WARNING: This fic is going to be long, and it is going to be a tearjerker.

I've been working in hospice care for about four years now, and I figured I'd write out some of my life stresses at the moment with this. I plan on it being multichaptered-as for how long it's going to be or when I'll have time to write chapters, I do not know. I'll play it by ear.

I do hope you enjoy this. I'll be leaving for Cleveland for a few days on Friday, so don't expect a major update until next week.

Please, please, PLEASE leave feedback! I accept all forms-negative, positive, or constructive.

Love,

-Silent-Protagonist

()()()

Not long ago.

Kyle couldn't stand it anymore. By the time he'd been going there every afternoon for the past six months, he thought he was going to burn down the fucking nursing home, he swore to God. If there was one thing he couldn't stand in medical school, it was nursing homes. It all seemed pointless to him—locking a mass of equally deteriorating people into one building and hoping staffing issues and neglect didn't cause an incident to occur. To him, it was nothing but a cesspool of bedsores, fall risks, and general unhappiness. He didn't know how anybody lived there. He didn't know how anybody had the gall to put someone there and just leave them alone.

According to the charge nurse on that particular morning, Stan had another pressure ulcer forming on his coccyx. "It's a Stage 3," she told him blandly, absorbed in another patient's chart and refusing to make eye contact. Her legs were crossed, clad in a shade of baby blue scrub pants that Kyle thought was the ugliest pair he'd ever seen. "Apparently it's been there for a while, but none of the staff has seen it. One of your hospice nurses is doing wound care twice a week."

Kyle slammed his hands down on the nurse's station's front desk. "Has nobody been repositioning him?" he demanded. "What kind of joke is this? The whole point of this facility is to keep your residents in good health, and I come to hear my patient has a bed sore? A Stage 3, no less? That means he's been on it for ages without anyone keeping him on his side. What the hell are your nurse aides doing on the floor?"

As he assumed, Kyle's inflammatory remark had pulled a chord—he knew the true trigger of registered nurses, and that was criticizing their authority. The charge nurse's gaze snapped up, her dark eyes boring flaming holes into his skin. Kyle knew what was best, and that was to stand his ground and glare back. "Excuse me, Doctor Broflovski, but I think I know what I'm doing here," she hissed. "Don't act like I'm the only nurse on call all the time. It's not my fault."

Sure it isn't. Kyle hated not only nursing homes, but sometimes, the people who worked in them. "Then maybe while you're working, you can get the aides to make sure his skin isn't breaking down," he seethed. "Pressure ulcers are a sign of neglect, and you know damn well I'm right."

"Do you know how hard it is to reposition him?" the charge nurse asked. "He's got Parkinson's rigor so badly that none of his limbs will move. The physical therapists have even given up on him. Range of motion exercises do nothing. He's dying, Doctor. There's only so much we can do at this point." She veered her sight back down to the chart, flipping through with a renewed vigor. Kyle, as usual, had gotten nowhere, so he decided to play his trump card.

"You have nice scrubs," he complimented, lying blatantly.

The charge nurse ignored him.

Sniffing, Kyle bent down and grabbed the handle to his rolling bag and turned down the dimly-lit hallway. The nursing home turned off half the lights in the afternoon to save electricity, which Kyle thought was utter bullshit. No wonder this was the second bed sore Stan had gotten in the last six months. Kyle couldn't be by his side all the time, or he would have ensured his joke of a treatment wouldn't have happened. Hindsight was always clear, and the longer Kyle stuck around in palliative care, the longer he wished he'd been a nurse instead. He could be closer to his patients.

He could've been closer to Stan.

Stan Marsh lived at the very end of the north wing of South Park's sole long-term care facility—he was the youngest resident there by at least thirty years. Stacked up against many of his older tenants, he was comparatively worse, too. This dismal thought cast Kyle's vision to the floor, watching the tiles flash by as he walked briskly down the corridor, the wheels of his bag clacking stolidly behind him. He brushed by a nursing assistant who had just emerged from a nearby room with a trash can filled with what smelled like vomit. Stan's neighbor, an elderly woman whose name Kyle couldn't recall, had been having emesis for weeks. When Kyle started seeing Stan, she was always hitting on him.

What was her name again?

As usual, Stan's door was wide open. The charge nurses always commanded this in case they needed to reach him quickly to do emergency care. Stan's door was the only one ajar in the entire wing. And as usual, the lights were off and the shades drawn. Without announcing his presence, Kyle stepped over the threshold and into the black room, allowing the darkness to swallow him. As he fumbled at the wall for a light switch, he glanced over in the general direction of Stan's bed. Amongst the inky shade, he saw the outline of a figure scuffle, shifting softly in his sheets.

"Hey, kiddo," he said sofly. "I'm going to turn on a light, okay?" No response. As usual. Kyle turned the light on.

