This would be quite a lot less believable if not for the, you know, FUCKING TELEPATHY or whatever that just was. 

It's still not very believable, really, but - there is, in fact, a patient in that bed. 

She raises her eyebrows at the supposed faith healer. 

Marian would probably be feeling so much weirder about this conversation if she hadn't been on-duty for like fourteen hours. As it is, she's actually just too tired to muster more than a flicker of irritation with Dr Harrison for just standing there smiling and not explaining himself when this was all his idea. 

"She doesn't speak English," Marian says. "She has a translation spell but it only works on me." And she'll switch to Celestial. "Samora, this is the expert doctor who was going to assess what kind of brain damage she thinks Leareth has and how it's affecting him." She stubbornly bites down on a tempting yawn. "- Sorry, I can't remember, do you have any easy way to demonstrate that you really have magic without wasting a spell slot?" 

"She can stick an arm in the bag of holding, or borrow my headband for a minute."

Ooh, either of those seem like they should work fine. 

Marian switches back to English. "Samora has some items with properties that I think are obviously magical. She suggested you can look at her bag that's bigger on the inside, or try her headband that makes you better at thinking. - the headband is probably interesting because it specifically helps with one of the mental abilities that Samora's healing could fix, and not the other two." 

The neurologist gives her the sort of look that means 'it's too late at night for this shit.'

"Oh? Which one of the clusters?" 

Dr Chadra still has the neurology consult note up on his computer.

"The one we put down as 'cluster two'." He reads off Dr Harrison's note. "Introspection, situational awareness, prioritization/filtering, judgment, emotional regulation, impulse control..." 

"....Huh," Dr Abazi says. "You know what, sure, whatever, I'll try the supposed magic headband of introspection and impulse control, why not." 

"She wants to try the headband," Marian relays to Samora. 

It's a good headband and wanting to try it is very natural; she hands it over. "Uh, warn her it sometimes causes you to realize stuff about your life you hadn't been thinking about? It usually doesn't."

That feels like a spectacularly awkward thing to say to a super-senior doctor who probably has her shit figured out, when you're in your early 20s and can be assumed not to have your shit together, but Mariona will relay it. 

...Dr Abazi does in fact stop and listen to the warning, because one should not just ignore listed potential side effects, but it's also absolutely not going to dissuade her from running the test to see if any of this is for real. 

(She notices, to herself, that she's not actually expecting it to turn out to be a prank. It's weird as heck, but it honestly wouldn't be any less "what the fuck" as a joke.) 

She puts the headband on. 

....It feels like putting on glasses she hadn't realized she needed. The feeling is sharp and specific enough that Dr Abazi half-starts to make a wry mental note about how she's really overdue to get her eyes checked, and then she stops and catches it and pins the thought down to dissect, because in fact it's not literally-that, just metaphorically the same sort of clarity - 

- and that, the catching-and-pinning, that's not her baseline either. That's enhanced self-monitoring. Fascinating. She's watching her own cognition in real-time with a precision she doesn't usually have outside of deliberate meditation exercises, and even then it's effortful in a way that this - isn't.

Fascinating. She'll poke at it for a moment, run a quick internal inventory, the way she might assess a patient:

Her selective attention is... significantly sharper. The fluorescent-lights hum she'd been filtering out is still filtered out, but now she's - aware that she's filtering it, can actually feel the process of her brain deciding what's salient and what isn't. The signal-to-noise ratio on her own thoughts has improved dramatically.

Working memory. She pulls up the consult note she'd skimmed in the car—the three clusters, the bizarre labs, the phrase "experimental cellular therapy"—and it's all just there, organized, accessible, not the usual tired-end-of-day sludge of half-remembered details. This is the big one. She can almost feel her prefrontal cortex picking itself up and doing its job properly, which is surprising when she doesn't actually feel any less tired – physically it still feels like 8 pm after a long day, but it's decoupled from her thinking.

The most obvious way to assess the effect on her judgement is, of course, to think about where she's just been asked to exercise it: with this patient. What does she know? The absurd initial blood gas. The cardiac arrest, thirty minutes, asystole. The CT findings that the radiologist had called "remarkably benign." The bizarre consult note's "experimental cellular therapy" which is apparently not even "faith healing" like she'd been thinking of it before, but either absurd alien sci-fi technology or literal fucking magic of some kind. The three cognitive clusters described in terms that don't map to any assessment framework she knows. She can feel out the shape of what's still missing, a surprisingly precise awareness of which specific questions she needs answered before she can form a reliable clinical impression. 

