Chapter 14

Hey guys! I did some chapter splitting again, so this is shorter than normally, but otherwise it would have taken forever. Thanks for still sticking with the story and for the wonderful reviews. I know everyone including is very busy right now, so have a good time preparing for the holidays. Still hope that you will continue to enjoy this story, when you get some time to read it.

All disclaimers apply.

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"Well…" Dr. Nick Stone stood in front the x-ray with narrowed eyes. He was so close to it that it looked as though he wanted to crawl into it and operate from the inside out. He seemed to lose himself so much in this pictured hand that Jesse imagined he could sense whose breath on his real arm albeit knowing that the soft breeze was coming from the opened window.

Despite the fairly warm air the young man felt chilly. He saw the goosebumps on his skin and noticed he was shivering slightly. He knew it was most likely due to his blood pressure that was right now probably dropping towards zero. He had come home last night, crawled into bed and slept almost immediately, but as he had woken up again 9 hours later he had been just as whacked as before.

Jesse nervously crossed his arms before his chest and took a deep breath, hoping that the sudden rush of oxygen would help him clear his head. But for all the good it did him, he might as well have tried to hold his breath forever. His chest was so tight with fear that he had the feeling his ribs would clutch his expanding lungs and never release them again.

Seeing Jesse's face paling, Mark inwardly readied for catching his fainting friend any second now. He could actually see how the anxiety was tearing the young man apart. He wanted to help him so badly, though he knew that the only thing he could do was to be there.

Desperately he tried to make eye contact with his long time colleague Dr. Stone who was definitely taking his sweet time at diagnosing the condition of the hand. Nick was a good specialist and surgeon for those kinds of injuries. Mark relied on his judgment. And still he also knew that Nick Stone sometimes had a way of making a diagnosis a living hell for his patients.

Nick didn't want to make a mistake, knowing his opinion in this case was crucial. Like Mark he was a man of the old school when it came to medicine. However, he was all the time of the young man's eyes staring at his back, waiting for him to turn around. The air was thick with tension, all three men could sense it, even though they pretended to award all their attention simply to a medical problem.

Finally the specialist turned around and scanned his visitors, regarding how to start. "Dr Travis…", he started in a deep melodic voice that usually had a calming effect on people, this time though it was different. Jesse winced as if someone had flipped with two fingers in front his face to keep him from dozing off.

He felt the cold sweat on his forehead as he met Stone's gaze as he tried to interpret whose expression. The older doctor's features were earnest and slightly taken aback as his look wandered from Jesse to Mark and back. When Stone took a second to look at Mark, Jesse watched the exchange of silent information between the two older doctors and his heart sunk when he recognized the manner of it. It was the same kind of look he would throw at another doctor when he didn't know what to say to patient. He had never enjoyed being on either side of that wordless emergency meeting, but now he realized there was nothing worse than being the object of it.

Still seeking for a way to start, Nick finally addressed him again: "I'm sorry, Dr. Travis but it looks like your first diagnosis and the one confirmed by Dr. Sloan was perfectly right."

He waited a moment for the words to sink in and considered the paradox absurdity of the sentiment, before he continued. "It's not a very common injury for the kind of accident you described to me, but that doesn't make it impossible. From what you told me, I would say the marrow cracked at some places when the arm hit on the car and later, when your wrist and shoulder were relocated, they loosened and started to drill themselves into the muscles. The numbness you are feeling is caused by a slowly growing barrier between your muscles and the newer muscle adjunctions." Nick paused shortly to watch the reaction to what had been said so far. Dr. Sloan shared his worried glance, but the younger man just stared at him blankly.

Jesse knew they probably expected him to say something, but there were no words for him to express what he was thinking. It was as though he had been locked in a cage where the way of human communication was useless.

It occurred to Jesse that this whole situation was like a one-way-mirror. He knew there were people on the other side, who could see and hear him, who probably talked about him. And still he was only able to see himself and every time he desperately tried to make a connection to the world outside he would just meet his own frightened mirror image.

Nick stepped closer to the atypically quiet man in front of him and searched for whose gaze that was lost on the room and almost impossible to meet. It seemed to go right through his and Mark's appearance. "Dr. Travis, I need you to listen to me carefully. There are ways to treat the numbness and the stiffness with medication, but that's only limiting the damage it's still about to do. To give the muscles at least a chance to heal, we have to operate."

"At what risk?" the young man looked almost stunned himself at the promptness of his reaction that none of them had counted with. He had reacted to a sublime cue, a question that had been haunting him and now finally had found its place to be voiced.

Dr. Stone swayed his head. "You are young, in good shape, there is probably no better candidate for that kind of surgery."

Jesse couldn't help it, he hated the way Stone had put this. He sounded as though he wanted him to perform the surgery instead of being the one under the knife.

Meanwhile, Nick continued. "But judging by the severe growth of the rigidifications, it still leaves you with a pretty good risk of a full paralysis of your arm and it's increasing with every day we wait. 35 to 40 percent is my calculation over the thumb."

Bang, Stone had dropped the bomb. The echo of his words remained in Jesse's and Mark's ears for a long time afterwards. Hearing those numbers, Jesse began to see black spots in his vision. Albeit having guessed it before, he couldn't say that it made it easier to accept it.

