“You know, Lois, house-hunting with you is one part fun and three parts crazy. I think we’re about to drive Mike nuts.”
“That’s a realtor’s job, to go nuts so the clients don’t look for another realtor. I figure he’s about due to start chewing on his eyebrows any minute now.”
“Maybe if we actually agreed on the area where we want to live it might help.”
“Clark, are you sure you don’t want to live in the city? I heard about a wonderful brownstone not far from the Planet.”
“I’m sure, honey. Wisteria Lane out here in the suburbs will be nicer and less stressful. And I’m the only one who’ll be going to the Planet on a daily basis, so we won’t need to find downtown parking for two vehicles.”
“Are you sure we can afford two stories, four bedrooms, and two full bathrooms? And a big kitchen?”
“I’m sure. We have my income, your syndicated column – which is still growing fast – your book sales, which also look very healthy, and your disability payments from the Planet’s insurers and from your personal insurance. And judging from our recent honeymoon, I think you can handle the stairs just fine.”
“Clark Kent, you smooth-talking hero! If the realtor wasn’t waiting for us downstairs I’d show you how much stress I can still handle!”
“Mmm, I’d love that myself. But can you restrain yourself until we set up a king-sized bed in that huge master bedroom?”
“Oh, I suppose so, if you insist. But I really want to know what we’re going to do with the other bedrooms.”
“Simple. One will be your office. You choose the one you want. One will be mine. And we can put our ‘spare clothes’ in the other one.”
“Oooh, that’s a super idea. And a rare good use of air quotes.”
“Thank you. It’s nice to know I’m appreciated.”
“You know, I like the neighborhood, too. It’s really laid-back. Lots of other young married couples live around here, and I think I’m going to like the sound of children playing in nearby yards. I’m sure the house will grow on me.”
“So let’s go make an offer and see what the realtor and the builder say.”
“Just don’t offer too much. We don’t want to appear desperate.”
*****
Lois burst through the front door and stopped. She was about to change their lives and she didn’t know how her husband would react.
Who was she kidding? She knew exactly what he’d do. All she could do now was wait for him to do it.
She followed her nose to the kitchen and put her purse on the table. “Hi, baby,” he said. “How did your checkup go?”
Here it was.
“Well – I think – no, I know we’re in for a big change.”
His eyes snapped open wide. “What? Why? Has Dr. Richards found a donor?”
“No, Burton hasn’t found a donor, not yet. Don’t worry, my liver is still working at its normal-for-me reduced rate. And before you ask, the cloning question is still up in the air. Um – you know how we’ve been decorating the house, right?”
His eyes narrowed and his lips thinned at the sudden change of subject. “Of course I do. That’s been one of our most time-consuming activities for the last eight months. Aside from being newlyweds, that is.”
“Yeah. Well – seems like we’re going to need to do something different with one of the rooms.”
“What for?” His face showed his sudden alarm. “Oh, no! Something is wrong with your liver, something bad, isn’t it?” He dropped the cooking utensils on the cabinet beside the stove and all but leaped to grab her. “It’s okay, honey. We’ll get through this.”
From deep within his trembling embrace, she giggled. “No, silly, no change on my liver! At least, not yet.”
He leaned back, obviously baffled. “Not yet?”
She smiled and touched his cheek. “Not yet.”
He took her by the arms and held her back. “Lois, would you please explain to me what you’re trying not to tell me.”
She nodded. “Okay. I’m pregnant.”
His eyes lost focus and his jaw dropped open. “But – but Bernie – Bernie said we – he said we couldn’t—”
She smiled. “I know. He was wrong. And he said he was never so thrilled to be wrong as he was today. Even Burton was stunned.”
His face went from mule-kicked to blossoming joy to caution in under three seconds. “Hang on. What does Dr. Richards think about you being pregnant?”
