Derek makes an irrational decision in an attempt to save his patient's life.
A/N: Thanks for the reviews recently everyone. :)
Murray nodded as he requested for a scrub nurse to carefully pull at the back of his attending's chair to drag him from the superior to the lateral side of the patient. He couldn't do that. It would contaminate his sterile field.
"You're going to have to hold onto me so I don't fall over, okay?" He asked. He didn't request for the man to shift him, but he was just glad he didn't have to ask. The request was going to be awkward enough as it was.
"I- yes, sir."
"And by not very good, I mean you are literally going to have to take all the weight off my legs so we don't both end up on the floor." He forewarned.
He nodded, looking more scared than Holtz.
"Ready?" He asked as he shuffled himself so he was sat right on the end of the stool he was perched on, barely clinging on.
"Yep." He nodded again, exchanging quick and worried eye contact with the surgeon opposite them.
This certainly wasn't what either of them were expecting when they were told it would be 'all hands on deck'. They imagined running around with IVs and chasing labs and bookings CTs and X-rays and MRI, not left alone to do general surgery with a neurosurgeon who couldn't stand on his own two feet.
Then again, Derek certainly didn't imagine any of this either.
"You're uh- you're going to have to help me stand...like actually stand up."
The man nodded, wrapping his hands – extremely awkwardly – around Derek's torso before pulling him up. It was safe to say that neither one found it comfortable, but if it was going to save a life, as he had promised, neither one really cared in the slightest.
"Glove me again." Derek demanded, aware of the fact that he was posing a massive risk of infection to his patient.
"Is this...what you meant?" The man asked, hands doing something in between just supporting him to stop him from falling and lifting him off the ground. He wasn't quite sure what side he was closer to, but it appeared to be working as a technique to get him operating on the man as one hand reached for the suction tube the woman had put down.
"I suppose so." He said. If he was honest, he had no plan of how this was actually going to work. All he knew is that there was no one available nor skilled enough to fix this bleed except him. He shook himself out of the mind-set, handing the tube to the man opposite him so he could focus on actually repairing the bleed rather than just absorbing the blood leaking from the it. "Holtz, you're going to follow me with suction and I'm gonna find this bleed."
"Anyone know why it's important to stand for general surgery?" He asked as he searched through the man's abdomen, trying to shake the shock off both himself and the whole room.
"Better visualisation, you wouldn't be able to see the surgical field as well." The intern behind him said, talking quietly as he knew he was so close to him. Awfully close to him.
"Requires more movement to reach the different spaces in the abdominal cavity." Dr Holtz next proposed.
"So why is it that I can do neurosurgery?" He asked, tossing out another lap pad and replacing it with a new one.
"Positioning, the brain is small so can easily be seen from one place." Holtz suggested. "There is little need to move like you have to in general or cardio."
There was a quick moment of silence before the female intern guessed, "Massive haemorrhaging does not produce the same quantity of blood."
"Very good." He murmured, hands diving in and out of the cavity. "Fraser clip...nope, I need- McIndoe scissors and then forceps.
"Anyone give me a definition of neuropathic pain?" He requested.
"Shooting pain, tingling and numbness which is often a result of damage or malfunctioning of the nervous system. Can be caused by diabetes, HIV, multiple sclerosis, herniated spinal disks, multiple myeloma, chemotherapy and thyroid problems. Can be chronic, can come and go. It's a variable, unpredictable problem hence why it's such a seriously painful – mentally and physically – thing to have to live with."
He nodded to the answer. It was more than accurate.
"Okay, now I need the clip." Derek requested, putting down one instrument to pick up the next. "How about allodynia verses hyperalgesia?"
"Allodynia is extreme pain to a stimulus that shouldn't be painful, hyperalgesia is more severe pain than what should be experienced." Murray defined.
"Good," He congratulated to the man behind him. "And cautery."
"He's not going to suffer from neuropathic pain, allodynia nor hyperalgesia, is he? Cause he doesn't have any of the conditions that cause tho-"
"No, he doesn't." He agreed before murmuring through a wince, "But you missed SCIs out of your list."
Silence engulfed the room at that three lettered acronym.
He shouldn't have said it really.
But at least he got a chance to acknowledge what was happening to him. It still felt odd, despite the fact he was plagued with it every day. It wasn't a sensation that was supposed to occur in a normal human being. Limbs were supposed to hurt when they were being hurt or healing from being hurt, not when all scans were clear of any major problem that should be giving him that amount of pain.