The first thing he saw were Stan's big, round eyes staring at him from the bed, blue and vast as the ocean and his pupils fat. He was like an owl. Kyle knew for a fact that Stan never slept, no matter how much clonazepam the nurses forced into his system. His Parkinson's caused severe spasms that kept him roused for hours. The bags above his cheekbones reflected this. Or maybe it was the loud purr of Stan's oxygen machine, which was kept running on four liters continuously. Four liters was unheard of. Most people were on two, at the very most. Stan had been clinging with four for a while now.

Wheeling his bag to the side of Stan's hospital bed, Kyle pulled up the single guest chair in Stan's barren, desolate room, lacking in everything personal except the white paint that kept the walls startlingly bright. His family never visited him anymore—his parents had died ages ago, and God only knew what happened to his sister. She was always a wreck, even in their childhood. "Do you want your blinds open?" Kyle inquired.

Stan gazed up at him, unresponsive. Kyle knew him well enough, though. There was a silent "yes" communicated between them.

Before sitting down, Kyle threw back the shades, allowing natural sunlight to wash the room in its glow and warmth. For a second, Kyle could have sworn that the corner of Stan's mouth curled up into a ghost of a smile. Yet in spite of the sun, Kyle felt suddenly cold and had to draw his white lab coat around his forest green scrubs. Hurrying back from the window, he plopped down beside his friend and patient with earnest.

"Let's see," he said, rifling in his bag for all the necessary equipment. "I'm going to just do a routine check up on that new bed sore. Is that all right with you?" Kyle didn't wait for an answer. He hadn't gotten one for about three weeks now. But when he turned back to Stan, cloth tape and wet gauze in hand, he saw that Stan looked mildly content. There was no change in expression—he couldn't express his emotions anymore, because they were all but gone, in all scientific definitions of his disease progress—but Kyle could still pretend that Stan was happy, even if his huge-eyed fawning and straight lips never shifted.

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Kyle forced a grin and ruffled Stan's black hair. "I'm going to uncover you, so it may be a little chilly for a second." Standing, Kyle pulled back the sheets and tried not to look too hard at Stan's crumpled, malnourished form. His limbs were drawn up to his chest, gnarled with arthritis and unmoving due to his Parkinson's. Rigor was very common in those patients, Kyle had noticed. Various towels were shoved between his extremities to reduce skin damage—the aides had even put washcloths in both of Stan's hands to keep his fingernails from cutting into his palms. The aides weren't dressing him anymore, either. Stan was clad in only a white adult brief, changed only when he soiled himself. Kyle had rallied for him to get an indwelling catheter, but his condition had made inserting one too difficult. There wasn't a stench, so Stan was clean. Kyle was somewhat relieved—he hadn't changed someone's brief since he'd been in high school, taking a nurse aide course.

After snapping on a pair of laytex gloves, Kyle turned him gently to one side and cursed silently at the charge nurse for making up excuses about Stan being too hard to manage for positioning. "I should have that bitch and her nasty-ass scrubs written up," he growled. What unprofessional language, he thought bitterly. Not that he cared when he was around Stan. If he'd had half his mind about him, he was sure his friend would have snickered. "Sorry, Stan." Stan didn't respond, but twitched slightly, as if to reassure Kyle it was fine.

"Yuck," Kyle commented when he saw the large, festering wound on Stan's lower back. The sore was deep and an angry red, the dead skin around it caked in yellow and black pus. Mumbling under his breath, Kyle fished out a paper ruler to measure the diameter of the sore. "Three centimeters in width and one in length," he said. "That's not too big, at least. But you could keep treasure in this one, Stan. The cops would never find it." He dressed the wound quickly and kept Stan on his good side, propping him up with pillows and exposing the dressing to the door. "I'll write an order for a wound vac on this one. Your hospice nurse will have fun with that."

Kyle walked around toward the window, where Stan was now facing, and placed the pulse oximeter on Stan's left index finger. "Breathe deeply for me, now." Kyle saw Stan's chest rise and fall much more noticeably. Kyle swore at anyone who believed Alzheimer's patients understood nothing. They understood nothing.

As the pulse oximeter got a reading, Kyle felt a gentle tug on his lab coat. Stan's grip had slackened on the washcloth bundle and had now latched himself onto Kyle's clothing, holding steadfast, as if he refused to let go. His eyes were locked on Kyle, as if analyzing every freckle on his face and every strand of wild, curly red hair on his head. For a minute, Kyle met his gaze. Unlike the charge nurse, Kyle could stare at Stan forever. Even like this, Stan's face was exactly the same.

Many things changed, but some things never did.

Beep. The pulse oximeter blinked. 89.

"Breathe a little more for me, Stan," Kyle said. "It has to be at least 90 for your oxygen level to be okay. Breathe deeper."

Stan's eyes were glassy. They never moved.

88.