“He said he wouldn’t have recommended it, but he didn’t know of any reason for me not to be. Pregnancy and childbirth are always stressful on a mother, but he said that he and Bernie would take extra-special care of me and that he believed I’d be just fine.”
Clark nodded slowly. “So – we’re going to be parents?”
“That we are.”
“Do they know when?”
“Oh, I’d say in about seven months.”
He shook his head. “Parents after only fifteen months of marriage. Wow!” He took in a big breath and let it out slowly. “Do you think we’re ready?”
“Well, we’d better be, don’t you think? It’s too late to ask for a refund.”
Clark looked into her eyes and chuckled. The chuckle slowly grew into a belly laugh, one which Lois shared. She drew him into a warm embrace and caressed his powerful back with her hands and buried her face into his massive chest. This was turning out just like she’d envisioned.
The one thing she hadn’t predicted was that they never had dinner that night. They were too busy celebrating their love and deciding which room should be the nursery.
*****
“Breathe, Lois! Breathe! Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo—”
“I’m breathing already! Aaaaah! Go get a cat out of a tree or something!”
“Now, Lois, Clark is here for a reason. He’s going to catch the baby just as soon as he decides to come out.”
“Come on, Lois, you can do this! Doctor Preston, is she ready to push yet?”
“Yes, I think so. Okay, Lois, one more push and—”
“NNNNGGGGAAAHHHHH!”
“The head is crowning! The baby’s head is coming out!”
“Get ready, Clark. Here he comes. Lois, one more big one, okay?”
“EEEAAARRRGGGGHHHImgonnakillyouClark!”
“What?”
“Just focus on catching the baby, Clark. Here he comes. Here he comes!”
“I got him! I got him! Oh, Lois, he’s beautiful, just like his mother!”
“Haaaaahggh.”
“Lois? Honey, are you okay?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Let me see him.”
“Here you go. Do you want a cold cloth for your face?”
“Oh, yes, please, Clark, that would feel wonderful.”
“He’s beautiful, Lois. You did great. As always. No matter what you do, you do it so well.”
“Thank you, darling. Oh, look, he’s trying to latch onto my breast! And he barely cried! Wait, Doctor Preston, is that good or bad?”
“Lois, your son is breathing easily, he’s a nice pink color, he has all his fingers and toes, his cardiac monitor shows a strong heartbeat, and he’s trying to nurse already. According to what they taught me in baby school, that means he’s just fine.”
“Oh, Clark! Our son. He’s our son!”
“Do you still want to name him Jonathan Samuel?”
“Of course! Have our parents arrived yet?”
“Honey, you were only in labor for a little over three hours. That’s pretty fast. Don’t worry, they’ll all be here soon.”
“Okay. Oh, Jonathan Samuel Kent, you are going to be loved so much by so many!”
“You know, Jimmy and Darla are seeing her doctor. Something about their premarital health screenings. I know they’d love to see you if you feel up to it.”
“Maybe after I get some sleep. But if I’m not awake, let them see little Jon. I want to show him off to everyone I know.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Oh, Clark, this is so wonderful! If I’d known all this would happen, I would’ve let Nigel shoot me a long time ago!”
*****
Dr. Burton Richards goggled at his friend. “She said what?”
Bernie Klein sat back in his chair across from his friend’s desk and laughed. “You heard me! She didn’t mean it literally, of course, but that’s our Lois. I don’t think Clark knows from one minute to the next what she’ll say or do.”
Burton shook his head. “She is definitely my best and worst patient. Best, because all I have to do is tell any new liver patients that I treat her and they automatically perk up. She’s been a terrific morale boost for both my patients and their families.”
“And how is she the worst?”
Burton sighed. “Because she’s crazy. She needs to stay on a fairly strict schedule, but good luck getting her to stick to that. She’s already talking about a second child, and she won’t listen to me when I tell her that her liver probably wouldn’t tolerate a second pregnancy so well. I don’t know how to get it through her head that she’s not as strong as she once was and never will be.”
