Headcanon - Luis’ injuries
Okay, I will preface this by saying this all won’t be 100% medicall accurate because we get way too little information for that in the game. And it is Resident Evil, so I will take my sweet ass right to be a little fudgy with how this works and how he recovers. This game isn’t reality. This game has a magic First Aid spray and healy herbs after all. And spine attaching brain eating parasites.
Krauser plunges that knife into Luis’ back. Several little details happen at once there.
Luis coughs blood almost immediately. Which leads to the assumption that most likely his lung was pierced. Other close candidates would be his oesophagus, but that would have bled more.
His aorta was most likely missed, because that would have resulted in him dying far faster than he did.
The knife is almost perfectly in Luis’ middle at his spine. Almost. I take a bit more of liberty here and say that it is slightly angled to the left of his body. Because if Krauser had really managed to slice his spine and thus spinal cord in half, Luis would not have been able to get up again, like he did.
So in my headcanon that knife got ricocheted from his spine and entered him at an angle to the left.
When it comes to the height of the injury? From eyeballing it and aligning some charts and all, I’d say it would be at vertrebraes T4 or T5. Which means the spinal nerve roots beneath those vertrebrae would be most likely affected alongside the ribs there. Thus making his arms mostly unaffected, but everything beneath his chest? Threatened.
The dorsal (back) root of a spinal nerve is for sensation input, the ventral (front) part for the efferent motoric output.
It’s obvious that Luis can still move after the attack. He even makes it down a whole platform and manages to shoot a knife out of Krauser’s hand. So the damage there can’t be too immediately-ending-it-horrific, not severed instantly and completely.
But we also see Luis soon losing all strength to remain standing. And he stands only with leaning heavily against a crate, plus his left arm isn't used at all. In the end he also loses the strength or coordination to even light a fire for his cigarette with his left hand.
To summarize all this, and because I ignore canon at this point and just say Leon managed to help Luis and make him survive – and then they were rescued from that goddamn island – Luis gets loaded with a ton of healing herbs and that First Aid Spray holds him together.
He is weakened and can barely walk any distances on the island, often takes breaks until they reach his laboratory, where he has some medications that help him, too.
In the end, he gets rescued alongside Leon and Ashley via helicopter.
Already on that flight, they put him under to treat his instability. There surely were some first emergency surgeries happening in Madrid. They did not wake him up afterwards, because he got to go to the USA alongside Leon and Ashley right after that. Washington probably is, where more surgeries happened and Luis found himself groggily waking up in the ICU with an “I lived, bitch” attitude. Though it took him several days to realize that he wasn’t in Spain anymore.
He has the scars on his back, from the knife and from the surgeries.
I will headcanon that at least a small part of Luis’ spine got fused with metal and bolts to stabilize it. So his movement in that part is a little less than before. He has to take pain killers at times, because his spinal nerves still act up.
He occassionally has numbness in his lower left side. He can’t run as fast and far anymore and if he gets tired, his steps become uncoordinated and he is more likely to stumble. His breathing also doesn’t run as deep anymore, he is missing part of his left lung (could be the entire upper lobe of it).
But overall he made a spectacular Resident-Evil-suiting recovery, thanks to Leon probably pulling quite a few strings and favours. Physical therapy was and still is a regular thing for Luis, but he is, as always, optimistic as hell.
Just don’t ask him to run a marathon. Or any kind of race. He won’t.
That is part of why he, even when he joins Leon on his missions for the DSO later, he will be in the background as a sniper and aid. Up close and cozy to the enemies, he would be too much at danger and any hit to his spine probably has devastating consequences.
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