Nerves were odd like that. He was the nerve guy and even his knowledge didn't scratch the surface of the number of things there still was to learn about neurons. No one understood nerves.
"Is it done?" The surgeon – or at least intern performing surgery – asked as Derek dropped the cautery back onto the instrument with a loud clash of metal, completely ignoring the awaiting scrub nurse who would have taken it from him and placed it back with an extremely minimal amount of noise. He didn't apologise, he couldn't.
"Mmm mmm." He murmured; eyes compressed shut as he sat back down with the guidance of the intern.
"I'm really sorry I couldn't find it myself." He apologised, still examining the place Derek had cauterized. It was in the upper right quadrant after all.
"Not your fault, it wasn't an easy- bleed- to-" He trailed off after his speech slowed to half-time speed.
Standing made him dizzy. He had noticed it before in physio but when there was a specific reason why he had to be standing, it made the feeling all the more prominent. He supposed it was possible that he actually had some kind of deficit in his brain which was causing his head to cause so many symptoms when standing. It seemed unlikely, seeing as the rest of that section of the brain controlled things that he was fine with, but it was still a possibility. That or the fact that he was only orthostatic on his feet for maybe a minute everyday meant his body was too confused to handle it for three.
He looked up from the surgical field to see him sat with his eyelids scrunched together, thumb pressing into the top of his thigh. "Dr Shepherd, are you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah. Fine." He agreed as he removed his hand, ignoring the blood coating his gloves.
He wasn't fine. Neuropathic pain was burning though every centimetre of his legs and despite the fact that his abrupt episode of allodynia meant that the slightest pressure of his thumb sent his nerves into pain overdrive, he needed to feel something real. Something that wasn't numb pins and needles.
"Just- could you take me back to-" He gestured with his free hand to the patient's head.
Dr Murray nodded before grabbing the back of the stool and dragging it – and him – across the OR floor until he reached where he was before to continue his own surgery.
"What the hell is happening in here?" Bailey asked as she walked back into the room, completely unaware of the chaos her departure had caused. The suction tube still lingered in Holtz's hand and there was a mountain of vermillion lap pads besides the patient.
"Re-bleed." Holtz answered as his superior looked into the chest cavity to see simply organs, not a pool of blood.
"You fixed it yourself Holtz?" She questioned, her eyebrows almost touching the ceiling with surprise.
He shook his head. "Dr Shepherd fixed it."
"Oh." She breathed before turning to him. She was about to ask how in the world he managed to do general surgery sitting down until her eyes settled on him. Clearly, that was the problem, he hadn't.
"And now?" She asked slowly, looking from the man with a sudden and intense interest in his own legs to the man stood over the chest cavity.
"Now I'm waiting for proper feeling to return to my left leg and the world to stop spinning." He explained, eyes now closed and head down simply so he didn't have to look at anyone as he announced his explanation.
Bailey swallowed, looking at him with burrowed eyebrows and concerned eyes. "You want me to call for another neurosurgeon?"
"No, no it's fine. It only lasts a minute. Or two..." He sighed. "Can someone take me out? To rescrub?
His wife was perched on the edge of a gurney in the hallway, head down and hands grasping against the side of the mattress. Her hair wasn't tied up but it was in the messy, unbrushed and confused state it normally was in after she pulled off her scrub hat and her hair tie out. Normally a quick hand ruffling through her locks would sort it out and it would return to its regular beauty within a second. But she hadn't done that.
"Hey, you okay?" He asked as he approached her.
She looked up at the sound of his voice, barely even hearing what he had said. Just the concern. The love. The desperate worry in his tone that begged for the frown on her face to shift to a smile. "My patient died."
"I'm sorry."
"We should have kept going." She murmured, eyes dropping to look at her toes. Or not her toes, seeing as the fact her belly was in the way of that. "We could have transfused more blood and gotten her back."
"Could have?" He asked softly. He didn't want to push, but she almost made it sound like it was unfair that they stopped. Well, all of it was unfair. Death was unfair. But it sounded like there was something more going on in her tone.
She slid off the gurney, shoes hitting the corridor's floor with a soft patter. "She'd already lost a kidney and her spleen. I'd resected a lot of bowel – she was going to need a permanent stoma – and Shelby was dealing with an epidural bleed." She explained before her pacing started. She stopped abruptly, looking back up to him. "She was dying and Oscar told me to just stop."