Bernie nodded. “Yes, well, she still thinks Superman will rescue her if she gets in real trouble.”
“If he doesn’t – never mind.”
Despite being socially inept most of the time, Bernie wasn’t medically dense. He picked up on what Burton had just said. “What do you mean? If he doesn’t what?”
“Nothing.”
“Burt?”
“Never mind!”
Bernie leaned forward. “This situation concerns not only our mutual patient but one of my few truly close friends. If you have any ongoing concerns about Lois’ health, I think you should share them with me.” Bernie’s voice, normally soft and bland, hardened. “Now.”
Burton looked into Bernie’s eyes for a long moment, then sighed. “Okay. I’ve consulted with my brother Reed on this – without revealing any names – and he agrees that my conclusions are unprovable but may very well be right.”
“What conclusions?”
Burton reached for a folder on the small table behind him. “You shared this information about Superman with me when we found out Lois was pregnant.”
“Yes. With their permission, if you recall.”
“Of course. Anyway, I was very interested in Superman’s aura. I agree with your conclusions about it, that he unconsciously extends it to include Lois whenever she’s close enough, which is most of the time.”
“They’re married, Burt. What did you expect?”
Burton lifted his hand. “Easy, Bern. I wasn’t criticizing. Besides, that aura keeps anyone flying with Superman from being burned by friction or asphyxiated by the speed of his passage through the air. It’s a semi-permeable energy membrane that allows air to pass through without transmitting the energy or pressure from his speed.”
“It’s not actually a membrane, it just acts like one. And I haven’t figured out exactly how it works yet, not in detail.”
“I know. And that’s one of the factors which keep my conclusions from being far more definite.”
“What conclusions, Burt?”
Burton sighed again. “Okay. When they’re together, Clark’s aura prevents Lois’s organs from deteriorating, right down at the cellular level. That’s a good thing, and it’s probably what helped make this childbirth relatively stress-free.”
“You say it helped?”
“It was almost certainly a major contributing factor, combined with Lois’ own youth and vitality. But the aura is also causing problems for her liver and the rest of her body.”
“What? How is it doing that?”
Burton wiped his face with his hands. “Look, here’s where we leave relative certainty and venture into uncharted realms. You remember those old maps that stopped where the old explorers stopped, and beyond that the legend often read ‘Here be dragons’? Well, this is dragon territory, and I don’t know for certain what’s beyond this point.”
“Tell me your best guess.”
“You may not like it.”
“I already don’t like this. Tell me your best guess, Burt.”
Burton licked his lips. “My best guess is that not only is Clark’s aura sustaining Lois’ liver and preventing further damage, but it’s keeping it from healing on its own. I also believe, but can’t prove, that it would interfere with any kind of major partial or full liver replacement. His aura isn’t completely under his control, like a regular human’s reflexive reaction to sudden heat. We put our fingers on a hot burner and snatch it back before our brain actually registers the heat and pain.”
“Sure. That reflex originates at the spinal cord.”
“Right. Well, whatever the Kryptonian equivalent is in regards to his aura, he envelops her with it without thinking about it. I seriously doubt that he could turn it off even if he wanted to.”
Bernie frowned in thought for a long moment. “If I understand what you’re telling me, that means Clark would have to stay away from Lois long enough for her to receive a donor liver and settle into a regimen of anti-rejections drugs.”
“That’s right.”
“So couldn’t he just keep away from her for a few months? Until her new liver settled down and her body got used to it?”
“I don’t think so. Lois would have to take those anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life. And because those drugs artificially suppress the recipient’s immune response to foreign bodies, Clark’s aura would try to protect Lois from both the drugs and the new liver.”
“That means – that means we can’t give Lois a new liver. She’d reject it as if she weren’t taking any drugs at all.”
Burton nodded. “Right. As long as they want to be married to each other, no transplanted liver for Lois. You know them better than I do, but I don’t see them divorcing over this.”
