod lights. Seeing the high intensity lighting Ken brought back with him made Rick put on a great big smile. He then helped set them up to provide the lighting exactly where he would need it the most. The two then prepped the lad as best they could, considering the circumstance.
Not wasting any more time, Doc Powers told Ken to scrub up and that he would need him to assist in helping fix the boy up. Ken moved without delay and after thoroughly scrubbing his hands with the antibacterial stuff he kept at all sinks in the house, he rejoined the doctor, who asked that he be called Richard or Rick,. It was already past three o'clock in the morning, and the storm outside sounded as if it was getting worse. Both men were now at the beginning of what would thus become one of the longest nights of their lives for either of them.