Healing in The Shadow Spinner

As a physical therapist, I’ve seen the healing process play out many, many times. So when it came time to write a Healing scene in The Shadow Spinner, I wanted to write something that reflected real facets of healing. Read on to see some of the limits as well as an explanation of some of the cool details I threw in.

Limits

The question that exists with any sort of magical healing is ‘if a Healer is nearby, how can anyone ever die?’. I think it’s a pretty valid question that generally isn’t addressed in fantasy. Most of the time, someone will be grievously injured and then the Healer rips them from the brink of death.

There are three major Healing scenes in The Shadow Spinner. One is Healing the patron’s fighter, one is Healing N’Halia and getting the Well, and one is Healing N’Halia after her Advanced fight. The first of all of these is a great example of Healing not working. Arol tries to Heal the fighter, but the man dies anyway from his severe head trauma.

This answers the question of when Healing won’t work – and it’s pretty similar to when emergency medicine in our modern society won’t work. Emergency medicine can save people from bleeding out, but only if they get to the person fast enough. The same is obviously true of Healing. The other thing is that, if you don’t know what’s causing the person to die or you don’t know how to treat it, then neither emergency medicine nor Healing will work. This is exactly what happens in The Shadow Spinner. Arol, having no formal training, doesn’t understand how brain trauma causes death. He’s unable to locate the problem fast enough and the man dies.

Incomplete Healing

Another limit, one that is often included in fantasy, is incomplete healing. After a severe injury and subsequent Healing, the characters generally need to rest for a long time to recover their strength. While some of this is related to energy, in The Shadow Spinner, I make a note that much of this is due to incomplete Healing.

The human body is far too complex to actually Heal it perfectly. Even with a simple gash, there is trauma to many layers of connective tissue and a cascade of changes to our body. So, while a Healing can address the major components, like stopping blood loss and setting bones, there are still many micro-traumas that the person’s body still must deal with.

Layers

Now to the actual Healing. If you read the Healing sequence in the chapter ‘The Well of Wellness’, you’ll see that Hermit advises Arol to Heal in an iterative fashion. Repair the blood vessels enough to stop internal bleeding, set the bones enough to prevent further damage, and so on. It wouldn’t do you much good to spend a lot of time healing the skin while the person bleeds to death internally.

In other books, I’ve read, I feel like they describe healing as just starting at the deepest layer and moving upward. While this makes sense surgically because after you close a layer you can’t go back down, I felt like it wouldn’t make sense for Healing. Since you can jump around through layers, you might as well bounce back and forth and address the most severe things. As you loop through the layers, you could bring everything up bit by bit back to normalcy. This mimics how the human body regenerates as well.

Blood replacement

The next two things are just random bits I threw into the Healing to make it even more complex. After an injury, there’s obviously blood loss. And even if you Healed the injury, you wouldn’t have replaced the lost blood, leaving the person weakened for a while. That’s why Hermit teaches Arol how to accelerated replacing the blood.

Fluid removal

One other extra detail to make the Healing needlessly complex. We’ve all gotten bruised at some point. You can watch the change as your body gradually removes the waste products. The bruise will change color and shrink. The waste products in our body are dealt with by our lymphatic system (a fluid removal system).

Hermit tells Arol to stimulate a structure in N’Halia’s abdomen – the cisterna chyli. This is just a large part of the lymphatic system. Once again, this detail was thrown in to accelerate her recovery post-Healing. I feel like an entire book could be written following a Healer and the interesting way they would use their Power that blended magic and anatomy. Maybe I’ll have to write a side story at some point!

Next up

Next post will be talking about the Flow with the different Powers.