Jonas shook his head a little to clear it of an overwhelming quantity of new concepts. “Back to my idea. If you made a device that could staze people who were in bad shape, it wouldn’t just be helpful for people dying of cancer or overwhelming the system in a pandemic. There are other situations where it could save lives.”
“For instance?” Seba asked.
“For ambulances in the field. Someone in cardiac arrest who might be saved in the Emergency Department but won’t last long enough to get there. They could be stazed. When they arrived, if the ED was swamped, the person in stasis could be set aside until things slowed down. We’d no longer have to triage patients when there were too many of them, leaving some to die so we have a better chance of saving the ones who aren’t quite so bad. With some knowledge of what’d happened in the field, the ED staff could get everything they expected to use in the resuscitation ready, including the correct specialists. Then they’d break stasis on the patient. This could be huge with accident victims who often need a lot of blood. You wouldn’t break stasis until the right blood type was ready and already crossmatched. If the patient used up all the available blood of the correct type, the ED would just put them back in stasis until more could be shipped in. If the patient needed to go the OR but the OR was full, they’d just put them back in stasis. Say, in the OR, the heart-lung machine breaks down. You put the patient in stasis until you’ve got another one ready. If a patient couldn’t be adequately treated in a particular hospital, you’d put them in stasis until you could get them to a hospital that could handle such a problem.”
Seba looked astonished. He said, “You make it sound like we should make the molds we’d staze people in so they’d stack.”
Jonas blinked, “What?!”
“You know. Make the bottom of one so it’d lock into the top of the one below it, something like the way Legos do. That way if you had far too many patients from some kind of disaster, you could stack them up until you could handle them.”
“My God. I hope it never comes to that, but if it did, yes, you’d want them to stack. And you’d need a way to attach identification to them.”
“We’ve been working on how to attach ID and medical records to Simone’s Stade. I think you provided the essential parts of her record that we’re putting in that record?”
He grimaced, “Yes, but we were very fortunate Simone had authorized Grace to have access to her records, or, by law, I wouldn’t have been able to release them. In the future, hopefully, people being stazed will have enough time to obtain their records themselves ahead of time.”
Grace looked at Sylvia Contreras, “I’m a little worried about whether there’re going to be problems handling her affairs for her while she’s in stasis. I think I’m going to be able to do it as her wife, but what if someone were to say I couldn’t. Or that being stazed is legally the same as dead and tried to activate her will?”
Contreras said, “Yes, legally these could be serious issues. In the future, unless pressed for time as you were with Ms. Welch, I would recommend that people about to be stazed sign a durable power of attorney permitting someone else to legally act on their behalf. Also—”
Grace interrupted, “When Simone got sick, she signed a power of attorney designating me, but I don’t know if it’s a ‘durable’ power or not. What’s the difference?”
“A regular power of attorney allows someone to act in your place, say to do business for you, or buy a house while you’re out of the country or something similar. However, you must otherwise be in good health and capable of carrying out your own affairs. A durable power of attorney allows someone to act for you even if you’ve lost the capacity to do it yourself, for instance, if you developed dementia. It would seem that Simone likely assigned you a durable power and perhaps even a health care power of attorney?”
“Oh, I think she did. You think they’ll be helpful?”
“I think so, but it would be better if stazees signed POAs specific to being stazed so there’d be no doubt they intended the POA to be in effect in the case where they’re in stasis. The health care POA lets you make medical decisions while the person’s incapacitated. It would seem to me that being unstazed is the kind of decision that would have to be made by the HCPOA since the stazee is incapacitated, but that such decision-making power should be explicitly spelled out in the document.”
Kaem sighed, “Wow. This’s a lot to think about. Sylvia, can you come up with forms we can use for this?”
She nodded, “But, unless pressed for time, people should probably take our forms and use them as examples when consulting their own attorneys. If they’re going to be stazed long term they probably need to get a trust set up to protect their financial interests.”
***
After Grace and Dr. Jonas left, Arya returned to her desk to check her email before leaving for the weekend. She’d finished that and was getting ready to leave when Kaem came over. “Hey, can I take you out to dinner?”
Arya felt torn between a flash