“But Clark’s been around people with similar health problems before. I don’t understand why – unless – unless this is something cumulative?”
“I think it is, given what you know about his aura. He’s never apart from her long enough for her liver to either fail or heal on its own. You could use the analogy that he’s both propping up a condemned building and not allowing any contractors on site to either fix it or replace it.”
Bernie rubbed his chin. “I’m still not clear on why his aura isn’t letting her liver heal. It doesn’t work on him that way.”
“We’re still in dragon territory, remember? So all I have is a theory supported by some evidence, a lot of educated guesses, and some logical but weird deductions. Human tissue has to break down in order to trigger the healing process. You don’t get a scab on a cut unless there’s a cut first. So what I think Clark’s aura is doing is keeping Lois’ liver from deteriorating to the point where her own natural healing process would try to take over.”
“Could he stay away from her long enough to let her liver heal naturally?”
Burton shrugged, his ebony face drawn and sad. “I don’t know if it would heal or collapse without his aura to sustain it. There are more dragons down that road than I care to take on any time soon.”
“What about cloning her liver?”
Burton shrugged. “I know what Hamilton and Mamba and a few others have done with cloning, but it’s different when you’re talking about just one organ, especially the liver. It should be simpler, but it’s not. An adult’s liver has grown up with and adjusted to the other organs around it and has learned to work within the endocrine and digestive systems, and those systems have grown up with it. You’re talking about a major stress event to introduce a new liver into the body, even a cloned one. You know, in some ways, transplanting a heart is easier. Hearts are basically just a bundle of muscle fibers that pump blood. Livers filter that blood, inject enzymes and hormones into it, add chemicals to the digestive system, and do some other things we don’t fully understand yet. And Superman’s liver does all that and even more stuff I can’t explain, so a partial transplant from him is out of the question. I wish I could say that cloning was a viable option, but given Clark’s aura and the complications that brings in, I have less hope for a cloned liver than for a donor.”
Bernie’s eyes opened wide. “What if we bring her father in on this?”
“Sam Lane? I don’t think he could help us here. His expertise is in prostheses and limb replacement. I don’t know near enough about that field to delve into it, and I seriously doubt Sam has done enough research and study to come up with something we haven’t tried or discarded.” He looked down. “If Lois had lost a leg, yes, he’d be one of the first I’d call. But not with a liver.”
“Wow.” Bernie rubbed his scalp with one hand. “Do you have any hope at all for using a cloned liver?”
“The only way I think of to get a viable cloned liver would be for us to clone Lois entirely and let Superman hang around the clone enough to get its liver used to his aura and then do a partial transplant. But I don’t have any real idea how long that would take, and I can’t see Clark being away from his family and his jobs – both of them – long enough for that to work. And that doesn’t begin to take into account the ethical problems of cloning a person for the purpose of harvesting vital organs. The clone would eventually become a person in her own right, totally separate from Lois, and what would she do with her life? What rights would she have? Who would she be? How would she live? And all that assumes that both Lois and the clone would survive and thrive.”
“Not to mention getting both Clark’s and Lois’ permission to go ahead with that plan.”
“That is not a conversation I would want to have with either of them, much less with both at once.”
“I think I’d rather learn to tap dance in a mine field.” Bernie leaned forward and put his face in his hands. “If she did get a donated liver, how long would she have?”
“Dragon territory, remember? All I have is some almost-informed and somewhat wild guesses.”
Bernie perched his chin on his fists and his elbows on his knees. “So give me your best wild guess. And before you say it, I’m already pretty sure I won’t like it.”
Burton sighed and shook his head. “Assuming it would be possible to acclimate another liver to Superman’s aura, with a transplant there’s no time for that. We couldn’t keep it viable outside the body that long. I would estimate that Lois would reject a donor liver within a month of living with Clark. And that leads us – or, me, actually – to another difficult question.”
Bernie looked at his friend with compassion. “The question of what you’re going to tell them about this. Assuming you tell them anything.”
