:Yes, that's a very good analogy, actually!: Shavri is looking thoughtful. :I think with practice, I could do what they're doing with Healing, and more precisely - they have very good drugs, better than anything we have, but all of their drugs affect most of the body at once, and usually they do more than one thing and some of the things are unintended...: 

Shavri can keep rambling on this and related topics for a while, in between answering Dr Chadra's questions about how things are looking in their patient's body and whether the interventions they're trying are causing any noticeable change. 

(The answer is mostly not, or at least not yet. The cytokine-blocking drug doesn't act instantly, and Leareth's body just isn't capable of doing that much with the IV nutrition they've now started, and - just, in general, he's slowly getting worse - probably more slowly than he would be without all the treatments, is the best Shavri can say - and nothing is getting better and that seems unlikely to change without Samora's magic.) 

They're counting down toward 2:30 pm, which would be about 90 minutes after Catherine's call. Marian is really hoping for an absence of traffic, and for the diamond-goop-processing to be fast - or for Samora to decide it'll work fine poured on their patient as a liquid, she can provide nice graduated jugs with pouring spouts (from the clean utility, and definitely sterilized since the last time they contained urine or other bodily fluids) for testing purposes. She is additionally desperately hoping that the spell will get Leareth STABLE and OFF ECMO and she can, maybe, possibly, have a BREAK. 

At 2:18 PM, Catherine is pulling off I-80 at the exit for the hospital and feeling like this might actually maybe work. She is Balto the sled dog. She is the Mail that Must Go Through. That guy had better still be alive to get this stuff used on him when she gets there.

She parks in the employee parking and runs to the building with the bags clutched under her arm like a football, switches to a dignified but still very quick pace as soon as she's inside, and arrives at the ICU just barely able to pretend she's not out of breath.

That woman is obviously out of breath and clutching bags! That's probably her diamond dust delivery! She would rush over and make a gimme gesture except apparently they might be able to get it out of the water it's in and that would really help their odds.

Dr Chadra hurries out to meet Catherine, with the clean graduated jugs that Marian had asked Clarice to stage on one of the wheelie bedtime tables right outside the room. “Where’s Minata gotten to - Marian said she was on figuring out drying the stuff - Catherine, show us what it looks like, is it pourable as-is, I really don’t know that we want to delay even half an hour, this guy’s labs are a trainwreck -“

Minata shows up to take part of the lapping compound relay! Once they get one of the syringes open it turns out to have the consistency of toothpaste.

"Alright, the stuff this is mixed in is water soluble, I think step one is to dissolve it in water whether we want it pourable or dry. Then we check the consistency and either filter it or pour it as is if we don't want to wait." She's grabbing distilled water as she says this.

Samora is observing these proceedings with non-English-speaking interest! "If I'm going to be pouring it it needs to be all in one container," she says to Marian.

(Marian arranged to slip out of the actual room and do the whole de-gowning routine when she saw the commotion of Catherine arriving, and Clarice plus the respiratory therapist and another nurse are still inside, as well as Shavri, but she's still kind of distracted trying to keep an eye on all the equipment through the window of the firmly shut main door.) 

"Will you be able to tell by practice-pouring it if the spell is going to work that way, or are we still just guessing? ...I don't know how long it'll take to dry everything out and he can probably wait forty-five minutes if that's how long it takes but I'm not sure - and what if it still comes out too clumpy and we just have to mix it in water again anyway..."

Marian feels like this would normally be a lot more exciting - a new medical procedure! which is literally powerful magic! and relied on a dramatic and heroic fetch quest by Catherine - but she just really really wants the patient to be stable already, on top of the sheer volume of charting for all the interventions it's just draining to be trapped in an iso room with a patient who is looking concerningly nearly-dead at her at all times. 

Poor Marian. It's too bad she doesn't have a second Share Language that would let her go through someone else. "I won't be able to try it without casting the actual spell, sorry. If it doesn't work I keep the spell slot but also the diamond dust will be all over his clothes and the floor and I don't know how I'd get it back in one place."

