Day 2! Thanks so much for all of the reviews, and also those of you kind enough to answer the many questions I had. I really appreciated it! It seems I've gotten a lot of anonymous reviews, which I wish I could reply to personally but since I cannot I would just like to say thank you to you all! I hope you enjoy the chapter and I will see you tomorrow.
Alex - December 2nd 12:03 AM
"No." I hear the quiet protest from Izzie, which is what jerks me quickly awake. I pick my head up quickly, scanning around the room dizzily to find her bucket. She usually only woke up for two reasons; puking, or bathroom break. Admittedly it wasn't the most attractive, but it wasn't like I could blame her. Thank God I was a doctor or I might not have the stomach I do to deal with it.
"Lay back down before you end up throwing her off the bed, Karev," Bailey commands and I obey, falling back against the pillows with her against me. "I'm just starting the next round of IL-2."
No wonder she was annoyed. She hated the night doses even more than the others, complaining she should at least be able to sleep without the drug's interruptions. I had to say, I kind of agreed with her. Only we were doctors, we knew that missing a dosage just wasn't an option. Once the new IV is connected to her central line, Bailey takes out the blood pressure cuff to measure Izzie's. She's only half awake now, her eyes slipping shut the longer she tried to keep them open. I look expectantly for the results. "90 over 70," she reports. That was good, still high enough to be considered normal. "When was the last time she urinated?"
"I don't know," I answer. "She was asleep when I got here, hasn't been up since then." She nods, looking at Izzie contemplatively, but she must have decided against it as she doesn't say anything. She does however hold up two new buckets for us to use when she wakes up later, setting them on her table. I nod gratefully.
"Get some sleep," she says, almost a little too kindly for Bailey. "You've got rounds in the morning." I smile, that was the Bailey we all knew and loved.
I press a kiss against my wife's still scarfed head and rub her back, drifting in between awake and restfulness, but really waiting for the first wave of the chills and nausea to hit her again.
5:30 AM
The vibrating of the phone in my pocket barely has time to start before I reach for it and shut it off. Izzie lay miserably in my arms, looking ashen and pale as she breathed with effort. I sigh, extracting myself from her weak limbs. I grab the nasal cannula and set it into place. Her face is warm against my hand and she begins to shiver now that I've pulled away. I'm about to walk out and get her some more blankets from the supply closet when I find some of our own blankets from home sitting on the chair. I'm not sure how they got here, but I was glad they were there. They were much more comfortable than the scratchy hospital ones. You'd think they would spend a little more money and get some nicer bedding for the patients, considering how often they're stuck in bed and all.
"I'm gonna go get ready for rounds," I whisper to her as I lay the last blanket over top of her frail body. I place a clean bin next to her, she hadn't really stopped puking since two this morning. You'd think after long enough her body would just give up considering how empty her stomach was. No such luck though, of course. Her eyes drift close as I run my hand gently over her head a few times. I shake my head and walk into the bathroom. My eyes felt like they were on fire every time I blinked I was so tired. I didn't know how I'd make it through the day but I'd find a way somehow.
I start with a shower, turning the water nice and cold to wake myself up. Then I brush my teeth, peeking my head out the door halfway through to see if she was sleeping yet. Thankfully, she finally was. One quick glance in the mirror, and then at the clock, and I determine my facial hair not in need of any maintenance. I throw on a clean pair of scrubs and grab ten dollars from yesterdays pants to buy myself a coffee. I search through the room in the dark, trying to find my shoes. I stub my toe twice and mistake Izzie's leg for my shoe before I finally have them both. One more quick kiss to her forehead and then I'm out the door for the morning, leaving my wife to lie in bed, half alive.
8:21 AM
"You should be working," Izzie reprimands as she opens her eyes tiredly. It tore my eyes away from the monitor, which displayed her heart rate and its too fast pace. I feared tachycardia if this kept up. I didn't really care for the idea of her spending the rest of her time here in the ICU. I notice her lick her lips and grab the cup and chap stick. I'd probably make fun of any guy who carried chap stick around in his pocket, but this time I was that guy. She gives me a weak smile in response to my actions. That made carrying chap stick around worth it.
"I am," I say, holding up a chart. "I can chart in here or I can chart at a desk. I don't see much difference." She rolls her eyes lightly at me, but I knew she was glad I was here. I'd spent enough time in hospital beds to remember how boring it can get when you're all alone.
She slowly starts to get up, taking a deep breath as she forces herself into a sitting position and swings her feet over the side of the bed. If she's this dizzy then her blood pressure must be low. I'd need to call Bailey in to take it so that she could give her some nor-epinephrine if she needed it. She slowly starts lowering herself to the floor and I want to help, refraining was never easy, but I knew from experience that she'd rather ask for help when she figured out she needed it than for me to force it on her.
"Alex," she says quietly and I take not even three seconds to get from the chair to my wife. I wrap an arm around her, supporting her body as we take a step together.
"You wanna bring the IV pole with us?" I ask and she looks at me groggily, not understanding at first but eventually realization dawns on her face and she reaches out and grabs it to pull along with us. We take step by step slowly until we reach the bathroom.
"You stay here," she directs with as much force in her voice as she can manage. I smile and let her pull away from my arm, keeping a hand wrapped around her upper arm just in case, until she closes the door in my face. I lean against the wall next to it, listening carefully.
"There you are, Dr. Karev," a blonde doctor says as she appears through the door. I don't recognize her immediately, it takes me a minute to place her as Callie's girlfriend and the surgeon for pediatrics. Dr. Robins, I think was her name. I wanted to groan at the thought of being on peds today. I didn't really have the energy for snotty nosed kids who needed their appendixes out. "Dr. Torres said I'd probably find you hear."
"Yeah, I'm, uh, charting," I say, covering my ass. Even if she had roller skates for shoes she was still an attending.
"It'll be our secret," she says with an exaggerated wink. I was all ready to let a bit of the rude Alex come out when Izzie opens the bathroom door, looking about ready to collapse against me. This time as we walk I carry more of her weight so she barely even has to shuffle her feet forward. Her skin is red and irritated still. It always looks so painful to me. I just about forget of Dr. Robins when she speaks again. "I need you on my service today," she says as I help Izzie back into bed, hooking the nasal cannula back up.
"Whatever, just give me a minute, would you?" I say, grabbing the blood pressure cuff and taking her blood pressure on my own. "Damn it," I mutter as I read the results, too low. If she kept at this pace she'd be in the ICU before her morning round of IL-2 even had the chance to kick in. "I need to get Bailey," I say aloud.
"I'll page her for you," Dr. Robins offers kindly. I was lucky she wasn't yelling at me for talking to her like I had a minute ago. An advantage to working with someone from peds, I suppose.
The nurse enters the room with a breakfast tray for Izzie and sets it on her table. She goes to take the blood pressure cuff, but I cut her off. "60 over 45," I say, shaking my head. "She needs to eat, and she needs some nor-epinephrine." I try to take a breath and calm down, but her heart rate starts increasing, getting me even more concerned. "Dr. Robins, I don't know if I can be on your service today," I say as kindly as I can as I run to the bathroom for a cool wash cloth. Her fever must be breaking because a sheen of sweat had appeared in no time across her forehead.
"Go," she says weakly. How was it only day two and she was already this bad? I had a feeling there was no avoiding the ICU this time.
"Dr. Karev," Bailey says as she enters the room, moving quickly. "I've got her. You go do your job before I personally see to it that you are fired for all of this not working you seem to be doing."
I sigh, knowing she wasn't serious but unable to shake the mild fear even aware of that. I know if I stand here too much longer and just watch her get sicker I'm going to go out of my mind though. So it is with that that I turn and exit the room, ignoring the beeping of the monitor as I go.
"Do you need a minute?" Dr. Robins asks.
"No," I spit back. "I'm not some chick who gets all emotional," I defend to her as I try my best to shuffle the charts in my hands.
"Alright," is all she says in response to that. "Go put those charts back and we'll get started." We walk toward the front desk where I hand the charts over to the nurses and Dr. Robins asks for the one for her patient. "Here," she says and passes it to me. "You can have the opportunity to get to know about our patient's history before we go see her."
