Dammit, what's happening to the patient?
"Doctor, his vitals are critical! You've got to do something!"
I-I don't know what to do! I—
"The patient is going under cardiac arrest!"
Get the defibrillator! Alright, charge it to 200! Clear!
"We've got no pulse!"
Quick, charge it up to 300! Clear!
"There's still no response!"
Let's try again! Clear!
"Doctor! Stop it already!"
No way! I'm not giving up on you! I will save you!
"...There's nothing we can do from here..."
NO! My Healing Touch—
"Dr. Stiles!"
I won't believe it!
"Dr. Stiles!"
The bewildered Derek yelped out in non-existent pain and fell off the couch. He ended up landing head-first on his head onto Hope Hospital's "famous" shiny floor. There was a satisfying thud as he fell, then the doctor crumpled into a ball clutching onto his head in pain. He sure as hell was going to feel that in the morning.
He uncurled and sat up, his back against the couch. As he rubbed his head in order to soothe out some of the pain, he looked up and realized that he wasn't the only one in the room. The Iron Vixen herself, Cybil Myers Kasal, was standing with a rather amused look on her face in front of Derek.
"Sorry for the rude awakening, Derek." Cybil was still chuckling to herself. Derek groaned and got up. He dusted himself off and fixed his posture.
"Do you need me for anything, Ms. Myers?" Derek couldn't get out of the habit of calling Cybil 'Ms. Myers' (her maiden name), but fortunately, Cybil insisted that he use whatever name or title he was used to when referring to her.
"Umm... yes. You're needed in the O.R."
"Now? I thought I was still on break!" Derek glanced over at the clock against the wall. He realized that it was 7:12 PM... 12 minutes into his shift. Cybil gave him an acknowledging glare and Derek chuckled a bit. "Hehe... looks like I dozed off a bit..." he replied sheepishly.
"Well? What are you waiting for? Get your sorry ass over to the O.R. right away! A patient needs you!"
"Right away!" Derek then rushed to get cleaned up and prepare for the surgery.
Chapter One: Tough Love
As the doctor scrubbed up, he couldn't shake the events that had transpired in his dreams away from his mind. It had been just over a week since he had left Caduceus in hopes of regaining his Healing Touch, but so far, this rehabilitation process hasn't been working at all. In fact, it was as if this entire thing was just dragging him down.
He had been transferred to Hope Hospital, the place where everything had started. Director Hoffman hoped that his old mentors, Cybil Myers and Greg Kasal, would be able to help in the matter. The only thing is how were they supposed to understand what he had gone through? First, a patient died on his watch. He also realized that he had gotten cocky with the Healing Touch; he let it get to his head. Suddenly, the one ability that made him such an amazing doctor was suddenly stripped from him; in the middle of an important operation, no less.
Now he felt as though he had suddenly dropped back to square one, a feeling he had hoped he would never have to experience. To make things worse, even he could tell that he was emotionally off. He had begun to take antidepressant pills in order to counter the effects, but they only made him drowsy and caused him to fall into a deep sleep like one today, a sleep filled with nightmares of the events that had occurred that caused him to be in this state.
He sighed deeply to himself. "C'mon Stiles, shake it off! A patient needs you in there!" He hurried over, quickly placing the mask over his face and spraying anti-bacteria spray all over himself. Once he entered the room, Mary Fulton, a veteran nurse and a good friend of Derek, along with an anaesthesiologist and Greg Kasal who would be part of the conference and watch over Derek as he performed the operation (you know, in case he screwed up... then Greg would act as a back-up net) watched him and his movements carefully. They knew that this is only the fourth operation Derek has dealt with since his return to Hope Hospital and he was still rather rough around the edges with the procedures.
"—alright, you got it?" Mary asked after they discussed the procedures needed on the patient before them, a twenty-four year old man named Rain Delen. He has reported some recent stomach problems. After closer examination, it appears that there are many tumours in his small intestine.
"Understood." was Derek's reply. He then rubbed a bit of antibiotic gel around the area of incision, then, using the scalpel, made the cut. Then he was in.
Operations now never had the same feeling they had back then, Derek thought as he cut out another tumour from the man's small intestine. Back then, he had the Healing Touch to back out and everyone treated him like a national treasure, which he was. Now these days, people around him don't treat him like some superstar (which is how he realized that all the treatment really was getting to his head.) Even he knew that he could barely perform even a normal operation these days without someone like Mary supporting him. What use would a doctor in his state be to Caduceus, or even to any ordinary hospital?
He managed to shake out of it and seeing that this would be the last tumour in need of excision, he quickly cut it out. After a quick sweep around the area with the ultrasound, he shot the patient with a few shots of the green stabilizer, and then grabbed the sutures to suture him up. Just as he was about to close him up however, something in the body ruptured and there was mass haemorrhaging everywhere.
"Dr. Stiles!" Mary yelped in utter panic. They were sure that the last tumour had been excised and that Rain's vitals had stabilized. "The patient's vitals are critical!"
"No way—"was all Derek could find himself saying. "There's no way something like this could just happen! He was stable just a moment ago! What could have caused this?"
