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“Dr. Rios, this is Daniel Everett.”
“I remember,” she said, coming toward us with a look of great concern. “What is it?” she asked me. “Are you in pain?”
“Not yet,” I said, “but it’s coming. I can feel it.”
Dr. Rios quickly whipped her tablet out of her pocket and called up the graph of my vitals. All three of us looked at the various spikes and valleys from the past hour. My stress level had just peaked again about five minutes before.
It was one of the reasons I wanted Dr. Rios to come so quickly. Because I knew that the drugs in my system were already sensing trouble, and were seeping into my blood.
“I need you to take these out,” I told the doctor, pointing to the tubes in my arm. “If I’m ever going to learn to control this on my own, I have to do it when I’m under stress. And
