There was a light on somewhere, but mostly, this hospital room—which presently had neither distinctive height nor depth—was dark.
She didn't remember agreeing to this.
In her defense, Myka was still capable of reasoning, that wasn't entirely her fault.
The doctor's hastily-scrawled doodle on a sheet in her medical file, she realized, had not been a good explanation or satisfactory form of preparation at all. She now regretted not staying up that extra hour last night to finish reading the notes she'd collected on laparoscopic surgery and debulking procedures. Knowledge was, had always been, her greatest comfort.
Which is why she had insisted upon the doctor's doodle on the back of an insurance form. And also why Helena had to sleepily tug it out of her hands and tuck it under her pillow before mumbling that Myka needed her sleep because they had to be up in a few hours anyway.
But she couldn't quite remember agreeing to this.
Because the doctor's explanation hadn't covered certain things she was noticing now, as her consciousness struggled against a morphine tide. There would never be a good enough explanation anyway, not if doctors actually wanted their patients to follow through on life-saving surgeries.
The doctor's scribbles and her notes had not quite captured the suffocating, blinding fog that, if she squinted hard enough, she was convinced she could reach up and tug free from her face. Which led to her next hazy thought. No explanation in the world could capture the panic that seized her when she found she couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't really remember how to speak. Didn't convey the terror of feeling the excruciating deadness in the lower half of her body, or the meager relief of reaching the semi-formed realization that she wasn't paralyzed, not really, just too plastered to know the difference. Didn't capture how much her abdomen burned, as if the surgeon had used a branding iron instead of a scalpel, and how much it felt as though she were stuck under a slab of concrete. Didn't depict the sheer disorientation she felt now, from being in a room she could barely remember needing to be in, in the first place. Didn't explain how to make sense of the hollowness that had erupted in her chest, which was accompanied by a brief but agonizing acknowledgment that she was surely alone in this half-darkness, as if she had lived never knowing a soul in the world. Didn't convey the odd sensation of suddenly forgetting all of these things as another rush of morphine flooded and overrode every pain receptor she possessed. Didn't capture the feeling she experienced before dropping silently and easily back into her medicated slumber, or the tingly hum that buzzed in her brain that made her want to cry because she knew for one lucid second exactly the reason she had agreed to this. And that reason was probably pacing a tiny waiting room and keeping her features neutral until she had solid proof that Myka was okay.
But the doctor especially hadn't covered this: that the warm hand that now slipped into her own would be Helena's, and the fingers that stroked her cheek was a better analgesic than anything being pumped into her bloodstream.
Myka blinked hard, once, slowly, to attempt to bring the ceiling, a face, anything into focus, but she felt those hands and uncertainty melted into relief. She sighed heavily and closed her eyes.
She was going to be okay.