"Arizona!" Callie calls, rushing up to her. "Can I, uh, talk to you for a minute?" she asks and I turn away, making sure to stare intently at the chart in my hands. "Do you think tonight we could maybe reschedule dinner?"
"Sure," she responds easily. I could see why surgeons dated surgeons now. That was a lot easier than the times I'd seen the Chief cancel on his wife or Bailey explaining her absence to her husband. "Do you mind me asking why though?"
"I sort of had something else in mind," Callie says in a seductive tone, and out of the corner of my eye I watch her run a finger down Dr. Robins neck. I swallow hard, forcing back the rush of hormones. Honestly though, who could really blame me?
"As long as you promise to show me everything you had in mind tonight," she responds, her own voice dropping a couple of octaves from the previous perky chatter she had. "A very in depth display."
"Okay, hey, I'm standing right here," I interrupt, clearing my throat awkwardly.
"Oh, is our relationship making you uncomfortable, Dr. Karev?" Dr. Robins asks, sounding a little angry. Oh god, how do you explain to a lesbian that you weren't asking her to stop talking her girlfriend seductively not because you were a homophobic, but because you were getting turned on?
"Er, something like that," is all I say. Now would be one of those times where I wished that Izzie was better for more selfish purposes. I missed sex.
I hear a man laugh behind and turn to find Sloan. "I dare say you're getting good old Alex here a little happy in his pants," he says, patting me on the shoulder.
"Alright, can we just go save a life?" I ask, irritated. I might just have to think twice before the next time I aggravated O'Malley.
"You're right, we should," Arizona says and kisses Callie quickly before turning and skating, literally, down the hallway. I follow at a jog to keep up. "Are you up for a surgery today?" she asks, rhetorically I'd imagine.
"Yeah, of course," I respond as I navigate through the peds hallways, relatively unsure of where I was going. It didn't help that the whole place seemed to have been transformed into a Christmas wonderland. All of the decorations were kind of disorienting. I'd been in peds before, obviously, but it just wasn't something I did very often. I preferred fully grown parts. "Who isn't ready to scrub in on a surgery?"
"You'd be surprised," she replies simply and smiles as she walks past people in the hallways, mostly kids. She calls them by their names and sometimes adds something more to get them to smile. I was impressed for a second before I remembered I was in peds. Kids were easy to make like you, just make a funny face or something. Only Yang could make them hate her.
We enter a room, although I'm still staring at the chart so I haven't looked up yet. I'm grateful that, instead of four, her chart said she was thirteen. Although I'd have to give Dr. Robins credit if she got a teen to like her. They weren't easy to communicate with exactly. "Hi, Hannah!" she says cheerily. "This is Dr. Karev," she gestures to me. "He's going to be helping on your surgery today."
I look up and am caught off guard by what I see. It was like looking at my wife in younger version. Even the same shiny, bald scalp. I swear to god if this girl is terminal... "Care to give report, Dr. Karev?" Arizona asks, and I clear my throat and pull my eyes away from the girl.
"Thirteen year old Hannah Roberts. Diagnosed three years ago with stage three leukemia, went into remission a little over a year ago after a bone marrow transplant and finishing her chemo, but recent scans show a tumor in her spleen." I ignore the young girls eyes on me. They were oddly familiar.
"Do you know what that means, Hannah?" Arizona asks as she begins taking the girl's vitals. Her mom stands near the bed and her dad is asleep on the window seat. Parents hovered, I was beginning to understand why more and more.
"You're going to take my spleen out." I'm surprised by how unfazed she sounds. If I didn't know better I'd think she was excited.
"Yep!" Dr. Robins replies cheerily.
"Can I keep it?" she asks, now the excitement evident in her voice so much that it could not be ignored.
"Hannah!" her mom reprimands, as parents always do. "That's gross." I want to laugh at the disappointment on her face. She rolls her eyes looking back to Arizona hopefully.
"I'm afraid that's against hospital rules." Somehow that was overlooked for Meredith. I still remember her going on about her kidney in a jar, literally bragging over it as Yang drooled in envy. They were a weird group. "But maybe you can watch your surgery when you wake up if it's okay with Mom and Dad."
She looks hopefully at her mom, her dad still sleeping soundly. "We'll see," she says with a slight laugh. "My daughter, the scientist," she says, patting her daughter's bare head.
"Your surgery isn't until two today," Arizona says, and I try and make note of how she talked to the patient, not the parents first. It was smart, really. Probably makes them more comfortable when everyone isn't talking around them. "So Dr. Karev will be back here around one to start prepping you, okay?"
"Sounds good," her mom answers and holds her hand out to me. "I'm Rachel, Hannah's mom." I reach out and shake her hand.
"I promise to take excellent care of your daughter," I say sincerely.
"Alright then we'll be seeing you later," Dr. Robins says as she turns and leaves the room. I follow but grab her arm before we can go on to the next patient.
"What the hell?" I ask quietly because of the little boy wheeling around no more than fifteen feet from us.
"Excuse me?" she asks, her voice obviously offended.
"You insist I operate on a kid cancer patient, of all things?" I question. "You know about Izzie," I remind her.
"I hardly see how that changes anything," she responds and I shake my head in frustration. It was like talking to Cristina all of a sudden. And not the kind of talking to her where we're debating surgery tactics or arguing over who gets a patient, the kind where you just want to put your head through a wall.
"It changes things because I don't want to work in fucking peds!" I yell without thinking. I'm just about to curse about the fact that I just cursed so loudly in front of all of those kids, but I quickly think better of it.
"Dr. Karev," she starts, her tone stern. "I may have allowed you to snap at me when you were looking after your wife earlier, but now you are in my service and you will treat me as your attending, understood?"
She didn't look cut out for lectures, definitely not like Bailey. She almost looked...tired from it. "Yes, I'm sorry," I answer.
"If you'd like to talk about it-" she tries to offer like I was some charity case. I try not to reply rudely to her, though it was difficult knowing how she was looking at me right now. I wasn't some weak, helpless family member.
"I'm good," I say cynically and start off toward the next room, hoping she'll follow since I didn't really know where I was going.
11:30 AM
"Chief!" I yell out before he has a chance to walk away. I'd seen him arguing with Shepherd a minute earlier and didn't want him to go walking off before I got the chance to talk to him. I hadn't told Izzie yet, in case I wasn't able to get it, but I was hoping to get some time off around Christmas. She cared about the stupid holiday, and I cared about her, so I was kind of hopeless in the whole mix. I wouldn't be able to help but submit to her every plea on what was sure to be an absurd amount of decorations and endless baking. I'd do it all if it made her happy.
"What, Dr. Karev?" he asks, clearly irritated. I guess trying to talk to him when he was angry wasn't the best idea. Whatever, I was here now. "Make it quick. I'm a busy man."
"Right, sorry sir," I start, trying to get him to see I was being respectful. It used to help sometimes with my dad when I was a kid. "I wanted to talk to you about maybe having some time off around-"
"Time off?" he interrupts, his voice incredulous. God, I mean, I know he's used to dedicated employees but had no one ever really asked for time off? What was wrong with these people?
"Yes, sir. I know it's last minute, and I didn't submit it in writing or whatever the hell we're supposed to do and that I'm just a resident and I shouldn't be asking for time off in the first place, but Yang will be all over the extra work. Grey too, they both hate the holidays and normally I would too, but now I have a wife and I'm almost positive she likes Christmas more than me so..." I trail off, a little out of breath from the monologue. I didn't usually say that much at once.
"Take a week and a half," the Chief says and my jaw almost drops in surprise like in one of those cartoons. "But don't come crying to me when Yang gets some good surgery or something that you wanted," he instructs and I'm still a little too on the shocked side for it to register.
So we could take time off if we wanted. Good to know. "Yes, thank you, Chief."
"Uh-huh," is all he says before he starts walking away. I breathe in relief and then smile, excited to tell my wife, how weird that still was, that we got to spend Christmas together without any surgeries or hospitals in the way, for either of us.
