BTW: I looked up info on infertility and there were drug names and usage info. But I didn't stick too close to that in my story. I doubt it's possible to get the shots almost every day for as long as I made it in the story but I need it to be that way for it to work. Just thought I should warn everyone ;)
Derek met Addison during the orientation right before the start of med school. It took a him a few weeks before he worked up the gut to ask her out and from there on it only took a few days to realize he was falling in love with her. Right before they started the clinical rotation aspect of their education, they were required to get a TB test and Derek decided that he and Addison should go together. That was the day he learned her strong dislike for needles. She claimed she was fine with shots as long as she was the not on the receiving end of the needle. He laughed and held her hand through the whole process, doing his best to distract her so she wouldn't pay attention to the needle just beneath her skin. That was the day she realized that he was the man she needed to spend the rest of her life with.
The problems started when they finally decided that they ready to have kids. They tried for months with no success that's when Addison decided they both need to be tested to check with something was wrong with either one of them. Turns out she was the problem in the equation. If they ever wanted kids than she would have to go through fertility treatments and she agreed without a second of hesitation. She wanted a child, she knew that that's all her husband wanted from day one so she wasn't going to give up when things got tough.
She needed hormone injections every single day with the exception of the days she was ovulating. And she needed them until she got pregnant. Given that she wasn't fond of needles, Derek was the one that would give her the shots. Every single night at the exact same time, he'd find a way to be with her to give her the shot in her lower abdomen just as he had been instructed. It didn't take him long to learn how much pain the shots caused her. The first time she ended up crying herself to sleep, from then on she learned to restrain her tears but still needed to curl up and try to forget her pain.
After almost a year of treatment, Derek officially decided he couldn't take it anymore. Going in to it, they both knew it was a long and difficult process but he didn't think it would be as hard as it was. He would ask her to be at the hospital when she needed the shot, he's give it to her and leave so he wouldn't have to sit beside her and watch her pain. After Derek left her, she had no choice but to give herself the shots.
The fertility treatments only made her experience in Seattle even worse. It had been a year and a half since she first started, almost three months that she'd been doing it alone. She refused to give up after Derek left. She had decided that after everything she'd been through, she didn't want to let it go to waste by stopping the treatment. So she locked herself in a bathroom stall of the surgical wing on the first night to stick herself. She found that she couldn't restrain herself from screaming so on the second night she opted for more privacy in an on call room.
"Day Three, Addison." Derek said as soon as he saw her that morning. "How much longer do you plan on making us suffer?" he asked her rhetorically.
She couldn't even come up with one of her sarcastic replies. Instead she stayed silent and pretended she didn't even hear him.
"Don't you miss your fuck buddy?" he continued.
"It was one night!" she snapped. "We were together for one night, only one night. We were not in a relationship, I did not have any sort of feelings for him."
"Do you think that dignifies your infidelity?" he asked her
"No, it doesn't. Nothing will dignify it but you make it sound like I fell in love with another man and that's not true! You make it sound so much worse than it was!" she exclaimed. It wasn't until that second that she noticed the crowd of people staring at them. "I'm sorry, we shouldn't talk about this here."
"We're not talking about it anywhere because I don't want to talk to you anymore." he told her harshly before walking away.
That night Derek passed by an on-call room and heard a whimper as he walked by. He took a step back, this time hearing a muffled sob. He slowly twisted the knob and walked in to see his wife standing in the dimly lit room with the buttons of her shirt undone to expose her torso. She had a syringe in her hand and she was holding it just inches away from her lower abdomen but she couldn't do it. Her hand shook just slightly every time she tried to bring it closer to her skin.
She looked up when she saw the door open and wiped away her tears with her free hand. "I'm sorry, I'll be gone by the time you get comfortable on the mattress." she promised, again attempting to bring the needle close enough to poke through her skin and again she failed.
He stepped forward and took the syringe from her. "Lie down." he ordered. She sniffled and hesitantly got on the bed. He sat at the edge and eyed the exact spot he needed to inject the medication into. "Close your eyes." he whispered softly.
She did as she was told but when he pressed the needle into her she let out a muffled scream of pain. He quickly pressed down on the plunger to release the medicine and pulled out the needle, covering the spot with a band-aid. The tears instantly came back into her eyes as she turned her back to him and curled up to face the wall. He got up and stood there for a few minutes just to watch her.
Addison sat up and wiped away her tears. "I'm sorry, I was suppose to get out of your way so you could get some rest."
"No, stay." he insisted. "You always needed some time to yourself after these shots."
"I've been getting them for such a long time that you'd think I'd be used to it already." she mumbled with another sniffle.
"Why are you still doing this?" he asked her softly.
"We went through so much that I didn't think I should throw it away by stopping." Addison replied honestly. Her lips curled up into a sad smile as gave a sadistic chuckle. "Maybe I'm just not meant to be a mother. I mean, we tried for so long and it never happened. I should probably just stop with these stupid injections. I'm torturing myself for no reason. We're not getting anywhere with this." she paused and corrected herself. "...I'm not getting anywhere."
"You've been giving yourself the injection?" he asked her with slight skepticism.
"It usually takes me an hour or so but eventually I would get it done." she answered. "But I'm stopping, today was the last one. I give up." she said before walking out of the room.
The next day he didn't pay much attention to the people around him. He didn't noticed if Addison was there or not, he was too focused on his patients. During surgery he glanced at the clock and noticed that it was almost eight, which was right about the time he would give her the shot. So he promised himself that as soon as he was done he would go find her to help her out.
He checked the on-call room he found her in the previous night with no success, then he checked every other on-call room he knew of. He asked a nurse to check the bathrooms for him and still he couldn't find her. So he decided to go find Richard to find out if she had left early that day.
