AN: I'm not certain exactly how many chapters this one will be. I'm still working that out. It's inspired from a Tumblr prompt that was sent anonymously some time ago.
I own nothing from the Walking Dead.
I hope that you enjoy. Let me know what you think!
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Spring Valley Medical Rehabilitation Center had been Daryl's place of employment for just over ten years. Finally tired of kicking around at what he considered dead end jobs, he'd gone to school for his degree and he'd gotten a job at Spring Valley almost immediately. He'd changed positions a few times within the center, none of them glamourous, and he'd finally landed on the one that he'd held for the past five years. Maybe it was just a dead end job, too, but at least it paid well and he didn't go to work every day wondering if he'd break his neck or lose an appendage.
Around Spring Valley, and behind closed doors, people joked that Daryl's job was "tending the vegetable garden" because most of his patients never woke up. And the few who did seldom recovered anything of their true selves. They were alive, but that was using the word in the loosest sense of its definition.
Whether it was traumatic brain injury, worsening pre-existing conditions, or anything in between, all of Daryl's patients were incapacitated. He had no more than ten of them at the time and, usually, he had only about five. But they required his full and constant attention, at least until their night nurse took over to handle the most basic needs while Daryl slept, because they couldn't do things for themselves. Most of them could do absolutely nothing for themselves. So that meant Daryl was in charge of their every need.
Spring Valley was a private center. The families of Daryl's patients paid good money to know that their relatives were well taken care of and they didn't have to worry about them—usually in any sense of the word. Whether or not Daryl's job was glamorous, he took pride in his work, so he made sure that he lived up to the families' expectations.
He made the rounds, throughout the day, and took care of the necessities. On his watch, everyone got their meals and medications. Everyone got a bath every day and he washed their hair at least once a week. Teeth got brushed, nails got filed, and skin got moisturized. Beyond the bare necessities of his job, Daryl also spent time with each of his patients. He took what little information he knew about them—provided by their family members and by the center—and he used to that to talk to them. He kept them up to date on current events. He reminded them of things they liked and people who cared about them. He read them their favorite kinds of books—or his favorites if they weren't partial to anything—and he interacted with them as though they interacted with him.
Unfortunately, many of his patients passed away without Daryl even having the chance to know if they were aware of his presence or if he'd done them any good. That was one of the downfalls of working with the people that were his responsibility.
But he didn't stop what he did because he loved his job. And he liked to believe, whether or not it was true, that at least his interactions with patients had brought them some kind of minor happiness before they slipped away entirely.
Their families, too, must have thought that it did. Daryl had a whole wall of cards in his apartment, all tacked up by their corners, from family members that had taken the time to thank him for the kindness he'd show to their father, mother, sister, grandmother, uncle, son—to their loved one. He kept every one of the cards he was written—long or short—and they reminded him, daily, that what he did was appreciated, even if his patients could never thank him for an extra bath, some lip balm, or "one more time" of reading their favorite book.
His bosses, too, seemed to recognize his hard work. In a place where people practically played a never-ending game of musical positions, Daryl had been allowed to keep his job and he was fairly confident that he would remain in his ward—they weren't talking to him about moving at all. That was the way he liked it, too. He preferred the security of his predictable routine, boring as it may be to others.
For the moment, Daryl had six patients. Three of them were long-term patients that he'd had the whole time he'd been there. Two he'd had for at least four months. The third was his newest patient and she'd only been with him for about two weeks.
Carol McAlister was her name. She was fifty one years old. She'd lived in Georgia her whole life, according to her daughter, and she'd had the accident in Georgia. Her daughter lived up north somewhere and travelled a great deal for business. She'd chosen Spring Valley because it was close to her mother's home—a home she might never return to—and because she'd heard about the center's reputation for excellent patient care.
Carol McAlister had suffered traumatic injury in a car accident six months before. Her doctors had expected full recovery, and physically she was doing well, but things hadn't quite gone the way that they'd expected. Daryl didn't know all the details, but the woman had never regained consciousness. Her brain was active, which at least gave them hope, but she'd seemed to stall in her recovery enough to keep her from coming out of the coma that she was trapped in.
Her daughter was busy and she had a life of her own. She couldn't dedicate herself to twenty-four hour care of her mother in the hope that she would recover. For that, she paid Daryl through Spring Valley.
She was paying top dollar for the best care possible—and that's what she was getting.
Daryl was still getting to know Carol.
Right now, what he knew about her came mostly from her daughter. The girl—woman really—had spoken to him over the phone and she'd agreed to answer a few questions for him so that he could personalize Carol's care. He'd used her answers to fill out the chart that he created himself for all of his patients.
