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June followed the young man to his bed with her galvanometer which was this plastic thing resembling a hammer. He was a bright boy preparing for his pre-meds and had topped his class in his village schools up in the mountains of Garhwal.
His muscles didn't look wasted at all. His muscle power wasn't that bad either, in fact it nearly equaled June's own as she asked him to flex his elbows but then on striking his muscle tendons in his upper and lower limbs June found them jumping and quivering. It was evident that the current flowing through them was quite strong but obviously misdirected due to malfunctioning ICs in his spinal generators. Somewhere in the thick bunch of wires especially as they ran in the area of his spinal cord at the back of his neck (termed the 4th cervical segment) was the lesion (the morphologic diagnosis). What was it that was disrupting the ICs there? Was it a tumor? (Unlikely, the machine had almost grown up with the malfunction). Was it the skeletal vertebral casing compressing the ICs causing cord dysfunction that was something treatable? Again looking at his back June couldn't find anything wrong with his vertebral column. Was it some blood pipe to the spinal circuit that had got blocked, drying up the ICs? Was it an inflammatory demyelination, a condition where the ICs lose their myelin sheaths (they help the current flow, jumping saltatorily over their nodes of Ranvier)? Unlikely again because both would have had an acute onset and the latter would have shown signs of recovery as soon as a new sheath replaced the old one in the ICs of the cord.
It looked more like as if the cells forming the ICs in the spinal cord had died on their own, a process termed apoptosis, which might have been triggered off by an external event, the entry of an email virus or may have been a consequence of a genetic software program inbuilt into his operating system.
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