He walked into the office without knocking and looked Richard in the eyes. "Have you seen my wife?" he asked with his brow slightly inclined.
"Now she's your wife?" Richard asked semi-sarcastically. "Yesterday afternoon you were ready to strangle her."
"I got over it." he snapped. "I need to know where she is, Richard. I promised to help her out with something personal. Did she leave early? Is she on a break?"
"The last time you needed to 'help her with something personal' and I told you where she was you ended up having sex in the gallery while the chief of surgery at Mount Sinai at the time was trying to operate on a senator." Richard reminded him. "I do not need you to do that in my hospital."
"It's not sex." Derek insisted. "I just need to know where she is."
"She didn't come in today. She called this moring and said she wasn't feeling well enough to come and she mentioned that she was leaving first thing tomorrow." he replied. "Haven't you noticed that you haven't see her all day?"
"No, I didn't pay much attention to anything today. I had a lot of patients." he explaind. "Do you know where she's staying?"
"I can't tell you where she's staying. That's personal information."
"I'm her husband!" he exclaimed. "You're allowed to tell me! If she said she wasn't feeling well then something could have happened. She needs someone to check on her. And I'm her husband, it my job."
Richard sighed and gave in without another word. He gave Derek the information to her hotel and then added, "If you didn't still love her, you wouldn't have spent ten minutes trying to find out where she is."
Half and hour later Derek found himself banding on the door of her hotel room. When the door opened he let out a breath. "I'm sorry I'm late." he said to her.
"Late for what?" she asked.
"Your injection." he answered as if the answer should have been obvious. "I know you usually do it around 8:15, 8:20 sometimes. And it's almost nine now but I got here as soon as I could."
"Derek I'm not doing the injections anymore. I thought I mentioned that yesterday." she replied softly. "You didn't need to leave work and come all the way here. Besides, I've been doing it alone for almost three months now, I would have managed."
He sighed and ran his hand through his damp hair. "You weren't at work today." he pointed out.
"I know. Like I said, I mentioned that last night. I said I give up, remember?"
"I thought you gave up on the injections not your job." he answered. She pulled him into her room and shut the door so no one else could hear their conversation.
"I didn't give up on my career. I meant I give up on you and I give up on having a child with you." Addison clarified. "I would have left after the TTTS surgery. I stayed because I love you and I was hoping that you might noticed that and try to work things out. But you're not interested in making it work with me because you've been someone who is ten years younger than I am, who is the exact opposite of me. And the only reason I didn't stop the injections sooner was because I thought you would come back and that we should good back to what we were before. I thought you might still want a child with me. But if you don't want me, why would you want a child with me?" she stated rhetorically. "So I give up."
"Don't." he answered her simply. "Give me the syringe, let's do this."
"I don't want to do this anymore, Derek. Why is that so hard to accept? What's the point of fertility treatments if I don't have someone to have a child with."
"You have me." he assured. "I left you to do this alone, you cheated on me, I left you, I cheated on you, I made your life hell over the last few days. You made a mistake, I made many more. It'll take a while to forgive one another but we're Derek and Addison... that's what you said, right? We don't quit. Remember that?" he asked her softly as he reached up to her cheek to wipe away a tear.
"You don't want me."
"Addie, don't be ridiculous. I wouldn't be here if this didn't matter to me." he told her honestly. "If I didn't care I wouldn't have helped you last night and I wouldn't feel your pain when I saw your face during the shot."
"What are you saying?" she asked him with a sniffled.
"I'm asking you to let me give you the injection and give me a chance. We'll go to counselling, we'll do something to work out our issues. I'm not giving up on us and I'm not giving up on having a child with you." Derek paused. "A brilliant woman once said to me that we have three options to fix our marriage, except she didn't know what the third option was. She just knew she was still in love with me."
"She doesn't sound brilliant to me. She sounds pretty fucking stupid." Addison mumbled.
"No, trust me. I know this woman pretty well. She really is brilliant. And she was right. I don't know what our third option is but I know I still love you."
"You can't use my own words against me." Addison decided, crossing her arms over her chest.
"Addison, please. I've made it sound like you're Satan since you got to Seattle and now I'm here begging forgiveness and telling you that I still share your dream of having a child. It's not easy to have a 180 turn in 24 hours."
Addison let out a tired sigh. "The syringes are in the drawer of the nightstand. They're I pre-filled them on my first night here." she said and moved toward the bed to lie down. She pulled down her pajama bottoms just slightly and pulled up her oversized t-shirt. He sat down on the bed and cleaned the area of skin with an alcohol wipe. "This doesn't mean we're back together. We still have a lot of shit to work out but if we ever want a child we need to do this which is the only reason why I'm letting you do this."
He nodded. "We can take it as slow as you want. I'll do anything you want me to." he promised. "Close your eyes." he whispered as he brought the needle closer to her skin. She pressed her eyes shut and bit her lower lip when she felt the surge of pain. "I love you, Addison." he swore as he pulled out the needle and set it aside to apply pressure with a small piece of gauze.
"I love you too." she whimpered, curling up on her side facing him. She claimed it would help with the pain and she was willing to do just about anything to reduce the pain.
"I know. If you didn't you would put yourself through all this for so long." he replied.
There you have it. Lots of Angst and barely any fluff. I've had this done for a while. Don't know why I haven't posted it. It's just a one-shot though, okay? Don't even try convincing me to make it longer because I don't wanna make up stuff and ruin the story. And an update should be come soon for Never Let the Past Determine Who You Are.
Thanks for reading. Dont forget to leave a comment.