"Stop?" He repeated. Surgeons didn't stop. Surgeons didn't ever just stop their surgeries while the patient was crashing.
"He was right though. She died about ten seconds later. But still...we weren't trying to help her in her final moments."
"And that hurts." He concluded.
She nodded her head. "God- Derek, it hurts. I mean- who does that? I shouldn't have pulled my hands out. The patient was haemorrhaging and we could have kept going. Just because she only made it for another ten seconds, who was to say that she couldn't have lived for just a little longer. Another day. Another week. Something...I could have given her something more than what she got." She paused for just a second, taking in a heavy exhale before continuing, "There were other patients I needed to see. Other patients he needed to get to and everyone in that OR had to get to because that's what always happens on a day like this. There's no time to save the people who are close to death when you can prevent the others from getting to that line. I couldn't save her by myself."
"Meredith." He called, feeling her rant should come to a conclusion. There was only so much the de-stressor could do, realistically.
"And of course, no one actually ever taught the intern how to follow someone with suction properly so th-"
"Meredith!" He barked.
She stopped, looking round at him. "What?" She shouted, voice echoing down the hall.
He didn't say anything for a second, letting her calm a little. His head tilted a little as he said softly, "This. This is when I hug you."
"When you what?" She asked, her voice shifting from loud and angry to quiet and confused in the matter of a second.
"This is where I would walk over to you and give you a massive hug. You'd shut up in my arms and then we could talk it through together instead of you just throwing words at me. And you'd always feel an awful lot better when I did that than when I left you to your own devices to keep doing what you're doing. But I can't. I can't walk so I can't hug you. So please, come here and shout instead." He elaborated, holding a hand out to her. He trapped his bottom lip in his teeth. "Please, Mer."
"Oh-" She breathed.
If she was honest, she hadn't even thought about him. She knew he had surgery too. His patient could have died too. His patient could have been a mother of five or an innocent toddler or a fellow firefighter. His patient could have been a somebody too. They always were a somebody to someone, but the more people that was, the more pain the death caused so she could only hope that the patients that fell were the least amount of 'somebody' they could possibly be.
He certainly looked like his patient could have died: drawn in, down-turned down lips and a fallen brow. "Are you okay?"
"I'll be fine when you're fine." He reassured her, pulling her towards him as she grabbed his outstretched hand. She sighed as he slid right into the backrest of his chair and tapped at his lap. She obliged to the movement.
"I need to train these interns better." She murmured as his hands wrapped around her stomach before pressing a kiss to the back of her head. She adjusted herself a little so she was sat at a slight angle. That way she could actually see the man she was pretty sure she was squishing to death. Although, he didn't complain.
"The interns are the stupid ones Mer, they need to learn better." He corrected.
"You fell in love with an intern." She remarked.
"Yeah-" He agreed through a sigh. "-but she was different. She wasn't really an intern. She was too intelligent and too driven and too...well, perfect to be an intern."
"Thanks." She said as she smiled a little, although it wasn't a humoured grin at the deception that he was obviously throwing over her. It was just a thankful grin. It faded as she whispered, "The woman died."
"And that's the thing I wish I could offer you solace and peace in."
"But you can't-" She started before a hand ruffled through her hair."-because she died."
"If it helps, my guy didn't die. That's one less time of death called in this world."
"Yeah." Her frown resolved to the slightest curl of her lips. "Yeah, that helps."
"And this?" He inquired as one hand released her to brush her flaxen locks to one side of her shoulder so he could kiss against her neck freely.
"That helps too." She said through a giggle.
"And this?" He asked again as a hand brushed her chin carefully and guided it towards his face so he could kiss her on the lips. It didn't feel despondent nor bittersweet despite the fact one member of the party was so upset. Derek's mind was flooded with negative emotion too, but she didn't need to know that.
"That helps. That helps an awful lot. But I believe our children need picking up."
"Mmm...probably." He murmured between three kisses.
"Hey." She greeted as she stepped out the door.
He said he was okay when she asked him about his surgery, but the more she thought about it, the worse her worrying gone.
"Hey."
"You're not okay, are you?"
He shrugged, his face neutral as the movement.
"Why are you out here?"
"Wanted some fresh air." He murmured, looking out to the sky. It was night – deep into the night – so the only colour that occupied the sky was black. Stars twinkled every, what seemed to them, couple of centimetres, although he knew there was thousands upon thousands of kilometres between them really. It was just the deception of sight that made him perceive it that way.
She waited a moment before asking once more, "Do you wanna talk about why?"
He paused for a similar amount of time, still looking up to the sky. "I stood in the OR today." He stated.
"Like to reach something or-" She started, unable to come up with an alternate reason for him to be performing such a task.
"I don't know for how long." He shrugged as if it would really make his answer any less significant that it really was. "But it was longer than…I don't really know, two minutes?"
"How?" She asked before she hand a chance to stop herself. She bit at her tongue. "Why, I mean, not how…why were you standing in the OR? And for two minutes?"
"We were stretched for staff. Bailey had to go to another trauma. So I had to do the surgery…or a bit of it." He answered, his tone a personification of the carefree shrug he gave. Even he wasn't sure where all the emotion in his voice had gone.
"Oh." Meredith breathed. "Bailey."
He looked round to her, ignoring the scenery for the first time since he entered the outside world. "Mer?"
"I was the one who paged Bailey." She swallowed. "For my patient."
"You…what? You were already operating when you paged her?" He asked, confused about why her patient was in such desperate need of two general attending. He and Bailey had assumed between them that it was a trauma case with no attending, not one who just needed another.
"It was just such a mess. I needed an extra set of hands." She tried to explain, feeling anger boil within the man opposite her.
"So my patient was left with me – the neurosurgeon who can't stand in his own two feet – as his general surgeon substitute to do an operation you literally have to stand for. Send the art teacher to do the Spanish teacher's job, why don't you? That'll end well."
"I couldn't handle it by myself."
"It was a 9-1-1 Meredith! You don't page a 9-1-1 when you're already operating on the woman!"
"It was an emergency. She was dying so I paged 9-1-1, that's how that works!" She sighed. "Look- I'm sorry, I didn't think anyone would answer the page if they were in surgery."
"He was stable. So she left. Then he wasn't stable. And she didn't come back."
"Derek-" She tried, although all that happened after that was him cutting her off.
"Then I had to stand like an idiot with an intern – a freaking intern Meredith – with his arms around my waist because I was the only one in the OR who could find the bleed and I can't keep upright nor stop my the pain without it. Not the only one who knew how to cauterize it Mer. The only one who could find it. You were right about interns being idiots, you know, but at least they had an excuse when they can't find and cauterize a bleed by themselves. They're supposed to be bad at this. But you're not." He took a moment to release himself from the insults he was flinging at her, taking one heavy intake in and out. He didn't think about what he had said nor what he was about to say in those few seconds. "It was...Meredith, do you have any idea how humiliating that was for me? Could you seriously not have just dealt with it yourself?"
"Okay, Derek, that is not fair and you know it." She said, standing now.
"Since when have things been fair? Name me one time in either of our lives where things have been fair!" He demanded.
She didn't falter as he expected her to. "Things started being fair when you stopped talking like that. Now you're doing it again. I get it, okay? You're trying to learn how to be you again and that's hard. Really hard. But you found someone to be. Someone I liked and someone I know you liked. You found yourself and now you're losing it again."
"I don't know how to not lose that guy Meredith. He just- he just disappears and reappears when he feels like it. And you telling me you want me to be that guy is great and all, but I can't bend at your will. I can't just become someone else because you're pressuring me into changing how I feel to fit the perfect little husband you've want, not the one you've got and you're stuck with."
"Don't blame any of this on me. I'm trying. I'm trying really hard. I've ignored the fact I'm gonna give birth to a living, breathing, heart-beating little human being in a few weeks so I can focus on you being okay. I'm not ready for this. Neither are you. Derek, I'm pregnant and you're still trying to hold yourself together with sellotape."
"I'm not!"
"Prove it to me then. Prove to me that you don't need your hand held by me for everything you do. Stop being so irrational. And impulsive. And arrogant. And stupid."
"I am not-" He protested, not even getting a chance to state which adjective he disagreed with.