"I knew those tumours were suspicious." Greg muttered to himself. "The test results, I admit, were rather strange. This is the first time the patient had problems of any sort. He was perfectly healthy. It was abnormal to have encountered so many tumours in such little time, especially considering that the man was leading a healthy lifestyle."
"What are you talking about, Mr. Kasal?" Derek replied. He kept using the drain in order to get rid of some of the blood while constantly injecting more stabilizers to stall while they figure out a solution to this problem.
"What I mean is that the tumours must not be the primary illness in this case. There must be something else causing those tumours to appear..."
"You can't be saying..." Only one name was in the minds of the three medical specialists in the room, but only Derek could say it out loud. "...GUILT."
"Derek, you are the only one in this entire hospital with the ability to treat it! I believe in you!" Greg exclaimed. Mary gave him a smile that was full of belief and hope. "I know you have it in you, Derek. You just have to believe in yourself."
"But I can't!" was Derek's hasty reply. "GUILT? At a time like this? I can't do it without my Healing Touch!"
"Healing Touch or no Healing Touch, you still have the capabilities of a master surgeon. Besides, you have me for back-up." Greg replied in an astonishingly calm demeanor.
"Why are you just back-up? Why can't you instead just do the operation yourself?" Derek mentally retorted.
"Dr. Stiles! You must proceed with the operation immediately!" Mary asserted. Her eyes were darting from side to side wildly, trying to just focus on one problem area, but having to quickly attend to others that were forming due to the GUILT.
"But there's no way—"Suddenly, Derek suddenly felt his body leading him to the sutures in order to close him up and leave him until help from Caduceus comes around, but he knew that he couldn't abandon his duties. Unless this was a new strain of GUILT, he should be capable.
"...alright." Derek sighed in defeat. He then grabbed the drain and cleared the blood on the most part. "Okay, what GUILT strain do I know creates tumours?" Only one name came up: Deftera. This was one GUILT that reminded Derek a lot about him and Angie because the only way Deftera could be a real threat was when one of each kind (which can almost be describe as male and female) fuse and form dangerously large tumours. In other words, the Deftera, like Derek and Angie, can't function without one another. Deftera, though it's a deadly pathogen, it is rather romantic in an optimist's point of view.
"...but now is not the time to be optimistic!" Derek scolded himself as he stared at the mass quantities of Deftera in the patient's intestine. They were all moving at an incredibly fast pace that it was saddening to see. There was no way any ordinary doctor could defeat the GUILT inside poor Rain.
But Dr. Stiles is no ordinary doctor.
Or rather, he used to be no ordinary doctor.
Greg managed to figure out what kind of despair was running through Derek's head. "I know it seems as though the task is impossible to accomplish, but even without the Healing Touch, you still have amazing skill which would trump many of the world's most amazing doctors, even in the state you are currently in."
Derek nodded in response to the compliment and decided that maybe this is what he had been waiting for this entire time. Maybe he was just waiting for the moment where he had no choice but to use the Healing Touch in order to keep up and defeat the GUILT before him. Maybe the Healing Touch will only return when a critical moment of time like this occurred where anything but the Healing Touch would fail to save the patient. He raised the scalpel from the tray before him over the patient and the GUILT.
"Alright, Derek. If there was a better time to get that Healing Touch back, that time would be now! Concentrate!" He visualized the star before him and traced the picture in his mind carefully. His mind began to slip into that altered sense of kinetic vision, his field of vision zoomed in and everything around him slowed. However, the feeling was brief because as soon as it dawned upon him, it immediately slipped away and Derek was back in normal time with the Deftera still attacking Rain Delen's insides.
Greg and Mary realized that Derek had just tried to use the Healing Touch and failed. "Maybe you should try visualizing another focus shape?" Greg chuckled to lighten up the mood, but Derek gave him a deep glare that read of annoyance and anger. "Alright, alright, I'm sorry!" Greg replied, waving his hands in front of him in a way that meant 'back off'. "Sheesh! Get a sense of humour, why don't you?"
Derek sighed and looked back at the Deftera. That attempt had him drained as he had forced a large amount of energy into trying to get it to succeed. He was rather surprised that after all of the time they had just wasted, the patient was still somehow alive and wasn't in too bad of a shape.
"Please proceed with the operation, Doctor." Mary stated. Derek nodded and only managed to defeat one pair of Deftera when suddenly, the toll of the use of the Healing Touch (or at least the attempt) lashed at Derek, causing him to lose all motor skills. He froze up in the middle of the operation and nearly dropped the scalpel into the patient as it fell out of his hands had it not been for Greg's fast reflexes.
Derek Stiles suddenly collapsed before GUILT.
The first time in his life, GUILT had a victory over him.
A/N: Haha, I'm new to the Trauma Center fanfiction world. I've played the games recently and I've been inspired. When I looked at the site and saw that there weren't too many Trauma Center fanfics, I was kinda surprised. I mean, I had at least expected about a thousand of them, considering that there are soo many pairings in TC and fangirls all over would be raving over them (I'm not so good at writing about pairings, so I try to do my best to write stuff like the above or fail-funny stories).
And don't worry about this being a discontinued story... this happens to be a story I've planned ahead of time, so there's no improv here, baby! ;)
Alright, see you next chapter! =D