Emotional regulation. Ohhhh, and is that one interesting to poke. She's still pretty darned annoyed with Harrison, the overbearing arsehole, all smug and cryptic and presumptuous, taking for granted that she'd just drop everything for his agenda. But it's - contained, now, she can localize it in the tight knot behind her breastbone and not let it flavor all of her thoughts. Experiencing the emotion without being the emotion, the way those mindfulness meditation soundtracks always promise and never quite deliver.

And she can admit, without any particular defensiveness, that Harrison's excitement wasn't showmanship. Clearly, and for obvious reasons, he genuinely believes he's onto something significant. The nurse looks exhausted and is holding it together anyway. There's a patient in that bed who nearly died today and might still, and whether Dr. Abazi is pissy about her evening being disrupted is not actually relevant to wheth   bShe was already planning on that, of course. She's a professional. She doesn't let irritation with colleagues get between her and a patient, even when they're being very obnoxious. But it's different to feel that knowledge settle into place without any effort of will at all. 

Impulse control. That one she has to dig for, because it's always been a strength; it's basically a job requirement. But...the thing is that normally, cutting off the desire to snipe at Dr Harrison when she enters the room, and keeping the professional face on as long as she's in front of a patient, would be a choice she makes, a small expenditure of willpower, the brief internal process of composing the sarcastic response and then not saying it. Now there's just... nothing to inhibit. The sarcastic response doesn't arise in the first place, because she can see clearly that it wouldn't be useful, and her brain apparently decided not to bother generating it.

Aaaaaaaaand it's not very considerate or polite to the fucking MAGICALLY EMPOWERED FAITH HEALER or possibly ALIEN WITH SCI-FI NANOTECH not to give back her fancy artifact. Even though it's really, really very tempting to never take it off again. 

...She takes it off and hands it back. 

"Convinced? Yeah, thought so." 

The patient doesn't even speak English. It was in the consult note, that there's a language barrier and that they have some kind of cryptic poorly explained solution, which apparently is TELEPATHY. 

"James, I mean with the greatest fondness for you as a colleague, but you're kind of a dick sometimes." Just because she can be polite doesn't mean it won't do him some good to hear it. "I'm glad you're having fun with your medical miracle. Fill me in properly?" 

"Gladly." Dr Harrison beckons her over to the computer. "Quickly, though, we've got this guy stabilized on an hourlong anti-nausea spell and we're running down the clock here." 

Leareth is starting to shift around restlessly again in the bed. 

Shavri is way too fucking tired for this. 

:Leareth, you're safe. Shavri from Valdemar here. Vkandis attacked, you were injured, you're with Healers, they have artifice to help you breathe, don't fight it.: 

To just Samora and Marian, :- how much longer on the Remove Sickness?: 

Marian checks the time now against what she wrote down for the start. "- About fifteen minutes. We'd better hurry." 

Fortunately, the medical team seems to be coming to the same conclusion. Dr Abazi forges over. 

"So I'm assuming the 'diagnostic intervention' is the thingamajig I just borrowed?" she says impatiently. "I'll try to get a baseline without it first, but only if it actually seems possible, we're short on time." 

She turns to the apparently-telepathic woman. "And it sounds like I'll need you to translate and tell me how he does. Ask him to count backward from a hundred by sevens, report back on what he's thinking." 

...This doctor is kind of brusque but, like, fair enough, they are in a hurry. 

Marian translates for Samora and watches. She can't actually do anything to contribute to the assessment, since Leareth can't talk and Shavri is the only one with any way of knowing whether he's doing the requested exercise. 

It takes Leareth a few repetitions to even parse that there was a request. 

Once he figures out what the request is, he gets 100 -> 93 instantly – that's clearly memorized – and then, much more slowly and effortfully, manages to jump to 86 also as a chunked step, and then can't seem to retrieve the next jump and starts trying to count down one-by-one and loses track of how far he's counted, and then is frustrated and panicky, and then forgets that he's supposed to be doing a counting thing. 

:He understood the question - eventually - and tried it, but it took a lot of effort and he got 93 and 86 and then got stuck and forgot the exercise. ...I think it's scaring him, when he has difficulty with something that should be easy, and then that overwhelms him and he loses track.: 

"- Hmm. So his underlying working memory and processing ability might be less impaired than it looks from that result, but he can't stay focused or regulate?" Frown. "Ask him to do something simpler – let's say just add three and four – and then think about whether it's harder than it should be. I think we need the intervention to get a proper assessment, but I'd like to see if he has any insight into his impairment without that boost." 

Shavri can relay that, sure.