Burton nodded again. “On the nose, Bern. I really don’t know how accurate this diagnosis is. I’m not some legend-in-my-own-mind doctor character in a TV show who thinks he knows the right thing to do all the time. I know I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even know if I’m right.”
“Which is why you didn’t want to tell me about it.”
“And now you get to carry this burden along with me.”
“Lucky me.”
“Lucky both of us.”
Bernie snorted. “Yeah, lucky. What’s the probability of you being right about this?”
Burton frowned. “I don’t think I can put an accurate number on that. There are just too many variables. I might even be totally, utterly, completely wrong.”
“Let’s say you’re on the right track. What’s the probability that your final diagnosis is accurate? What odds would you give Lois on getting a new liver and thriving?”
Burton blew a breath out through his nose. “If you held a scalpel to my jugular vein, I’d have to give myself a seventy percent chance of being right.”
“So – that’s a thirty percent chance of a successful transplant, whether full or partial.”
“I’m afraid so.”
After a long moment of silence, Bernie stood and walked around the desk, then put his hand on Burton’s shoulder. “If you decide to talk to them about this, I’ll be there with you. For the moment, though, I think you’re right not to share it. This would be too much for them at this point in time.”
Burton nodded. “Thanks, Bern. I just hope I’m wrong about it all.”
“So do I. But assuming you’re not way out in left field, and assuming Lois’s liver did fail, what’s the most likely scenario?”
Burton leaned back in his chair and looked at the file folder on his desk. “Most likely? Given her current lifestyle and their shared circumstances, I think her liver would fail suddenly and catastrophically, probably after a very high-stress event.”
“Like having another baby?”
Burton closed his eyes and turned his head away from Bernie. “Yes. Like having another baby.”
Bernie chewed on his lip for a long moment, then asked, “What if she doesn’t have any more children? What then?”
“I assume you want to know how long I think she’ll live?”
Bernie sat on the edge of the desk. “Best guess.”
“Again with the guesses you want from me.”
“Stop being Yoda’s Jewish cousin and give me the straightest answer you’ve got.”
Burton looked at his friend and smiled sadly. “Okay. My best guess is that Lois, assuming a normal lifestyle from here on out, has a life expectancy of thirty to sixty years. She should see her son graduate from college and tell her grandchildren bedtime stories.”
Bernie relaxed visibly and nodded. “Now factor in what you know of Lois Lane’s lifestyle, her penchant for hard work and skating on the razor’s edge of disaster, and her tendency to dive headfirst into whatever she’s doing.”
“She might not live another five years.”
Bernie gulped aloud. “That’s – a little abrupt.”
“You wanted my best guess, Bern. The other side of that is that she might outlive all of us non-Kryptonians. If we factor in her previous lifestyle, there’s really no way to calculate how long she might live. And if she doesn’t make major changes, her liver might be the least of her worries.” Burton leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk. “So how do we proceed from here?”
Bernie stood and crossed his arms in thought for a long moment. “First, we don’t tell them anything specific because we can’t be specific between ourselves. Second, we strongly advise Lois to dial back her 007 lifestyle just for her general health. Third, we put in as much time and effort as is reasonable, given our other responsibilities, into solving the transplant problem, whether from a live donor or a clone.”
Burton stood and walked around the desk, then put his hand on Bernie’s shoulder. “That’s a good summation. I think that’s out best plan. And hey, if we can’t solve this, it might be unsolvable.”
“I don’t like to think about that.”
“Neither do I, but it’s a fact that doctors always lose patients in the end. We’re born, we live, we die. Nobody gets out of life alive.”
Bernie turned rheumy eyes to his friend. “Which is why I moved into research. It rips me apart to lose a patient, especially when that patient is also a friend.”
Burton squeezed Bernie’s shoulder. “Then we’ll do our very best to put off that event as long as we can. Come on, let’s go see the baby. I’m a sucker for little kids.”
