Chapter Text
“I can’t see!”
Matt’s screams drowned out the approaching sirens.
“I can’t see! I can’t see!”
Jack held his son as tightly as he dared, not knowing if he had any other injuries. The old man said Matt pushed him out of the way, but what happened after that? Did the truck hit Matt? How did the chemicals end up on his face? What kind of chemicals were they?
“I can’t see!”
“I know, Matty,” he murmured. “It’s gonna be okay.” It probably wasn’t, but he didn’t dare say that out loud. “Help’s coming.”
An ambulance turned the corner and two paramedics came running out.
“Sir, you need to put him down,” one said urgently.
Jack immediately lowered Matt back to the street. He would’ve done anything they asked if it meant getting Matt to safety.
“No!” Matt screamed. He reached out and grabbed a handful of Jack’s shirt. “Daddy, please! I can’t see!”
“It’s okay, help is here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Did anyone see what happened?” one of the paramedics asked the assembled crowd.
“He pushed me out of the way,” the old man reported.
“Did the truck hit him?”
“No, it swerved at the last minute,” another man said. “But it dumped a bunch of those barrels and they started leaking.”
The paramedic nodded and crouched by Matt’s side, shining a flashlight in his eyes.
“You’re his father?” the other confirmed.
Jack nodded.
“No pupil response,” he reported.
“Collar him.”
“He says he can’t see. Is that…is that from the chemicals?” Jack asked.
“It could be. It could also be a brain injury. We won’t know until we get some scans, so we’re going to put a collar on to keep his head and neck still until we know, okay?”
A brain injury? No, no, no, no, no, that couldn’t happen. Matt needed his brain. “It’ll heal, right? If it is a brain injury?”
“The doctors at the hospital will answer all of your questions. For now, let’s focus on getting your son out of here safely, okay?”
The other paramedic, still crouched by Matt’s head, fastened a thick blue collar around his neck. “I’m Emma,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over Matt’s continued screaming. “Can you tell me your name?”
His eyes skittered frantically around, searching for the source of the voice and finding nothing. Jack felt the grip on his shirt tighten impossibly further. Matt stopped shouting long enough to mutter his name.
“Matt, do you know where you are?”
“48th and 10th.”
She smiled. “That’s great. Can you wiggle your feet?” Matt did exactly that.
He knew exactly where they were, and he could move. That meant his brain was fine, right? Jack clung to that belief as Emma and the other paramedic lifted Matt onto a stretcher. Jack was forced to hunch over the side since Matt still refused to let go of him. “Daddy, I can’t see!” Matt cried.
“Anthony, set up the Morgan lenses,” Emma ordered. “I’ll get the pH strips.”
Anthony ripped open a drawer on the other side of the ambulance and pulled out a bunch of tubing and a bag of fluid. He hooked it all up and hung the bag over the stretcher. Meanwhile, Emma pulled a tiny piece of paper from a box and tapped it to one of the wet spots on Matt’s forehead. Instantly, the paper turned from yellow to dark blue. “Whatever it is, it’s basic as hell,” she reported.
“What does that mean?” Jack asked.
She ignored him, and instead reported this information to the ambulance driver. Meanwhile, Anthony said, “Matt, I’m going to put something in your eyes to help wash the chemicals out, okay? I need you to listen to me and look up or down when I say so, okay?”
“But I can’t see!”
“That’s okay, just try to move your eyes in the right direction, okay? I’m going to do the right eye first. I need you to look down.” He picked up a small white disk at the end of the tubing, pulled Matt’s eyelid up, and shoved the disk inside. Matt yelped in either pain, terror, or both. “You’re doing great, now look up.” He tucked the disk under Matt’s lower eyelid and repeated the whole thing with the other eye. Then he taped the tubes to Matt’s forehead and adjusted something along the tubing.
Jack almost threw up. Matt looked like something out of a sci-fi horror movie. The fluid from the tubes poured out of his eyes and down the sides of his face like a rush of tears.
“It hurts!” he wailed.
“I know, sweetie. We’re gonna make it hurt less, I promise,” Emma said. Somehow she’d put a needle in Matt’s arm while Anthony worked. Jack had been so fixated on the horrors happening at his head that he hadn’t noticed. “Dad, does he have any allergies to medication?”
“I…I…No, I don’t think so.”
“Does he take any medicines?”
“No.”
“Any conditions we need to know about? Diabetes, epilepsy, anything like that?”
“N-no, he’s always been healthy.” Until now.
“I’m giving him one milligram of morphine,” she told Anthony.
Jesus, Jack thought. That was the hard stuff. He almost threw up again, knowing his little boy was hurting bad enough for them to give him that without hesitation.
Matt continued to cry the whole way to the hospital while Emma and Anthony worked. More tubes and wires joined the ones in Matt’s eyes. They cleaned up the cut on his temple and ran water over his cheeks and forehead to wash away the chemicals. By the time they arrived, the stretcher beneath Matt’s head was soaking wet, but the skin around his eyes was still angry red, even black in some places.
