Treating most cancers is a little bit of a downer in a family-friendly administration sim. That’s why Two Point Hospital invents a bunch of pun-based fictional ailments and presents them in a cartoonish setting. Like the afflictions in 1997’s Theme Hospital, they’re designed to boost a smile: Gray Anatomy, verbal diarrhoea, and who might overlook Bloaty Head?
But if you concentrate on it, these ailments, and positively their therapies, are literally fairly horrific. What would Two Point Hospital seem like if it weren’t a cartoon?
To keep in your cosy world of videogames, try our Two Point Hospital gameplay preview.
I push by the surgical procedure doorways and blow out my cheeks, tossing bloodstained gloves into the bin. Eight hours. Eight hours of painstaking unwrapping, gradual and deliberate in order to not rip any pores and skin away with the bandage, like peeling an infinite sticker from the duvet of a brand new ebook. Damn if mummification isn’t a ache to deal with.
But I’m lastly accomplished and the affected person is in restoration – with pressing recommendation to by no means once more set foot within the British Museum – thanks to those miracle-working fingers of mine. Time to clock off. Maybe I’ll head to the workers room first, sneak in a nap on the comfortable couch…
Oh no. That’s my title being referred to as over the tannoy. I’m urgently wanted, and no-one else will do.
“Dammit,” I mutter. Curse these miraculous fingers.
I crack my knuckles and jog to reception simply as a workforce of paramedics push a gurney by the entrance doorways. Its occupant lies fully nonetheless beneath a blanket that covers their complete physique, although there’s an ominous glow the place their head could be. The gurney gathers a crowd of grim-faced nurses and docs like a turd rolled by glitter.
“Presentation?” I ask of the paramedics, in a transparent, commanding tone.
“Lightheadedness,” the lead medic whispers, her voice quivering.
“My god.”
An intern physician laughs, incredulous at my solemnity. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. Surely we advise a healthy meal and a nice lie-down?”
The extra skilled workers change seems to be of concern. I slap the intern round his contemporary, naive face, as a result of it feels just like the dramatic factor to do.
“Educate yourself or get the hell out of my hospital, rookie!”
“Bu – but…”
“Where’d you train? Haven’t you heard? Lightheadedness is the new Bloaty Head!”
In unison, these docs senior sufficient to recollect the Bloaty Head epidemic of ‘97 look at the intern like he’s simply requested to urinate of their cornflakes. That was a darkish time. Our solely therapy was to re-inflate sufferers’ heads after puncturing them – I can nonetheless keep in mind how the pus stank. The intern stares on the linoleum ground, ashen-faced, holding again tears. Good. It’s powerful love, however he’s received to study: Lightheadedness is to not be taken evenly.
After 5 minutes of pushing the gurney by double units of swing doorways – somebody has laid this hospital out actually badly – we get to the working theatre.
“Bayonet or screw?” I bark.
The lead medic is shamefaced. “We… we didn’t have the guts to check, doctor.”
“Dammit,” I mutter once more. Pretty certain I nailed the gravelly voice. With a flourish I take away the blanket, revealing a bulbous glass head and the brightly burning filament inside – it crackles with anxiousness. I verify the poor fella’s neck.
“Screw,” I declare. A nurse’s hand shoots to her mouth. The intern turns to vomit on the ground. I slap him once more and name for the pincers. “No time to screw round,” I say, deftly deploying a little bit of humour to boost morale.
But my quip conceals some extent of lethal seriousness – judging by the rusty hue of its mild, the filament is about able to pop. And when that occurs, nicely. You don’t need to know.
“Restrain the patient,” I command, and the small military of attendants safe a limb every. The pincers are the dimensions of bolt cutters – squinting towards the searing mild of the bulb, I shut the jaws across the affected person’s neck and squeeze my arms across the handles. I slap the intern yet one more time for luck – all of us have our superstitions – and drop my weight, pulling the pincers down.
There is resistance at first, however the affected person can clearly really feel the strain – he writhes in mute agony, and the workers wrestle to include his thrashing. My ft are off the ground, the complete weight of my muscular 187 lbs utilized to the pincers, after which one thing offers with a thick crunch from deep inside the affected person’s neck. The sound is like somebody crushing a crisp packet inside a bowl of custard. This, sadly, is the therapy for Lightheadedness: unscrewing the bulb from the affected person’s backbone. Naturally, common anaesthesia could be referred to as for, however mild bulbs can’t inhale gasoline. Duh.
After a quarter-turn the pincers are close to the ground. I unclench the jaws, reset them, and repeat the process. Sweat beads on my forehead, and on these of the attendants as they maintain the affected person down. But for his or her effortful grunting and the susurration of sheets on the gurney, it’s disturbingly quiet. I’d virtually favor it if victims of Lightheadedness might scream.
There is extra crunching, extra grinding, till lastly the filament sparkles and goes darkish, and it’s as if the complete room exhales.
“Well done, everyone,” I say. “We can do the rest by hand now.”
Perhaps desperate to compensate for his earlier insouciance, the intern hurries over to complete the job. He reaches out for the bulb itself…
“Not like that, you fool!”
The intern locations each palms on the searingly sizzling glass, and instantly withdraws them with a scream that’s all of the extra surprising for the silence of the affected person only a second in the past. He leaves two black palm prints on the bulb, trailing oily smoke and the scent of burned plastic – the stays of his surgical gloves, flash-melted. I consider my mummification affected person earlier at the moment, of how cautious we have been to not tear the pores and skin away with the bandages.
The intern is huddled within the nook of the working theatre, watching his shaking palms in horror. I can’t inform the place plastic ends and flesh begins. There is blood and the scent of cooked meat.
Staff rush to assist the intern to his ft, and to supply phrases of comfort, however he can’t cease watching his palms. For as soon as at the moment, he’s pondering what I’m pondering.
Those palms will work no miracles.
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