She liked to be called Carol. She never wore her fingernails long because she hated the disappointment of having one break and being forced to cut the rest. She loved music from the seventies and she indulged in cheesy romance novels of the dollar store variety while she pretended to read books labelled as classics that she never read past the first or second chapter. She didn't care for television and she hated watching the news in the morning because it made her sad before her coffee was even finished. Her favorite movies were the tear-jerker Hallmark movies that broke hearts halfway through only to end happily. She liked gardening, but wildflowers were her favorites.
She hadn't always had a happy life, but she was a wonderfully happy woman.
The last part Daryl had made up for himself from what he'd heard from her daughter and what he could simply tell about the woman. Daryl could tell old scars from new and he couldn't help but notice that there were, on the woman's body, enough old scars that he couldn't chalk them up to accidents—no one was that accident prone and still managed to stay alive for fifty one years. Something had happened in her life, something that her daughter wasn't talking about, but it didn't sound like it had stopped her from enjoying the rest of her life to the fullest.
At least there was that.
Some of Daryl's patients came to him having never really known much of a life to begin with. It was always more tragic, for him, to see them come to the ends of their lives when he knew that they'd never really had the chance to experience much. He always wondered if they were aware of their condition and if they lamented things that they hadn't done. It wasn't ever easy to lose a patient, but he found it was a little better if he could at least believe that they'd had a good life.
Those were his worse cases, though. He'd had, since he'd taken this job, about a dozen patients who'd recovered. Maybe they'd never been restored to exactly what they were before their accidents—he hadn't known them before to judge—but they'd gotten something of a life returned to them. He'd actually been able to see them go—waved goodbye to all of them from the curb—when their time with him was done and they were well enough to be returned to their families. He had pictures, on his wall, of each of them and, sometimes, he still heard from their families with a quick note or snapshot that told him that things were going well.
That was the hope that he had for Carol McAlister—that he'd wave goodbye to her, one day, from the curb when her daughter took her home for the rest of her recovery.
Daryl couldn't look at the woman and imagine that she might just linger there—in some limbo land between life and death—until she simply slipped away. She looked full of life and her doctors said that they had hope that she would wake up and reach a full recovery, even if that hope was dwindling. Daryl figured, then, that it was his job to keep that hope alive.
Carol was his last patient of the morning rounds. He cleaned her up, changed her clothes, and took care of her medications. While he worked, he hummed "Hotel California" because the song had been stuck in his head since he'd gotten to work. She would appreciate his taste in music, though, from what he'd heard, so he didn't apologize for the repetition of the tune and the occasional lyrics that slipped out of his mouth while he worked.
When she was clean and comfortable, Daryl opened the curtains to her room and let in the light. The views on his end of the building weren't that great—since nobody seemed to think his patients would care anyway—but the sun could still filter into the rooms.
"Pretty day outside," Daryl said. "Good weather. Not too hot. Muggy, but the mosquitos aren't too bad. If you were to wake up? We could take a trip out there. We could—have lunch outside probably. The food really ain't that bad here. I've been eating it for years. Beats just having a sandwich. Sure beats what they're giving you for lunch right now."
Carol, of course, didn't respond to him—and she didn't get up for his offer to go outside—but Daryl was used to that. It was part of his job to be used to that. And, though he'd never felt super comfortable when he was engaged in conversations with others, he found it was easy to talk to his patients. He never felt like they were judging his chosen topics. He never felt like they were tired of hearing him. They didn't respond, and that meant he didn't have to overthink their responses or his own words to follow.
He was comfortable with the monologues.
He pulled his chair around and set his watch. He'd spend a half an hour with her before it was time to start rounds again, dividing the rest of his day up with tasks he needed to complete and shorts spurts of time spent with his patients. He picked up one of the ten or so dime-store romance novels that he'd grabbed to read to her and he settled down in the chair. He looked at the back of the book.
"I had a patient once—Margie Weber—that loved these kinds of books," Daryl commented to the woman that may or may not be able to hear him. "Her granddaughter said she liked the kind, though, that had the supernatural whatevers in them. You know? Like vampires and ghosts and time-travel. This one's new. It doesn't look like there's any time travel, but—Sophia didn't say that you wanted that. Just that you liked the romantic parts. Judging by the cover—there's got to be something like that in here."
He laughed to himself and settled back in the chair. He cracked open the cover of the paperback, found the first page that had anything that pertained to the story printed on it, and he started to read aloud to the woman—hoping she might appreciate his selection of fine drugstore dollar-novels.
Over the years, he'd read everything from Shakespeare to veritable porn out loud—whatever his patients wanted. Whatever they'd liked in their lives—past lives almost. He'd listened to music that was bad enough it had given him a headache, and he'd learned about music that he never would've known he liked. He remembered every patient that had ever, inadvertently, introduced him to something new—something he never would have experienced without crossing paths with them. Whether or not everyone else called his ward the "vegetable garden," Daryl learned a lot from his patients.
And he cared about every one of them, no matter if they were just passing through or if they ended up staying for a while.
Every single one of them got individualized care and exactly what they needed. They got the best that Daryl had to offer them.