Emma and Anthony rattled off information as they rolled Matt into the emergency room and handed him off to a new group of doctors. “Sir, we’re gonna need you to step back so we can examine your son,” one of them said.
Jack tried to step away, but Matt wouldn’t let go. “He—he can’t see me, this is the only connection he’s got.”
“Matt, your dad’s not going anywhere, but we need you to let go, okay?”
“No!”
“Matty, it’s okay, I’ll be right here.” Though it killed him to do so, Jack pried Matt’s fingers from his shirt and stepped away to let the doctors work. Matt screamed like someone had just chopped his arm off. The doctors quickly switched him from the stretcher to a hospital bed. “I’m right here,” Jack repeated. One of the doctors took pity on him and led him to the foot of the bed. Jack grabbed Matt’s foot and gave it a squeeze. “Feel that? I’m right here. You’re safe.”
Matt’s screams quieted to whimpers.
“pH is down to 10.5,” one of the doctors announced after dipping another little paper into the stream of fluid pouring from Matt’s eyes.
“Let’s send him to CT and keep the Morgan lenses running. There’s not much we can do until we get that back to neutral.”
“What does that mean?” Jack asked. He only understood every fourth or fifth word that came out of these people’s mouths.
“We can’t treat the eye injury until the chemical is neutralized. The pH is 10.5 now, we need to get down to about a seven. While we wait, we’re going to take a look at Matt’s spine to make sure nothing’s broken.”
Jack nodded. That was the first thing he’d heard since they set foot in the hospital that actually made sense. They made him wait in the ER while they took Matt to the scanner. He stood beside the empty space where the bed had been, biting his thumbnail. Why the hell was this happening? Matt saved an old man, and this is how God rewarded his selflessness?
When they brought Matt back, he no longer had the collar on, though the tubes continued to push water into his eyes. “Your dad’s right here, on your left,” one of the doctors told him. Jack reached out and grabbed Matt’s hand.
“Good news, his spine is totally clear,” the doctor said.
That meant there was bad news.
“There appears to be no damage to any internal organs.”
That was also good news. “What about his eyes?”
The doctor’s expression turned more serious. “Once the pH neutralizes, we’ll get ophthalmology down to do a full exam and see what’s going on there. The burned areas around his eyes are also a concern. Most of these are second degree burns,” he explained, pointing to the inflamed areas on Matt’s forehead and left cheek. “They should heal up okay on their own as long as they’re kept clean. This spot, however, is third degree.” He pointed to a quarter-sized area below Matt’s right eye. Even Jack could tell it looked worse than the rest of the burns. “This will probably need surgical debridement and revision.”
Jack didn’t know what any of those words meant, but they sounded expensive. God only knew the medical bills they’d racked up just in the thirty minutes they’d been here. But he would worry about that later. For now, all that mattered was getting Matt the help he needed.
“Dad, what does that mean?” Matt asked.
“A nurse will be around to check the pH every few minutes,” the doctor announced before racing off to the other side of the ER.
“What does it mean?” Matt repeated.
“I—I don’t know,” Jack admitted. He never even made it to college, how was he expected to understand medical jargon? “I’m sure they’ll explain it better later.”
“Can they fix my eyes or not?”
He wanted so badly to say yes. Matt sounded so scared, and it was his job as a father to reassure his son when he was afraid. But how could he do that when he was equally afraid? Jack squeezed his hand and said, “They’re gonna do everything they can.”
They waited another half an hour for the pH to reach the right number. This time, when the nurse checked it, the little piece of paper hardly changed color at all. “These can come out now,” she said, indicating the tubes sticking out of Matt’s eyes. She pulled his lower eyelid down, careful not to touch the worst of the burns, and slid the disk out of his right eye, then the left. Matt’s eyes, once bright and inquisitive, were now hazier than the bathroom mirrors at Fogwell’s.
“What happened?” Jack asked. He got there right after the accident, and they looked normal then. Somehow, in the time since, they’d clouded over.
The nurse clearly didn’t know how to answer this question. “Ophthalmology should be down in just a few minutes,” she told them. “First, we need to get these burns cleaned and bandaged.” From a cabinet beside the bed, she grabbed a bunch of supplies. “Can I get some help in here?” she called out. Another nurse jogged into the room. She sprayed something into a square of gauze, then rubbed it against the wound on Matt’s left cheek. He howled in agony as the skin gave way to reveal an open, oozing sore. “What are you doing?” Jack asked, frantic. “You’re making it worse!”
“The dead skin has to go,” she said plainly. She asked the other nurse, “Can he have more morphine?”
“He got one mil in the field,” she reported.
“That was more than fifteen minutes ago; give him another.”
She prepared a syringe and injected it into Matt’s IV. Moments later, she attacked his forehead with another handful of gauze. Matt’s cry of pain was quieter this time, but still broke Jack’s heart. The other nurse picked up tweezers and scissors and snipped away at the flaps of skin sticking up from the wound. Jack had to put a hand over his mouth to stop from vomiting.