"For the love of God, yes you are!" She shouted, glad they had chosen a spot outside now. "Stop trying to stand every five seconds and transfer yourself to impossible locations. You did it when you were first discharged. I was tired. I was so damn tired from having to look after you by myself for the first time and you just had to make that day all the more difficult by sitting on the floor. You couldn't sit on the floor. You couldn't get up off the floor so you weren't supposed to be there. You played catch with the kids and fell backwards out your chair. You could have hurt yourself. You could have broken your chair and I'd have to go and get that horrible one that the hospital offered that always used to make your left hip throb and that you could never manage to keep up with. Then you would have complained, as if it was my fault. You ended up on the ground of a patient's room, holding her in the recovery position. Then you seemed almost surprised that you were in pain. You decided it would be a good idea to go for an unaccompanied, unauthorized walk-about in your physio room and almost pulled your shoulder out. And I- I don't even know what to say about that one. You could have dislocated your shoulder, then you would have- well, I don't even know what, you would have knocked out three out of four limbs. Suppose you would have got an upgrade. A motorized upgrade. You could have hit your head. You could have caused a bleed. You could have burst unsuspecting aneurism. You could have stroked out on the floor of a physiotherapists room." She breathed. She needed to breath. Desperately. "Or, you could have stayed in your chair. You could have stayed in and played with the kids. You could have just called someone to help you. You could have just not been such a massive idiot. You could have found some solution that was better than you performing an ex-lap. You didn't have to do any of those things. Yet you did for some reason I'll never understand."
"You can't understand me Mer. You can't know what this feels like to me beca-"
"I swear to god Derek, if you say the same thing to me as you did to the chief," She threatened. She wasn't quite sure how to finish her blackmail so she simply gave a heavy exhale instead. "I'm not saying it's a bad word. In fact, it's a good word. The word people are supposed to use instead whatever discriminative terms they manage to come up with. But you've actually got to acknowledge what it means, you can't just chuck it about everywhere you go but ignore its meaning. There are some things you just can't do anymore. There are some things you'll never be able to do. So you've got to stop doing them because newsflash, if something causes you pain, you probably should be doing it. That's what it means. Now whether someone can't do something because of the pain it would cause them or because they literally, physically can't do something, that doesn't matter. That's not relevant here. You just have to acknowledge that that is what it means. I don't want to call it a limit…that feels wrong. But it- it kinda is."
She expecting him to say something to that. But he didn't. He just sat there, staring up at her with confliction spelled out on every inch of his face.
"It's great that you're not trying to limit yourself. You're doing the best you can with what you are limited to. You just-" She trailed off, getting lost in his eyes. But not in the romantic way she normally did.
"I just need to what?" He asked, astonishingly softly. He sounded genuine. Real. As he actually wanted to know the answer to her paragraph, but not in the sarcastic way she was expecting. "Because you're contradicting yourself here and I don't know who I'm supposed to be listening to anymore."
"You're not doing it sensibly. You're not doing anything sensibly. With a level head. And there's nothing wrong with you. You aren't the problem. It's the cinemas with broken lifts and people who were never properly trained to not gawp at people who are different to them that are the problem…but you've got to stop trying to be like everyone else. You've got to stop being so careless. I know you were mad after your shouting match with the chief but you could have seriously hurt yourself doing that! You don't think. Ever! You don't consider me!"
"I don't want to fight Meredith." He sighed as he pushed himself inside.
"You do. You do want to fight. All you did for freaking months was cause fight after fight about DC. If you really hated fighting, you would have quit that job and come home to your wife and children!" She exclaimed, following him inside.
"DC? Seriously Meredith? You're chucking DC at me?"
"You don't just get to forget about it because it was before the accident. That's not how this works! You don't get a clean slate because you were hit by a truck! DC was my life for months. Months and months and months of my life."
"And now, believe it or not, my whole life is about this. Whenever anyone thinks about me, it is literally just this wheelchair and the fact that I'm, watch out I'm saying it, disabled that comes to mind. Which is great, Meredith, honestly, it's freaking great. I don't mind the fact that I'm not going to walk again. It's fine by me. But living with the fear that I'm going to get assaulted by a patient or be asked to ignore the fact that my legs are literally useless because otherwise, I'm just an inconvenience. So freaking inconvenient for other people, right? You get that. I'm inconvenient for you. I know that. I'm annoying to deal with. So I'm sorry if I'm trying to be normal. I wish I could be normal. Then I could do all those things without it being a big deal. But I'm not. I'm not normal Meredith. I'm different. And different is bad. I'm trying...okay? I'm trying-"
"Dada?" A high voice called. "Why you shouting?"
The parents of the six-year-old turned to look at her, stood by the stairs.