12:35 PM
I brace myself as I walk to Izzie's room for lunch, still pretty surprised that I hadn't gotten paged about her being transferred to ICU. I was even more surprised to walk in and find her sitting up and chatting away with Meredith. She looked ten times better than when I had left her this morning. A quick glance at the monitor confirmed that her heart rate was almost normal now, and probably her blood pressure was as well.
"Meredith and Derek made up," Izzie says with a smile, like I actually gave a crap about the relationship status between those two. It changed way too often for me to keep track of.
"Swell," I say with a heavy note of sarcasm. Izzie gives me a momentary look and Meredith shrugs. I set one container of food down for Izzie and then take my spot at the foot of her bed to eat my own. We shared the little tray table as she surprisingly ate her food in small amounts. It was the closest thing we would be getting to a sit down meal for a few days.
"And it looks like Cristina and Hunt are-" Meredith starts to say, but gets cut off by her pager. "911, gotta go," she says and dashes from the room.
"She's doing a heart transplant this afternoon and Cristina is so jealous. It's kind of funny," Izzie says as she takes a decent sized bite out of her mashed potatoes. She giggles as I continue to stare at her. "You wanna stop staring and eat your lunch?"
"You were so sick this morning," I say. It wasn't that I didn't understand how she could get better or that I wasn't happy she was or anything. It was that I had spent my entire morning mentally preparing myself for the state I was about to find my wife in. Now she was sitting up and eating while telling me about the unending drama that followed Derek and Meredith's lives.
"Good thing I'm in a hospital then," she replies, looking her cheery self, but with angry skin and sunken-in eyes. "Alex, would you like me to lie down and be sick again?" she asks, fighting a smile from her face.
I roll my eyes at her and turn my attention to my food. It was hard to handle, people didn't get that, because even when they're getting better you know they're just going to get sick again, and all of that uncertainty was exhausting. I tried to shake it off, remembering my news from earlier. "I have good news," I start and she looks wearily at me now.
"You didn't go and buy a farm this time? Or maybe a third world country?"
"Shut up," I say and she smiles again. She was happy right now, that was good. "I have off Christmas."
"Well technically we've had Christmas off every year, but no one ever takes it so neither do I," she says, irritated from holidays past and others unwillingness to join in. "Wait," she begins again, a slow smile on her face, having bounced back from her agitation moments ago. "Are you telling me that you, Alex Karev, will not work a single minute on all of Christmas?"
"Or for a week and a half before that," I finish and she shoves her tray aside, carefully enough that the food doesn't go flying off as she pushes it away and throws her arms around me.
I laugh at her enthusiasm. "I didn't know you would care quite that much," I say trying hard not to flinch from the way her arms wrapped around me. The last time we'd held each other like this she'd fallen limp and nearly hadn't come back.
"How'd you even manage that?" she asks as she pulls away and lays back against her pillows. A hug had worn her out. That's all it took during her treatments. She was still smiling though, radiant really.
"I asked," I answer simply, shrugging my shoulders as I devoured the lukewarm chicken. I glanced up a moment later to find her eating again, a smile still set on her face.
1:36 PM
"Alright, Hannah," I say as I go in her room. "Time to start prepping you for surgery." Her parents give her small smiles as they kiss her head and pat her hand saying, "I love you" and "see you after." It was nice, her having such a good support system. "Ready?" I ask, and she shrugs.
"Have you done this before?" she asks me as I begin taking her vitals. "Taken out a tumor infested spleen, I mean."
"Well, I'm not doing it myself, that's what Dr. Robins is around for, but yeah I've seen them done a few times." She nods, accepting my answer.
"So...do you always yell the f-word or do I specifically bring it out in you?" I laugh nervously, ashamed that my patient was hearing me like that. It wasn't appropriate, especially not for some kid.
"Sorry about that," is all I say. There wasn't much else I could say, not really. It was crappy behavior and had it been with Bailey I'd probably be writing lines of "I will not curse in front of patients" a hundred times over.
"Hey, it's cool," she says, wincing as I stick a needle in her arm. "I have two stressed out parents and am in the eighth grade. It's not like I don't hear it all the time anyhow." I don't have anything to say after that. I wasn't the best when it came to communicating with teenage girls. "So what has you all angry?"
