Title: Reaction
Chapter Title: Her
Fandom: Grey's Anatomy
Coupling: Mark/Lexie
Rating: PG-13/T
Words: 1,020
Author's Note: I wrote this back in November 2009. Just now getting up the courage to post it somewhere other than my blog. This is part one of three. Oh, and it completely ignores the events of the episode "Holidaze" and beyond.
She's a stress eater, a nervous eater. She must have gained ten extra pounds in between the time she found out she was pregnant and the time she broke the news to him.
"I'm…I'm pregnant," she blabbers. "And I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing because I don't know how you feel, and if you're not happy, then I don't know what I'm going to do because I need you. I need you, Mark, and babies aren't really your thing unless you get to attach their arms. Oh my god. Oh my god, what if I need a caesarean and the quack OB cuts his arm off. And then you can't operate on him because you're his dad and you're family and he's left without a right arm. And kids, they're really mean, and they like to make fun of other kids on the playground. He'll be scarred for life. Literally and emotionally. And…Will you say something here because I'm totally freaking out, and I need to know how you feel about our kid. Our armless kid."
"You're pregnant?"
And then when everything went pear-shaped, when the ultrasound showed gastroschisis – also called paraohphalocele, laparoschisis, abdominoschisis, or abdominal hernia – she ate four Butterfinger candy bars while waiting for Arizona Robbins to come and speak to them. She moaned and cried and ate two whole pints of Haagen-Dazs rum raisin ice cream in between contractions after Robbins, her OB-GYN, and Addison Montgomery via conference call decided to induce labor today.
"It's a girl, Lexie!"
The confirmation of her daughter's diagnosis made her eat seven cups of Jell-O in the recovery room, and then she got her sister, Molly, to sneak in a greasy cheeseburger and fries from the burger joint three streets over once she was in her own room. So when he came to give her an update and tried to describe the baby down to the last freckle for her, he was confronted with the image of her mid-bite. There was a drab of cheese on her chin and a smudge of ketchup on her cheek, and he wanted to scream at her for eating at a time like this.
"She's perfect. Absolutely perfect."
She nodded and shoved another fry in her mouth before she realized that everyone was looking at her expectantly. And then she started to tear up because the fries weren't helping keep the stress and the nerves and the subsequent emotions at bay.
"I can't…I can't…Gastroschisis is really, really scary. I mean, it sounds cool when you're a surgical intern because this baby's organs are growing outside their body and you get to put them back in. But she's mine and she's a part of me and she could, she could die."
She spouted out definitions from medical textbooks verbatim because she's Lexipedia and she has a photographic memory and she just knows these things. He held in her arms and kissed her on the top of her head as she sobbed and sobbed because he's her comforter. And then when Cristina Yang came to tell her to they're taking Baby Sloan-Gray into surgery, he kicked everyone out, crawled in bed next to her, and stroked her hair because that's what she likes someone to do for her when she's sick.
It was agony watching the hands on the clock tick slowly, and it was painful for her to curl into him anymore than she already was. Her lady parts were throbbing, but her heart was throbbing even more.
And then he pulled away from her, which caused her to whimper and try to pull closer to him, because Robbins and Addison were in her room to break the news.
"We were able to get twenty percent of her organs back into her chest cavity, which is good for her gestational date, but she's going to be in the NICU for quite some time," Arizona tells them softly.
"How many more surgeries?" He asks because he's stronger.
"It's difficult to say, but she's probably going to have to undergo at least three more," Addison replies honestly.
Now she stuffs her face with chocolate chips as they wheel her to the NICU because it's so difficult for her see her baby like this and she's a stress eater. She's a stress eater and this is what stress eaters do. So she's got fists full of chocolate chips as the nurses try to help shove a yellow trauma gown over her arms, which garnishes her odd looks from those same nurses. And she struggles to hand over her chocolate chips when she's wheeled over the hand washing station, but she does and she washes her hand for the required five minutes before they slap some gloves on her and wheel her towards her baby.
"Lexie, Mark, we managed to get eighty percent of her intestine into her chest cavity, but there was a complication."
The OB nurse parks her wheelchair right next to her boyfriend – her strong, ecstatic boyfriend who's got this ridiculous grin on his face – but her eyes aren't on him. They're on her daughter, on the tubes going in and out of her, on the bandage taped across her chest, on the clump of bluish-red organs outside her body.
She wants her chocolate chips back.
"In English, please," Thatcher says.
"Essentially, we cannot finish surgery until we're able to stretch a patch of skin with a balloon, remove it, and use it to place over her belly."
She's been alive for eighty-seven hours and has already been in and out of surgery four times. Her mother, though, can't even look at her. She's shut her eyes as tight as possible, and all of the sudden she's gasping for air because she can't breathe.
She can't breathe.
She can't breathe, and her boyfriend is glaring at her because he doesn't understand. She is his second chance; she is his redemption. But for her mother, she is someone she failed, someone she couldn't even shield from pain before she arrived. She is someone good girl Lexie Grey couldn't be perfect for.