So much for him diffusing the fight.
Zola. Their girl was stood there, wide-eyed and lost. Their arguments had evidently woken her up. That was the exact thing they both always feared from their arguments.
"I'm sorry baby." Meredith apologized, stepping towards her and shooting her husband a look. "I- um, I'll come back upstairs with you. I can read you a story."
Her eyes flickered between them for a second before settling on her mother as she gave a satisfied nod.
Post-sleep was a place where Meredith could normally hang in bliss. She didn't think, not really. She just thought about how perfect the warmth below her was and how soft the sheets were against her bare feet and arms. The soft light spilling in from the windows didn't really affect her. It was mild enough that it didn't hurt her eyes, but she was aware of the fact that it was morning. She stretched, hand brushing her stomach. It reminded her of the world. Nothing specific. Just the fact she had a life to get to. Responsibilities and jobs.
She was sure that her eyes had already dropped open already – she wasn't sure how she could have guessed a number so close to the true time if she hadn't seen it recently.
Derek wasn't besides her.
For a second, still living in that same dreamy state, she didn't notice nor care that he wasn't there. Then she remembered the night before. The week before. The month before. The year before. Reality hit her hard.
She sat up, being careful not to stand up from the bed too quickly. Gestational anemia made it hard to stand up in the mornings without having to sit back down as her head received to an instant set of throbs as the world spun and her vision was flushed with tiny, sparkling dots. She learned to wait. It was only an extra five seconds.
She pulled open the door, no need to pull down on the handle as she noticed the crack between the door and its frame. Clearly, someone had opened the door between when she and Derek went to bed and that very moment.
"Hey, you-" She paused as she stepped into their lounge-kitchen combo room only to find the place totally and utterly uninhabited. Great. For a man who couldn't, really, leave the house himself, he did like disappearing a lot.
Meredith sighed as she stepped into the kitchen to find a piece of paper and a pen on the table. The piece of paper that informed her that he'd taken a taxi – to get the ferry, because he was Derek – and that he didn't want her to call but would answer if she did. Great. For a man who couldn't, really, leave the house himself, he really did love disappearing a lot.
She didn't call. She didn't dare to call. It was clear from his note that, while he would gladly answer her, he didn't want her to. So she resisted the urge, leaving him be through the whole time she was preparing her children for childcare and the first two hours of work.
She could see through the ER window of the trauma room that it was chaos. It was always chaos in the trauma room, that was the state that those rooms inherently came with. She shoved open the door to see a man, eyes half-open on the gurney and doctors swarming around him.
"Hey, what we got?" She inquired as she stepped into the room, analysing the scene unfolding in front of her.
"Brian Lewington, 68, took a fall down the stairs. GCS of 6. Positive LOC." Bailey answered, a chest tube in her hands. "Probable abdominal bleeding too."
She nodded to the information, taking a moment to look over the patient.
"Grey, I could do with you over here, need you to check distention and do an ultrasound."
She didn't reply verbally or with another nod of her head, instead simply heading towards the patient.
"Derek." Meredith said to Amelia as she found a spot besides her and the paramedic who was doing a quick wrap of the man's wrist, starting work on the patient.
"Is he okay?" Amelia asked, concerned about the fact the first thing she said after hearing of a trauma was about her brother.
They talked all the time about the drama within the hospital walls while treating patients. It was unprofessional and wrong, but no one ever seemed to complain nor raise the point that the patient probably did not want to know that some intern was pregnant or some resident was on a week probation for messing up a patient's chart.
"Have you seen him?" She asked, picking up the ultrasound at the side of the room.
"Yesterday, why? Is he not okay?" Amelia asked.
"I haven't seen him this morning. He left a note saying he went out but I'm still worried."
"Maybe he got held up after a physio session." She guessed, more focused on her patient than what her brother was doing. She knew Meredith worried. A lot. And most of the time, it seemed unjustified or at least an overreaction. If she was honest, there was always something to worry about with him since the accident.
She shook her head. "I didn't take him to physio this morning."
"Well ask whoever did then." Amelia offered through a shrug.
"No one did. He didn't show up. He would have got a taxi if he didn't want me to take him."
"So the last time you saw him was-" She prompted.