"I'm not angry," I say, sighing as I think of cancer and hospitals and death. "Okay, maybe a little, but it's not an excuse," I tell her while she closes her eyes and lays her head back on the pillows. She laughs cynically for a second.
"I'm angry that I'm in a hospital with cancer again," she starts, opening her eyes and staring at me, pulling my own gaze in as this little girl spoke. "I'm angry that I fought like hell and I'm sick still. I'm angry that my dad got a job transfer and now I live three hundred miles away from everyone I knew. And I'm mad that I can't do anything about it." She sighs, that same tired sigh I'd come to be so familiar with. It was a tired one, one only adults should have. "Your turn."
I laugh in response, not exactly willing to share all the crap in my life with some kid about to go into surgery. "My wife has cancer," I start, shaking my head as I say the words. I hated those words. "Like you, she has cancer. Only, they don't know if they can get it to go away. They can't take out her spleen and give her some chemo and call it a day. I'm angry that I don't know if she's going to live and that she has to be so sick every day. I'm pissed that I can't fix it even though I'm a doctor and her husband, and I'm mad that her own best friend won't even talk to her and it makes her sad."
She looks at me, tears in her own eyes for god knows what reason and I make eye contact with her again. She kind of smiles, like an understanding one to let me know I'm not alone, and it's absurd, and stupid because she's a kid with cancer and I'm an adult dealing with someone else's cancer. But I can't help feeling grateful that even if I'd talked to some little girl she still seemed to get what I mean.
"Time for the OR."
3:25 PM
"Almost done here, looks like a perfect resection to me," Dr. Robins says as she pokes around for a second more, checking for anything that may have been left behind or could be another tumor forming. We had to open her up because of the tumor, can't do it laparoscopically when you need to fish out a mass of cancerous cells too. "Would you like to close, Dr. Karev?" she says and hands me the tools to being stitching her up. During the surgery I was allowed to do the actual removal of the spleen, which told me that Dr. Robins not only forgave me but also must think I'm a decent doctor.
"Actually, could I?" one of Yang's interns asks. "I was hoping to practice on something more than bananas," he says.
I'm hesitant, knowing I should give up the tools and let the kid do it, only I'd seen his work on another patient and it was pretty messy. For a surgeon the kid didn't have the steadiest hands. I sigh, handing over the tools and stepping back to allow him to do it. I had a wife to look after, I didn't need to be concerned with some other kid who I'd hardly be involved with post this surgery. "Just do a good job," I say and then stand back and watch. I was somewhere between a high from a solo spleen resection and a low from unfortunate attachment with a patient. It was Dr. Robins fault, putting me on a case like this when she knows the condition of my wife. It should have been an assumed reaction, I told myself. Whatever though, I didn't really care.
8:16 PM
"Did you handle the last round okay?" I ask Izzie as I walk into her room. She's still looking decent, but I knew that could change quickly.
"Yeah, yeah," she says, not wanting to talk about the medicine right now. Instead, she holds up a piece of paper that is covered in her bubbly hand writing. It looked like it started out very neat, but degraded into a more hectic list. "What do you think?" she ask and then flips it over to show a diagram on the back. "I don't really know what the place looks like yet so this is a rough sketch, but I can adapt I'm sure."
"You made a diagram for Christmas decorations?" I ask incredulously as I take the paper from her to look it over, shaking my head at her own ridiculousness. "I'm getting you a book."
She grabs it back from me, sending a glare in my direction. "We need to know what we need when we go shopping on Monday," she says, reminding me of the previous shopping commitments I had made. I wondered how Meredith felt about Christmas shopping. "And you aren't backing out of it like you're thinking about doing right now," she includes, sternly.
"I wasn't gonna back out," I lie. Still tempted to ask if going with her friends would really be that bad. I refrain in fear of her response though.
"Good," she says. "Because this is going to be our place now, and, as such, we need to both be apart of decorating it." She looked so proud, so happy as she says that. I have to wonder if she'd spent the afternoon coming up with it.
