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Chapter 10

On the way to the hopsital, Brooke sat by Julian's head and rubbed his forehead. He looked up at her with his glassy eyes and mumbled words she couldn't understand.

"Love..yyyo...I love..."

"I know you do baby. I know. Just breathe, I know you do. You love me more than enough. You are all mine."

When she said that Julian's eyes widened and closed.

In the split second that Julian's eyes closed, flashes of the past came back to him.

The first flash brought him back to the boy naive irresponsible boy he used to be. He stood face to face with his high school love, Melanie. She was crying as he held her shoulders; he remembered this moment, he remembered everythign about that day. It was the day he found out she was pregnant. "Are we enough for you, Julian? Is a life with me and this child we created together enough for you? I won't abandon this child and i hope you won't either. Because this baby...well he or she is all yours...and all mine."

The second was a flash of Brooke, her hair blowing back in the breeze as she stood in front of him; they were surrounded by white; they too were face to face. She repeated the words she said to him in the ambulance a minute ago. "I love you, Julian. And you love me more than enough. You are all mine."

The third flash was of the night he was mugged. The vision was blurred from how badly his head throbbed from being hit. His gut hurt just as much as it did that night. But then the figures started to talk, the voices approached him slowly and became clearer. His sight went black, but that only heightened his other senses, mainly his hearing. "Never take something that is mine." The female voice barked. This was what he couldn't quite remember before now. Julian began to move his head weakly and his eyes moved under their lids. To stop him, the woman kicked him with her heel. The blow made his nose and eyes throb. They were no longer close to opening anymore. But he didn't need to see in order to get the information he needed. "Damn it. He better not have seem you, Rachel!" Rachel...Rachel...Rachel! That was it! Rachel Gatina back for revenge for keeping Rory from her. The last flash was quick. It happened back in his house, by his front door, with the ragind redhead herself. "Screw you!" "You need to leave. Get out of my house. Come back when you're sober and you are ready to take responsibility for the things you did." The door slammed in Rachel's face, and she banged on the locked door for another ten minutes. "I'll get you for this, you smug bastard!"

RACHEL!

Julian's eyes shot open again. He was still in the ambulance and Brooke's hair blocked his view of anything above him.

"Please don't leave me!" Brooke cried.

Julian looked up with squinted eyes. He looked right past Brooke into space. He wasn't all there anymore.

"Rachel..."

;

She was here. Again. Again. AGAIN.

Brooke was left with the overwhelming sense of horrible deja vu. How many times was she here this week? This year? Too many. Even one was too many.

Julian was now having all kinds of tests and this time there was no sense of relief that he was getting medical help from doctors. That worked out so well apparently... Brooke thought she was losing her husband. Brooke looked down at her hands which were stained red now. The blood had dried in the time she was waiting here, in this seat, in this room, in this hospital, again. She wondered if that was her last experience with her living husband. She hoped his last word was not 'rachel'. She hoped somehow he could answer the mountains of swirling questions in her mind about that name. WHY...for starters. He hated Rachel. He always had. WHy wouldn't he have said her name? or his daughters' names, his sons' names? or even Melanie's name for all she cared. Those names made sense to her...he was holding onto someone he loved, not Rachel. But she guessed that now it wasn't important. She didn't care what he said or what happened from here, as long as he was alive to do and say something.

She didn't see how anything could turn out okay. I mean, he had already been in this predicament before, fighting to live, how many times could he come back from peril before his luck was up? She prayed to something, anything at all, that his luck would hold up.

A young nurse on staff came over to talk to her about what was going on. She was told he had a pulmonary embolism, meaning he had a blood clot in his lung. She said this usually stems from a broken off piece of another blood clot in his leg or pelvis. So they were checking for that too. The symptoms fit: chest pain, anxiety, low BP, sudden cough, bloody mucas, shortness of breath, rapid heart rate, dizziness, wheezing, etc... Julian had a lot of the symptoms she described. Right now he was having a variety of chest Xrays, an echocardiogram, MRIs, ultrasounds, and CT scans. They were running labs on his blood like arterial blood gases and a pulse oximetry. Brooke didn't want to hear anymore.

"How do you help him?"

"We started him on blood thinner, and once we find where the clots are, we can start thrombolytic therapy and medications to break them up."

"What happens if that doesn't work...Could he die?"

Why did she ask that? She didn't want to know, and of course he could die, she just saw him fighting for just a half of a breath. This was bad. She didn't want to know. She didn't want to hear it out loud; that would make it real.

The nurse took a deep breath before telling Brooke the hard news. "Your husband could go into shock, experience hypertension, and there is a 50% chance he won't make it. I'm so sorry."

