A/N: Hopefully, not needed, but a disclaimer just the same. Short of the ZA, please don't ever attempt to debride a wound without a medical professional.
August 17-18, 2010
Sophia switches off the alarm she slipped out of Shane's room when he went back to sleep after she woke him at nine last night. His fever was holding steady just over 102, and they cleaned the wound again. This time, he took his meds and Gatorade after he threw up from the wound cleaning.
He only managed half a bowl of the vegetable soup she warmed up. She put the rest in the fridge to try again later.
She didn't think sleep would be easy, worrying about Shane barely waking for her poor attempt at nursing and going right back to bed despite the pain. But now she's glad she set the alarm.
The PDR indicates the antibiotics have to stay on schedule, so she pads down the hall to the kitchen. Until she knows how he's feeling, she isn't going to fix any food. Gathering the pills and drink, she grimaces.
This is the last of the bottled Gatorade, but when she put away the groceries, she found three cans of powder to make more already in his pantry. She'll just refill the bottles.
She guesses his fever isn't better, because he's kicked the sheet away. At least the bandaging is still secure.
"Shane?"
He rouses, groggy and blinking. "Fee? Time's it?"
"Four in the morning. It's time for meds. Need to take your temp."
She plucks the thermometer off the nightstand and hands it over. As soon as the beep sounds, she's looking and grimaces. 102.6.
"It's higher. I want to look at your chest."
The quiet that worries her earlier persists, because he just peels back the bandaging and lets her look.
"It's still oozing," she says. "And it's darker now. Not black but close, on the edges." She brushes against his leg and he flinches. Gentle prodding shows it's the whole left leg that's painful. From the textbooks, it means the infection is widespread, not just his chest.
"What's your book say?"
"We have to get the black off."
Debridement. It's happening a little, because the pad closest to his skin dried out and pulled some of the gross bits away. But out of all the ways mentioned, she thinks the worst is what they'll need to do.
And she thinks he realizes what it means too, because he shudders.
"If you'll bring me supplies, I'll work on it."
"It'll be safer if I do it." His hands are already unsteady. Holding anything sharp isn't going to work.
"Can I see the book?"
She trots down the hall to the living room, where the book is on the couch where she left it when she kept nodding off last night. This one is just procedures, and the debridement section made her want to throw up.
Sophia grabs the shopping bag she put all the extra medical supplies in while she's on that end of the house. Back in Shane's room, he's in the bathroom, so she waits and rereads the rather intimidating words.
The wobbly walk she noticed last night is still there when Shane makes his way back to the bed. He reads the section she points out and checks another about burns before nodding.
"There's a tool box in the closet in the smallest bedroom. Should be a bunch of razor blades in it from when I was working on stripping caulk. Might be best to boil them," he suggests.
Sophia finds the toolbox and the blades. She tries to imagine holding onto the little blades and grabs the scraper too. Dumping several blades, the scraper,and the oversized medical tweezers in a pot on the stove, she sets it to boil, pacing nervously. She isn't sure she is really brave enough for this part, but there's no one else.
He's pulled the bedding even further out of the way when she returns and put a layer of towels down. They irrigated his chest on the floor last night, but this might take longer.
"Good. You cooled the water," Shane says, looking at the stock pot she's carrying. Most of the ice melted, but a few chunks remain.
She nods and sits the pot down on the nightstand on a potholder. "I figured we didn't want to wait on it to be cool on its own."
"Sophia, you don't have to do this."
She guesses he knows she's scared. "Your hands are shaking. You might hurt yourself worse."
Shane studies her for a long moment before nodding. He lays down on the bed, reaching up to grip the headboard.
In the textbook, there's supposed to be pain meds given: the shots like the dentist uses. Instead, he just endures as she clears away the discharge with gauze soaked in alcohol. It takes three of the plain gauze pads before she's soaked it all away.
Shane's shaking and she didn't think anyone could hold their body so rigid without breaking something. She bites her lip as she dips a gloved hand into the water and fishes out a blade and the scraper. It attaches easier than she expected.
After saying his hands are shaking, it figures that hers start once she's also got the tweezers.
Shane opens his eyes and watches her carefully. "You don't gotta do this."
"I can do it."
Her hands stop shaking under his inquiring gaze, so he nods and takes a deep breath.
The next ten minutes will replace running on her own from walkers as the most traumatic thing she's ever done until the end of her life, she thinks. As much as he's fought for quiet when she's cleaning the wound, he loses the battle when the razor meets flesh. She fights the urge to throw up, holding the ugly, dying edges of the wound while she slices them away.
Through it all, even as he gives voice to the pain of having bits of him cut away, he never lets go his grip on the headboard to stay out of her way. She can see tears streaming down the side of his face.
When there's no more of the blackening flesh, she drops the scraper onto the pile of discarded medical supplies. The wound is bleeding again, so she irrigates it before pressing a pad of gauze against it. Holding it down firmly, she can feel the hitches in his breathing and his heart rate slowly returning to normal.
"I think I got it all."
He doesn't open his eyes this time. "Good girl."
It's husky, his voice deep from the strain, and she blinks away tears. He's always so easy with praise, casual words of thanks or good jobs that feel like treasure she's gathering close. Even her mama isn't so generous, always too wary of drawing Ed's attention on them both.
They wait in silence for the bleeding to ease. When ten minutes pass on the little wrist watch he gave her, she lifts the edge of the gauze. The bleeding is barely an ooze. She carefully wipes his skin clean.
She doesn't know enough, even after the textbooks, to be sure, but she thinks they would never be able to stitch this wound now. She cut away too much for the edges to meet again. It's raw and ugly and she doesn't begin to understand how his body can heal it.
Glad he got extra tubes of the antibiotic cream at the pharmacy to add to the partials they collected from the cabin and farm, she applies the ointment and one of the alginate dressings. Once she's finished all the bandaging, he shudders and rolls, throwing up into the trash can. There's not much other than dry heaves, because he hasn't drank anything yet.
"Maybe you should take the better pain meds now? It's got Tylenol in it, too."
"Yeah, probably should." Shane manages to take the two pain pills and the antibiotics.
"If you can let me get the towels, I can wash them. I got all the other dirty clothes washed." Plus the bedding in Carl's room, because it smelled dusty and she craved sleeping on fresh sheets.
He manages to free the wet, blood soiled towels and pass them to her without a fuss. She takes them to the washing machine and dumps them inside and starts the load.
When she returns to clean up the mess of used medical supplies, he's leaned against the pillows and sipping the Gatorade. His skin is sallow, making the rash she can see along one side stand out. There's still too many things that could be making him sick and no way to run tests.
"When did you have a tetanus shot last?" That was a frightening section to read about.
"Last year, actually. Cut my arm on a piece of rusty metal chasing a suspect down."
Probably not that one, at least.
"Do you think you can eat anything yet?"
Shane grimaces. "Let's see how the Gatorade settles first."
"Do you need me to bring you anything?" He doesn't even have a television in the bedroom, not that it would work anymore except with DVDs.
"Nah. