AN: August is the anniversary of me joining ffnet. In commemoration, here is part 6 : )

PJ

'No,' Gillian thought as she undid her seatbelt, grabbed her purse and rushed out of the car. She didn't even think to lock it. 'Please let him be okay,' she begged silently as she moved into the ER department. She shakily told the nurse why she was there and mutely begged again. The nurse took her by the elbow and gently led her immediately to one of the trauma rooms. The nurse told her she should wait outside and a doctor would be with her soon, but Gillian could see through the window anyway. Out there it was like watching a television show. If she was in the room she might start to suspect this was real.

Cal was on the bed in the centre of the room. He was on his back and his neck was in a bright yellow brace. It was hard to see his face but she could see the red everywhere. It was all over him. His shirt was open, heart monitors stuck to his chest and more red. His pants were covered in a fine layer of dusty dirt, brought up so obviously against the black material. His left leg was also in a demobilising cast. His shoes were covered in the same light earthen colour. His hands were limp and had streaks of blood over them, casting obvious rivers as it had travelled over his skin and that dust. In the room with him were five doctors or nurses, Gillian figured a mixture of both and she watched as they moved around her husband and talked to each other in rapid shorthand, calling out the names of drugs and problems and worked on stabilising him as quickly as they could. Their sense of urgency was high and it made Gillian's heart pound.

At one point a woman near Cal's head shone a light into his eyes and Gillian didn't have to be leaning over him to know that there was no response; the body language of the woman was enough of an answer. Gillian felt her heart sink into her stomach to pulverise the shit out of it, like Lewis jumping recklessly on their bed in the mornings. Cal wasn't in there. There was a broken limp man in his place. Gillian gripped the edge of the window sill until her fingers cramped in protest and still she didn't let go. Of all the trouble he had gotten himself into over the years, this was the most serious, the most complicated, the most frightening. She recognised the slight edge of panic in the team of medical professionals as they worked on him because it mirrored her own. The woman with the light moved away slightly and glanced up to talk to a man across the room with a set of x-rays that he was sticking up over the light boxes. Gillian's gaze was on her husband. A nurse removed the large pressure bandage against his head to change it out. What she saw in that brief moment was an ugly gash along the side of his temple that was oozing black blood. And beneath that was a very white shard of his skull.

Gillian swallowed an overwhelming wave of nausea and started crying.

PJ

Gillian had exhausted herself pacing so now she sat numbly. She kept checking her watch and the clock on the wall (they were a minute and seventeen seconds apart, she had determined). The minutes were crawling by and she worried about getting Lewis from day care and whether Cal would be out of surgery in time. She didn't want to miss either of her boys or let either of them down or...

A doctor walked towards where she was waiting and she looked up hopefully but he just gave her a polite smile and kept going. Gillian fidgeted the wedding band on her finger until the digit hurt. Her eyes burned with fiery tears shed and unshed. She kept telling herself to not worry until she knew she had something to actually worry about. But the giant hole in his head and the pale pallor of his skin had stamped themselves behind her eyelids so that every time she took a deep breath and tried to relax and not panic she could see him lying there inert on the hospital gurney.

It made her feel nauseous. An hour ago she had actually worried she was going to lose her breakfast and rushed for the bathroom. But she just dry heaved a bit and felt worse and then sat on the lid of the toilet and cried some more. The waiting was driving her insane. Every damn time she had to go to a hospital and kill time for him. He said he wasn't going to do that to her anymore. And yet here she was, waiting once again because he had gotten himself struck across the head and was now having brain surgery. Different hospital. Different day. Different accident. Same stress. Same heartache. Same wait.

She took her phone out of her purse. There were no messages on it. She hadn't called Emily yet. But she might have to soon to ask her to pick Lewis up. There was no way she was going to miss talking to Cal's surgeon. No way.

"No way," she whispered to herself. There was no way this could be happening again. Everything had been so great for several years now. They had moved on from Lily's death. The last hospital visit she'd had to make for a personal reason was to give birth to Lewis. No, it had been for Lily's birth, but that was kind of different. There had been no medical emergencies in their family for years. It had been a welcome period of peace. And now this. This was the biggest threat to their lives since Mitchell. That was four years ago now. Four whole years. And now her husband could be dying again and she didn't know again and all she could do was wait again.

PJ

Gillian was fighting back another wave of tears when a doctor approached and asked if she was Mrs Lightman. Her head shot up so fast she was sure it pinched a nerve in the back of her neck. She swallowed down the tears of frustration threatening to suffocate her as she got up to shake the man's hand. His face was grim but open and she read him like a book. He said his name was Avery Rockwell and he was a neurologist. He was in charge of treating Cal's head injury and had been present during his surgery. "Let's go somewhere and talk," his voice was kind and he placed a hand gently on her shoulder to direct her to a private waiting room.

Gillian allowed herself to be led, her heart hammering wildly and the notion that she was going to be late forcing its way through everything. It made her feel nervous, the relocation, and she suspected it was a nice device to try and distract her from the inevitable bad news she was about to receive from Rockwell. She could see something in his demeanour that certainly wasn't good news. She suspected he was about to cautiously tell her to not get her hopes up. Which may as well be a death sentence. If they didn't have hope, they didn't have much of anything.