Brooke closed her eyes. She whispered to the kind nurse. "I don't know what to do..."

"Why don't you just take a few deep breaths and I will come get you as soon as I know more."

Brooke nodded. "Thank you."

;

Brooke stayed by Julian bedside all night, all day, and all night again. But this time, he didn't wake up in the morning like she'd hoped. He just remained asleep. The doctors said they were moving on his time table. It was up to him to wake up now. It seemed as though he wasn't getting any worse but the medications they had him on hadn't made him any better as of yet. The doctors had removed the clot in his lung and were supplying him with enough drugs to knock out possible infections and reoccurring clots. But upon further examinations, tests showed that he had other clots in both his pelvis and legs that were becoming cause for concern. The hypothesis was that one of those clots had a piece that broke off, traveled to his lungs, and caused the episode that Brooke witnessed a day ago. The pulmonary embolism...Brooke would forever hate those two words.

Brooke shot out of a fitful sleep when she felt pressure on her shoulder. She jumped up from her leaning-on-the-side-of-the-hospital-bed-uncomfortable-sleeping-arrangement-position to look at her husband. She was sure it was him, finally waking her up to tell her everything was going to be okay and he wasn't leaving her. But it wasn't Julian.

"Brooke, honey? Are you okay? I'm sorry I startled you."

It was Jocelyn. Was his sister the next best thing? Not really.

"I though you...I though Julian was awake." Her eyes never left him.

"I'm sorry."

Brooke nodded, signifying that it was fine. She knew Jocelyn didn't mean to.

"Brooke you should go home. Take a shower, have a rest, be with your kids."

"I don't know what to say to them...I told them the last time that he was going to be fine. I don't want to lie again."

"I'm sure just having you there will help them. Eliot called me. Haley's with them, helping her, but the kids only want you."

Brooke closed her eyes.

"Maybe I could just sit her for a while longer, to get my thoughts together?"

Jocelyn pulled a chair beside Brooke, and leaned forward to grab her brother's hand as well.

"Okay...then I'll sit with you. We all know how haunting thoughts can get when left alone with them."

"Thank you, Joce."

For the next hour, Jocelyn's shoulder became a resting place for Brooke's heavy and pounding head. And as promised, Jocelyn silently sat with her, just rubbing her arm for support. After that, Brooke made the treck home in Jocelyn's car, since she had come to the hopsital in the ambulance with Julian before. Jocelyn promised to call Brooke with any changes at all.

;

Brooke didn't have any good news for the kids, so when she walked through the door of her house, she began to regret her decision to come home in the first place. The kids bombarded her wth questions that Brooke didn't have the heart to answer. 'Where's daddy? When's he coming home? Does he know i miss him? Why couldn't daddy breathe? Why did that truck take him away? Can i see him?'

She couldn't answer these questions since she had thought them all herself, plus ten times more on top of that.

Distraction was the only thing she could think of. The only method she wanted to try, really.

Eliot pulled Brooke into the master bedroom to talk alone. Eliot had so many questions that she knew Brooke wouldnt want to answer with little ears around.

"SO...tell me. How bad is it? I can tell it's not good."

Brooke didn't say anything and didnt look at anything besides her hands.

"Is he dead?"

"No! God forbid. Knock on wood. No. Jocelyn's at the hospital with him. She told me to go home."

Just then Eliot's phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out and read a txt message, then stashed it away quickly.

"What's that?"

"Nothing." Brooke noticed how defensive she was all of a sudden.

"When are you going back to school anyways? You can't stay home for much longer. You'll miss too much work."

"Don't avoid my question."

Brooke rubbed her eyes with her palms, abandoning that distraction on the spot.

"Come on Brooke. What's wrong with my brother?"

"I wanna know too..." Two heads turned quickly to look at Nolan who had just walked through the door.

"Nolan..." Brooke began.

"No. I'm not a little kid anymore. I wanna know what's happening to dad!"

"Okay...Come here." Brooke patted the seat on the bed beside her.

Brooke explained everything she knew to Eliot and Nolan. By the time Nolan and Eli exited the room, their eyes were puffy and red from crying. Brooke emerged looking refreshed a little while later after a hot shower.

They tried to hide their saddness from the kids, but of course Jordan and Tristan weren't oblivious. Even the triplets rarely missed a beat, especially not this one, which apparently had big flashy lights directing them towards it. Brooke, in that moment, decided to take the kids to see Julian. They wanted to and deserved to see him just as much as she did.

"Come on guys. Let's go see Daddy."

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~Haley :]