Chapter 7

Haley walked down the hallway to Alex's room. Everyone was unaware of that incident that had just taken place in her room, so they didn't monitor the visitors she had.

She knocked on the door, but when there was no response, she knocked louder and said, "Alex? Are you in there?" There was still no one response, so Haley walked down the hallway to a nurse.

"Excuse me?" she asked. "I came to see my sister, but her door is locked and no one is responding. Could you unlocked the door?"

The nurse nodded and took out a key. As soon as she unlocked the door, she took her key out and walked away, leaving the door closed.

Haley opened the door and screamed at her sister laying on bloody sheets and wearing a bloody hospital gown. "Help! Someone come here! Someone help my sister!" screamed Haley. A doctor who was about to go into somebody else's room quickly ran to her side.

"Is everything alright, miss?" he asked.

"No! Please help my sister!"

He went into the room and was shocked at what he saw. He unclipped a walkie-talkie and began to talk into it. "I'm going to need backup. I'm in the room to the right of my intended room."

The doctor could see the tears silently streaming down Haley's cheeks as he grabbed paper towels, beginning to dab some of the blood off of Alex.

Within minutes, there were three more doctors all crowded around Alex. Haley got pushed out of the way and soon couldn't even see her sister. No matter what angle she titled her head to, Haley could only see white lab coats.

A doctor turned around and told Haley, "Is this your sister?"

"Yea," she replied. "Is everything okay?"

"I'm afraid not. She seems to have lost a lot of blood. Luckily, I read her file a few days back, so I know her blood type. Unluckily, the only reason I remembered it was because that type is so rare, a doctor only gets to see it one or two times a year. I highly doubt that we would have any in the blood bank downstairs."

"Then what are we going to do? You have to do something! You can't just sit around and do nothing!"

"Well, we could… Hey, wait a minute. Do you know what type of blood you have?"

"No, I don't. But couldn't you run some tests to find out?"

"Yes, we could. Follow me."

Haley followed the doctor down the hallway and into an elevator marked, "Staff Only." As it began to move, images of Alex laying in her bed, unconscious, kept flashing through her mind. Her thoughts we interrupted when the doors opened and they walked out into a lab with many people wearing lab coats and safety goggles working with machinery.

The doctor must have seen the look of confusion on her face because he began to explain what they were doing. "I'm taking you down to the lab that we rarely use. It will give us results in a few minutes, rather than a few hours from the one upstairs."

There was a chair in the far corner of the room that was next to a table covered in needles with thin tubes connected to them and different sized vials.

As soon as Haley sat down, the doctor put a needle in the inside of her elbow and laid out a row of five of the largest size vials and one of the smallest size, one of which was already connected to the tube.

"We are going to use the small vial to test our blood type," he explained. "The five larger vials will be used to give to Alex just in case your types are the same. We can't waste any time by coming back down here to get your blood if the types are the same."

Filling all of the vials took a lot longer than Haley thought it would, so she decided to start a conversation with the doctor. "I'm Haley, by the way."

"Hi, Haley. I'm Dr. Russell, but you can call me Luke."

"Ok, Luke. If this lab is rarely used, then why did you take me down here?"

Luke looked down at the floor. "Well, I don't usually tell people this, but my sister took her own life when she was sixteen. I became a doctor so I could prevent families from going through the same thing that mine had to. I know how awful it can be and I will do everything I can so people don't have to deal with everything that a suicide can bring."

"I'm really sorry, but I appreciate everything that you are doing. Not only for me, but for other families."

Soon, everything was filled and Luke rushed the smallest container to a machine that would test the blood type. A few seconds later, the results were back. Luke smiled from ear to ear when the realized that Haley and Alex's blood types were the same.

"Alright," he began. "We're back in business. We need to hurry upstairs if we want to make it in time."

While she was in the elevator, her phone went off. It was a text from Claire. It read, "We are up in Alex's room. Doctors are prepping room for another surgery. Come as quickly as you can."

Following her mother's orders, Haley and Luke ran down the hallway. Before the arrived at the room, they stopped and gave the blood to a nurse so it could be used in the surgery.

In Alex's room, Claire and Phil were sitting on the edge of their daughter's bed, both crying.

Luke said, "The operating room will be ready in twenty minutes, so I will leave you alone until then."

However, before he could leave, Alex's monitors began beeping and making all sorts of noises. Claire grabbed Alex and placed her head in her lap, hugging her.

A few seconds later, the lines on the monitors began to spike up and down, but they eventually started to even out.

Claire felt her beloved daughter take her last breath in her arms before her body went limp.