Avery closed the door to the small room and took a seat next to her. His eyes were perfectly brown. No hints of gold or green. He held her gaze steadily as he started to explain what he had been up to for the last... Gillian did some quick math. Five hours. She had been waiting for some word on her husband for five hours. The snippet she had received before they whisked him away for emergency surgery was that he was stable, he had a brain injury, but that he was stable. Was stable good? Seemed like a bit of false hope. Stable could really go either way. She knew that from treating her own patients.

"Cal suffered damage to his frontal and temporal lobes," Rockwell started.

Gillian nodded. She knew what that meant. Those were the two regions at the front of the brain and to the side that were part of the larger area of the cerebrum. The cerebrum controlled cognitive and sensory function, namely intelligence, memory, reasoning and emotions. She had even treated patients who had suffered from similar brain injuries and she knew the recovery was extensive and long and sometimes remained forever incomplete. Brain injuries did not have exact neat numbers on full recoveries. Cal could wake up from the surgery a different man. Fear struck her cold and she shivered. She realised the doctor was still talking...

"Relieved the pressure in his brain."

He was still talking about the surgery. She hadn't missed much.

"Unfortunately that is about as much as we can do for him at this stage."

Gillian nodded again and swallowed hard. "When will he be awake?" Meaning, when was the anaesthetic going to wear off? When could she talk to him? Only then would she trust that everything would be ok.

"We're keeping him sedated," Avery responded carefully. His brown eyes never left hers. He had no signs of guilt or shame. "We want to give him a chance to recover before allowing him to regain consciousness." Gillian surmised that the surgery had gone to plan (not that she had really been paying attention to that part of the conversation), but the doctor couldn't control what happened next and this was his best bet at trying to contain any surprises.

"So what does that mean?" Gillian asked next. "How long will you keep him sedated for?"

"Probably a few days, barring any complications."

"Complications?" Gillian asked warily.

"Brain swelling is Cal's number one concern right now. We've managed to relieve the pressure for now by drilling into the skull. But we will need to keep a close eye on it. If the pressure rises again, Cal will likely need more surgery if we can't control it. We will manage it very carefully with medications."

"Worst case scenario?" Gillian found herself morbidly asking, even as a part of her didn't want to know.

"Well," Avery's tone got even more careful. "If the pressure becomes too great there is a risk of brain herniation and that would result in death."

"So you're saying he's in a coma right now?"

A coma was a persistent state of unconsciousness that lasted for more than six hours. Even as Gillian asked she knew the answer. Cal had been unconscious for more than six hours. And those didn't count the time before the EMT's arrived, the minutes they had worked on freeing him, transferring him to an ambulance, bringing him to the hospital, the half hour in the emergency department before he had gone up for surgery.

"Once the sedation is ceased, what we will do are stimuli tests to see what level of responsiveness Cal has. We can determine then his state of wakefulness."

That was a yes. Cal was in a coma.

Doctor Rockwell reached out to touch Gillian's arm and gave it a slight squeeze. "It's not bad news," he tried.

"It's not great either," she responded glumly. Where had her tears gone? She thought she would be a blubbering mess by this stage of the conversation. She found a spot on the floor where the pattern of the carpet came together to make a dodecahedron. She had enough time to count the sides before Rockwell brought her out of it.

"Can I call someone to come and be with you?"

Gillian shook her head slightly. "It's ok."

"Let me call someone," he insisted gently. His tone gave no room for argument and Gillian handed over her phone, directing him to Emily's number. If anyone else should be here it would be Cal's daughter right? Gillian thought the doctor would hand the task off to someone else but he went through her phone directory and found the number and made the call himself. His tone was even more gentle as he explained who he was, why he was calling and asked if Emily would be able to come down to the hospital. He thanked her politely, like she was doing him a personal favour. After hanging up the phone and giving it back, Avery suggested they go to see Cal.

Gillian nodded her agreement but walked with some trepidation. Did she really want to see Cal right now? A mess of tubes and wounds and bleeding? The image of his skull showing through the wound in his head crept back behind her eyes and she shuddered again, trying to physically shake it off. She felt Rockwell's hand in the middle of her back as he guided her down hallways to the elevators. They went down a level to the ICU. He knew exactly which bed Cal was in. Gillian didn't miss the nod of acknowledgement he gave to a nurse on the desk; 'yes, this is the wife'.

Gillian swallowed down feelings she didn't have time or the inclination to deal with yet. She barely recognised half of them. The most prominent on her mind right now was nerves. Before they stepped into the room Rockwell stopped her again. "Before you go in, I want to explain what you're going to see," he told her, his hand on her arm again. For the first time since meeting him, Gillian realised his hands were warm and that it was strangely comforting. "Cal has thick bandages around his head that obscure his face a little and he's quite bruised up."

Gillian nodded, swallowed hard, her mind started to put the picture together. Rockwell explained Cal wasn't breathing on his own, so had a ventilator tube in his mouth. That was about the extent of what she would see. What Gillian read between the lines was that he would be hard to recognise as her husband, but was now a bruised and broken man lying small in a hospital bed starting a long road to recovery.

Not long ago they had been talking about family holidays and the future and now here she was faced with the possibility that Cal would never be the same. He might never wake up from a coma. What was she going to tell Lewis? That Dad was sleepy? Speaking of which, she still had to go and get him and soon. Or call Emily to get him on her way in. She was torn. Her husband or her son.