“…We probably shouldn’t risk wasting it,” even though aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa about waiting however long it takes to dry it and what if they fuck THAT up, “but if it won’t waste the spell - and it sounds like it doesn’t need direct skin contact? - it’s possible we could cover him in a drape and, like, prop it up higher around the edges and catch all of it? I guess it’s have to be waterproof and maybe that’s not okay even if clothes are -“

She switches back to English to tell Minata that they should test drying, like, one syringe worth of it, to see how long it takes and what rough percentage if any gets stuck inside the syringes. “- Catherine, how much wiggle room do we have on the total weight, can we afford to lose, like, five percent or is that cutting it too close -?”

"It doesn't need skin contact but if the dust is fine enough to go through the cloth we would still lose a bunch if the spell fails."

"We can waste two tubes and still be alright. Try drying the syringe of three micron first, it'll be the most pain in the ass and if we throw it out we'll have all the same size."

Minata digs through the bag of tubes for the three micron one and unless someone says "No stop" she's going to mix it with distilled water until it flows freely enough to look like it won't immediately clog the syringe filter.

(No one calls to stop.)

Marian tries slurping up a syringe full without the filter connector-bit, and then screwing on the filter and seeing whether the application of firm pressure will force out only water and leave mostly-diamond.

….It’s going to take a lot of that just to get back to toothpaste-consistency, honestly? Maybe they should try microwaving a dish of paste directly (covered to avoid splatter? but with something porous so the water won’t just recondense, but not so porous that the diamond can splatter right through it?) and see if that seems inclined to dry it out in an even vaguely reasonable length of time? 

Minata is worried that won't cook off the, what does the MSDS say this stuff is in, polyalkylene glycol. They can try that, maybe in a container that is itself in a plastic baggie with the opening on the side, and then if that just gets them hot paste they can try again after dissolving it?

Google, open. 

> boiling point of polyethylene glycol

Oh no this is an unanswerable question as stated, Marian gets the Wikipedia article and polyethylene glycol isn't one thing it's, like, dozens of things? Miralax is a kind of polyethylene glycol but it's apparently a high-molecular-weight kind, low molecular weight kinds are liquid at room temperature and boil at...like 250 C. That is indeed a problem.

Does the package have a number on it that might be the molecular weight of this kind of polyethylene glycol? ...Also how much, does it say, maybe the thing they would need to do is rinse it out but that sounds like it would require repeatedly liquifying the paste in more distilled water, filtering it with the obnoxious syringe method, and liquifying it again with different water - it's apparently also soluble in isopropyl alcohol but Marian isn't sure how much that helps, except that she does vaguely recall that isopropyl alcohol has a lower boiling point and that would in theory make the final round of paste slightly easier to microwave dry... 

It actually says polyalkylene glycol but that stuff also boils at really hot. She's already got one mixed in water, if that one turns out to take way too much microwaving they can try alcohol next. The one with water in it is gunking up the filter quite quickly but it turns out that it is in fact the diamond dust gunking it up and scraping it very thoroughly out into a container for microwaving gets the filter back to mostly functional again. This is going to take ages, though. Push through the filter, disassemble, scrape. Actually they should maybe just leave the filter cartridge in the container, except what if it catches fire in the microwave. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere: 

Miracle or Malpractice? Strange Happenings at Renown Regional

A Gazette-Journal reporter was invited to the Intensive Care Unit at Renown Regional Medical Center today to investigate reports of "miraculous" healings conducted, not by a medical genius, but by a priest of a previously unknown religion associated with the popular "role-playing game" Dungeons and Dragons. . .

. . . wearing medieval-style armor, and a nurse claimed she spoke no English . . . 

. . . Nonetheless, patient satisfaction seems surprisingly high. One patient's sister described her brother's recovery from a car crash three weeks ago as "absolutely miraculous" . . .