“Almost done, sweetie,” the one nurse said as she scraped at his right cheek. “We should page Dr Rose, he’ll want to take a look at this third degree patch.”
At last, they put down the gauze and the tweezers. Matt lay there, panting, his face a blotchy mess of pink, shining wounds. “Go get some Silvadene and sterile tongue depressors,” one of the nurses told the other. While she left to go gather those supplies, the other began cutting pieces of gauze to fit the size of Matt’s burns.
The other nurse returned and set down a cylindrical tub and a handful of thin white packets. She opened the tub, ripped open one of the packets, and pulled out a large popsicle stick. She used it to spread the white substance onto the gauze like butter on toast, then handed it off to the other nurse who laid it over Matt’s cheek and taped it in place. They repeated the process until all three areas were covered, then left the room.
“Dad, what if it never comes back?” Matt asked, sniffling.
He hadn’t even considered that possibility yet. It was too huge, too life-changing, too terrible to contemplate at the moment. “It’ll be okay,” he said. It was the only thing he could say that wasn’t either hopeless or an outright lie.
Another doctor poked his head in. “Are you Matthew Murdock?”
“Yeah,” Matt said.
“I’m Dr Radcliffe, and this is my intern Dr Graham,” he gestured to the younger man standing beside him. “We’re going to take a look at your eyes, okay?”
Matt shifted nervously. “Okay.”
Jack noticed he was blinking more often than usual. He wasn’t sure if that was because of pain or a desperate hope that the next time he opened them, his sight would return.
Dr Radcliffe produced a small flashlight from his breast pocket and shined it in Matt’s eyes, frowning. “NLP in both eyes,” he remarked. Dr Graham scribbled this down on his clipboard. “Pupils equal and non-responsive.” He put the flashlight back in his pocket.
“Now, keep your head still and move just your eyes in the direction I say, okay?” he instructed. “Start looking straight ahead. Now look up and to the right…good. Now just to the right, down and to the right…down and to the left, to the left, up and to the left…great. So many of my patients don’t know their left from their right,” he said with a chuckle.
Next, he picked up a device that looked like a digital thermometer, but instead of under Matt’s tongue he held it right up against his eye, so close it was almost touching the surface. Jack would’ve flinched if someone did that to him with no warning, but Matt remained motionless. Seeing his eyes looking so hazy and unfocused was one thing, but watching someone hold something directly in front of his face when Matt so clearly had no idea it was there really hammered it home.
The device made a quiet beeping sound. “Don’t blink,” Dr Radcliffe said. That was the only warning he gave before he tapped the tip of the device against Matt’s eye.
“Ow!”
Dr Radcliffe wolf whistled. “IOP 37 in the right eye.”
“Jesus,” Dr Graham said as he wrote it down.
“Two more times in this eye, and then we do the other.”
“Why do you have to do it multiple times?” Jack asked. “It’s hurting him.”
“We need to take three measurements and use the average,” Dr Radcliffe said. He repeated the process twice more, reading off another 37 and a 36. The other eye got a 29, 30, and a 31. Matt’s noises of pain faded to near-silent whimpers by the final measurement.
“Dr Graham, can we dim the lights?”
Dr Graham glanced around the room. “I don’t think so.”
Dr Radcliffe sighed. “This is why I hate the ER. We’ll just skip that for now. Pass me the slit lamp.”
Dr Graham handed him another device. This one looked like a handheld microscope. He held it in front of Matt’s face and looked through the eyepieces. “Severe epithelial defect,” he noted. “There’s no point fluorescein staining this, it’s so far gone. Noted opacification as well with severe limbal ischemia.” He switched to the other eye and repeated many of the same phrases. At least, Jack was pretty sure. The words were so alien that they were gone from his brain the instant he heard them.
“There’s no point trying the fundoscope; the corneas are too opaque. But with an IOP that high and NLP in both eyes, I suspect complete glaucoma. We’ll reevaluate once we get the pressure down with topical corticosteroids, but I’m almost certain of it.”
He might as well have been speaking Japanese, for all Jack understood. “Can you fix it? Make him see again?” That was all Jack needed to know.
“Let’s take a walk,” Dr Radcliffe suggested. He was already up and striding back through the curtain before Jack had a chance to respond.
“Um…okay.” Jack scrambled to follow him. “Don’t worry Matty, I’ll be right back.” He chased Dr Radcliffe around the ER, dodging doctors and patients as they raced around the floor. When the doctor came to a sudden halt, Jack nearly ran into him. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why’d you drag me all the way over here?”
“I figured it was best to relay the news to you first and let you decide how best to tell your son.”
“Tell him what?” Jack asked, even though he already knew. It was a simple yes or no question, and only one of those answers was difficult to give. “You can’t save his vision, can you?”
“Let me make this very clear, Mr Murdock. The possibility of saving his vision never crossed my mind. Right now, I’m not sure we can save his eyes.”