Nevertheless, he knew that it was now, this very moment that he had to make a decision. It wasn't that he hadn't made any life-changing decisions before, but he couldn't remember experiencing any of those so consciously as this one. Once he made this one, he wouldn't be able to turn around. This was his fail safe point and he had to decide whether to cross it or not.

There was only one last question left in him and he simply didn't have the energy to wrap it up in anything but bluntness. "If I want to work as a surgeon again, I have nothing to lose, right?"

He looked at Nick Stone and at his mentor Mark Sloan and all he got were two mere nods.

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Both doctors walked out of Nick's office and back to the lounge. All the time they walked next to each other, their hands stuffed into the pockets of their pants, the taller older man and at his side the younger smaller man.

Only when the got to the lounge and found it empty, Jesse dared to look at Mark. He didn't know what he wanted to see less in whose face, disappointment or approval. It wasn't so much the lack of tolerance for his decision he was afraid of as the pure realization that the decision itself was final.

"Feeling a little better?" the older man inquired carefully.

In all his confusion Jesse produced a weary smile without even knowing where it came from.

He shook his head. For some reason he didn't feel like lying to anyone right now. "No, I don't. It's more like…" He took a moment of consideration. What was it like? "It's like five minutes after the take-off, when you are in the air and you wait for your ears to pop, but for some reason they don't…"

Both men chuckled absent-minded as they settled down in the armchairs. The silence emerging from their inability to come up with a topic for a conversation was only broken when Jesse mumbled in consternation.

"40 percent…I must be nuts."

Mark gave him an encouraging grin, which was still full of understanding. He knew that he had to be careful about applying either too much optimism or pessimism. Both wouldn't have been helpful and, more important, not very fair to his friend.

"Who says you have to belong the 40 percent?" he asked simply.

"Who says I'm gonna belong to the other 60?" Jesse shot back, but Mark was prepared for that. He had been thinking about that reply before, in Nick's room, but now the right moment seemed to have come.

"You remember your first day at med school? Remember the very first thing they told you there?"

Jesse stared at his mentor for a second, trying to recall. The very first thing, the very first impression they had given him. And even before his memory had really dug it out, he muttered: "Look at your neighbor…"

Mark winked at him as he started imitating the voice and tone of a professor. "Look at your neighbor to the left and to the right. Look at him carefully because by the time you graduate one of you won't be here anymore…you heard me alright, ladies and gentlemen, 50 percent of you won't make it through the next four years of training."

The younger man smiled bewilderedly. "Oh yeah, I do remember." And it really was as present now as it had been years ago. Only now it was weirder, looking at it from the distance of quite a few years in between. The very first impression, the very first notion of his medical training had been the image of failure and it had never really gone away.

Mark was now ready for making his final point. "What made you so sure you didn't belong to the other 50 percent back then?" he half questioned, half stated.

The younger man shrugged. "I don't know. I think I was never sure."

Mark smiled kindly and after a few seconds a sparkle flickered in Jesse's eyes and he managed to smile back.

For the first time since he had looked at the x-ray of his hand, Jesse felt something like hope. There seemed to be a crack in the one-way-mirror, a part that was see-through. He had something to look at without being confronted by his own frustrated fears the very instant he focused on it.

"Thanks", the younger man whispered, barely audibly.

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Two days later it was already 9 o' clock p.m. gone when Mark was starting to get worried. Nick Stone had scheduled the surgery on Jesse's arm for the next morning. But Jesse was nowhere to be found.

Mark had tried to call his friend's cell phone more than a dozen times, whose pager about twice as often and when all hopes failed that he might be at the hospital, the older man had even tried his apartment number.

It wasn't that he feared Jesse wouldn't turn up the next morning that put a knot in Mark's guts. He believed he knew his former student at least well enough to predict that would never happen. But he still understood the stress level the young man was bearing right now had to be extreme and he didn't want him to cope with it all on his own.

Walking along the hallway, Mark met two equally worried eyes belonging to Amanda.

"Have you found him?", he asked, though he could already foresee the answer.

She shook her head no. "I really don't think he is at the hospital, Mark. We searched this place ten times at least, there is no way he can be hiding anywhere."

Mark sighed in dismay. "I don't believe that. He is not answering his phone or his cell or his pager. What in God's name is he thinking?!"

The young pathologist gave the older doctor a concerned look. She wasn't used to be confronted with impatience from his character and knew it was a sign of Mark being worried sick. "Calm down, Mark. He will turn up sooner or later, I'm sure. Maybe we should give him and us a break…"

Saying those words she gently took his arm and led him towards the lounge. She only hoped she'd be able to beat out enough time for Steve to find Jesse.

In her despair she had calledthe Lieutenantearlier, wondering whether he might have a clue where the younger doctor could be. She was convinced that in this respect, Steve was probably the one to know best what was going on inside of Jesse. Even though normally both men didn't have a lot in common, they both shared an affinity for dealing with their problems alone and only very reluctantly agreed to accepting help from anybody.

After listening to her pleads, theyounger Sloanhad promised her immediately that he wouldn't come back without his friend. And Amanda was had no doubt he would keep his promise.