. . . "It's not a joke. I saw a man's skull grow back. I saw a guy the doctors had given up hope for sit up and repent of his sins." . . .

It is unclear at this time whether insurance will cover this treatment. When the attending doctor was approached for comment, he responded, "First of all, who the (expletive) let you in here . . . " . . .

Further investigation is in progress and updates will be provided when available.

The article includes a picture of Samora and a picture of two people in hospital gowns hugging each other.

Wow Marian does not chemistry. ...Google thinks that polyethylene glycol is a subtype of polyalkylene glycol, which is an umbrella term, but yeah that doesn't super help. 

...Maybe she'll text her dad, who is an Actual Chemist, juuuuust on the off chance that there's some obvious hack here that doesn't involve, like, access to an entire university chemistry lab. They should possibly try to arrange that if they're going to have to do this again tomorrow but that's not today-Marian's problem. 

She texts her dad, and then calls Clarice on her hospital phone extension rather than actually stick her head into the positive pressure iso room and lets her know that, uh, they are not confident the diamond dust will work if it's a liquid or that they can recapture it all if it fails to work and so they're going to try to dry it and it'll be, like, an hour. If the patient is deteriorating fast enough that they don't think he's going to last until everything is dry and ready, then they can just mix it all into water again but they do need, like, five minutes' notice.  

...And then she's going to help with the stupid chemistry project, because Clarice and Chris are tag-teaming covering for her right this second on documenting ECMO flowsheets and this is the closest thing she's had all morning to a break. 

On the other side of the country, Dr Chen skims some of the Google search results for breaking news in Reno, Nevada. 

(She's mostly not expecting to find anything; it's probably a ??training scenario??, which wouldn't be in the news, and if there was some kind of radiation leak incident it would probably be classified, but - this entire situation is surprisingly compelling to think about obsessively, and she's not going to keep calling the ICU, because if it's real then they're going to be incredibly busy and don't need their elbows jogged.) 

....

....That does not actually unconfuse her in the slightest! Honestly it would barely unconfuse her even if it was April 1st. She looked up Dr Harrison and he doesn't seem like the type to waste a bunch of people's time with an elaborate and very unprofessional prank?? 

She pulls up the lab results email again and stares at the numbers unhappily. 

...She emails a pile of her colleagues asking if anyone, maybe, possibly, was in med school or residency or college roommates with any of the physicians on staff at Renown Regional Medical Center, such that they would have the person's contact details and the person might be inclined to answer a question for them. 

Dilute. Mix. Transfer to syringe, squeeze water (and poly-whatever-ylene glycol) out until the filter clogs, remove filter - without spilling the remaining liquified-paste - and scrape off with a scalpel into a sterile metal kidney basin stolen from a procedure kit, replace filter and try some more - she would be tempted to swap filters more often, they have an enormous box, but what if they end up with like 30% of the diamond dust gunked inside the filters, they should find out if the fillters are microwave-safe and they can dry them out and shake the dust out of them once it's no longer mixed with water... 

This would be more satisfying if Marian wasn't in a state of slow-motion freaking out that her patient is going to code before they're actually ready. 

Will they be able to microwave it in that metal basin or should Minata find a different container?

Catherine puts a filter in the microwave for thirty seconds and watches it like a hawk for signs of catching fire. It doesn't catch fire. She joins the dilute-mix-filter-scrape party.

Samora can help too! It looks like the sort of thing she can imitate without any special knowledge. It's nice to have something useful she can do that requires neither language nor spell slots.

…They should not microwave metal. They probably shouldn’t microwave plastic either, they want, like, glazed ceramic? The ramekins that the kitchen sends for soup and pudding and stuff might work but Marian is not psyched about washing a used one in the staff room sink, maybe they should call the kitchen and get a delivery of ones fresh from the industrial dishwasher…

Dr Chadra does, finally, manage to escape the patient’s room again, and hide in the conference room to try to call Dr Chen back. 

“Hi, it’s Dr Chadra from Renown, have I reached—“