"I wasn't going to back out," I say again, leaning forward and kissing her on the lips. She kisses me back with eagerness and I suddenly really, really miss having her, a bed, and good health. She pulls away, literally gasping for breath from the lack of oxygen. I can't help but laugh. "I made you 'breathless,'" I joke putting air quotes around the last word.
"Oh shut up," she says as she regulates her breathing. "Did you get yourself a decent case today like I told you?" she asks me.
"Yes ma'am," I respond and she scoots over, grabbing my hand and pulling me to lay next to her. "Well, I resected a spleen by myself today, at least. Arizona helped with the leftover tumor."
She nods tiredly as we lay side by side, both of us kind of squished but not really caring. "Start from the beginning," she instructs and closes her eyes.
"Okay well, once upon a time there were two surgeons. One was an average attending and the other a ruggedly good looking resisdent." She laughs and were her eyes open I swore she would have rolled them.
"Keep going," she encourages, and so I do. Complete with plot twists and a beautiful fair maiden waiting for the handsome man in the next room. I know she's fallen asleep when stops smiling every few seconds and I turn so that I'm facing her, and I watch her sleep peacefully.
I give myself a few more minutes to lay with her before climbing out of the bed, scribbling a note of goodbye as I grab my stuff. I walk to my car and start it, driving out to the trailer and gathering as much as could fit in my car as possible. Thankfully we didn't have a ton of stuff, but I still knew it would be a couple of trips before I was done. Then I still needed to get whatever furniture at Meredith's that she would consider ours and buy the rest.
I shut the trunk, knowing the next time I open it there will be plastic bags of clothes and shoes rolling out. I drive, enjoying the calmness and quiet as I do. My mind relaxes, my body finally releasing some tension after the day. It felt like I'd been running a marathon, never stopping to take a break long enough to regain my strength. I had a job all day to keep me busy and a sick wife who I stayed up all night with whether she was asleep or awake. I didn't know if I could keep doing it, not like this.
I just need to make it to the fifteenth, I tell myself. Just a few more days and then I'd get a break, a real one. Izzie would be feeling better from the chemo and Christmas magic, or whatever she wanted to call it, and I would have no responsibilities in terms of work or anything else. It could just be us, doing whatever we wanted.
I got lost in fantasy land until my pager went off. I didn't think too much of it at first, figuring it might just be them alerting me they were taking Izzie to ICU. Her heart rate had been a little high when I left, even though she had been sleeping. I refused to believe it could be anything worse on her condition.
And it wasn't either of those things. It was my patient, my actual patient. Who, it would seem, was not doing very well because I was getting a 911 page for her. I didn't get it. The surgery had gone perfect. Hannah had seemed great when I checked on her tonight before going to Izzie's room. What had happened since then?
Answers wouldn't be reached until I got there, and so I pressed on the gas just a little harder, hoping to get there before there was nothing I could do.
9:57 PM
"What happened?" I yell as I rush into the room, finding her being held on her side as she seizes violently.
"I don't know," a nurse says. "I just heard her mom start screaming and came in and she was like this so I paged you and Dr. Robins."
Dr. Robins was no where in sight though, probably too busy with her girlfriend's in depth examples to notice her pager going off. "Has she been seizing this whole time?" I ask, it'd been at least ten minutes since I'd gotten the page.
"She stopped for three minutes and then it started again," the nurse reports and I take a deep breath, trying to ignore her frantic parents as they cried.
"Did you give her diazepam?" I ask. She nods, and so I take a second to think. "Phenobarbital then," I instruct mainly to myself as I inject the meds into her IV.
"What's happening?" her mother screams, reaching a hand out to the seizing girl, but a nurse grabs her and holds her back. The father just stands there, frozen and watching. "Hannah!" she yells, desperate for her daughter. It was harder than it used to be, keeping them back, because now I got it, how much you needed to be with them even if you're only in the way. It was distracting, thinking about it.
"Get them out of here!" I bark out when the woman screams out again. The nurses begin pulling them out just as the monitor starts beating erratically. "Her rhythm is tachycardia," I yell. "Someone get the paddles, will you?" We lay her flat and start compressions, the oxygen bag is pulled out. "Come on, Hannah," I mutter as I squirt the gel on the paddles and rub them together. "Charge to 200!"