"Last night. He left me a note saying he was going ferry boat-ing. But before we were…kinda fighting." She confessed. She wasn't quite sure she could call what they had been doing just 'kinda fighting'. She would be alarmed to see what real fighting was if that was just 'kinda'. They were shouting. Emotions were running high. Their exchange was most definitely fighting. "I mean- we weren't fighting-fighting. He was just- he was being Derek."
"What is this about you and Shepherd fighting?" Oscar questioned as he waltzed into the room, someone presenting him with a scan before he even took three mere steps. He mulled over it for a second before nodding to the scrubbed person.
"We weren't." She dismissed quickly, trying her best not to roll her eyes at the intrusive man. The intrusive man who their fights were based on. "And, Dr Shepherd is here, we don't need two neuro consults."
He didn't shift, confining to look at the scan anyway. "Just offering a second opinion, what is so wrong with that?"
The door opened and a paramedic stepped into the busy room, swarming with doctors. Their partner was still inside the trauma room, evidently getting distracted by the careful wrapping of the man's arm he was doing. "Leon, c'mon. I've got another call…someone seizing on a ferry boat, the Seattle terminal. It's bad."
The younger doctor nodded, putting down the roll of gauze he was wrapping the patients arm with abruptly and rushing out the door behind his partner.
Amelia didn't return to her neurological examination as she simply stared at the closed door.
"Earth to Amelia?" was the first thing she heard since the words 'ferry boat'. She shook herself out of her thought quickly, slipping her penlight back into her pocket as she looked to Meredith.
"Huh, maybe you do need two neurosurgeons on one case, seeing as one of them as seemingly left." Oscar snarled.
"Amelia?"
"Where did Derek go this morning?"
Meredith swallowed before repeating, "Ferry boat, why?"
Silence fell among the people that heard both what the paramedic said, and their two-sentence conversation.
The problem was Meredith didn't hear the first bit. She was too busy eyeing Shelby as he paraded around the room like he owned the place, as he did daily.
"What?" She breathed, finding multiple pairs of eyes on her. They were all so...alarmed.
"That paramedic just said someone was having a seizure. On...on a ferry boat."
Meredith was a doctor. One that looked at real, scientific proof of diseases and illness and trauma. It was stupid to assume it was him really. As a doctor, she worked on evidence, and she had no evidence. He hadn't had a seizure in over six months. He didn't ever get a diagnosis of post-traumatic epilepsy after his traumatic brain injury because he didn't fit into the criteria. His seizures stopped. Even the migraines and sensitivities he was left with after his TBI was better, discounting when he had a major stressor. But still...it could still be him. Him on the floor of a ferry boat, shaking and convulsing as his brain misfired in his head so severely that it caused a seizure.
She didn't register that with a physical response but ripped off her gloves instantly, chucking them into the bin before pulling her phone out of her scrub pant pocket. She felt more eyes on herself than on the patient as she pulled the phone to her ear.
It rung.
And rung.
And rung.
She sighed, pressing his name again only for it to ring through again.
"Well?"
"He said he'd pick up." She said, mouth dropping open. "He promised that he'd answer me if I called. But it's not him. Right? Just he...just because he got the ferry this morning. That doesn't mean it's him, does it?"
"Go on then!" Bailey instructed.
Meredith turned to the woman, confused at what she was commanding her to do.
"What?" Meredith asked, confused by Bailey's sudden demand.
"Derek isn't picking up after promising he would and someone is seizing on a ferry boat. Go!" She ordered again.
"Are you serious?" She questioned, surprised by her sudden kindness. Contrary to other people's belief, Bailey could be kind – if she wanted to. But offering to let her go for something that was a massive maybe surprised her. If they knew it was him, of course they'd let her go. In fact, she was pretty sure they would all offer to drive her there. But they didn't know. It was just a guess. A suspicion.
"If you go before I change my mind, then yes, fine." She offered, wishing the woman would just hurry up and leave.
"Thanks." She said as she pulled off her gloves and dumped them in the bin besides the door.
"Grey." She called out.
Meredith paused, hand still lingering on the door.
"Take more than an hour and you can take five off me next week."
"I- okay." She submitted, sighing as she ripped off her trauma gown. That's where classic Bailey was then. It was a fair enough trade off though. She would rather take more than an hour and get stuck with extra hours than walk around the ER for hours, worrying about him, even if he was okay in the end.
"And."
She paused again. Almost out.
"Don't you dare let that man need another ambulance. He's been in this ER far too many times already."
She sighed. "I'll try Bailey."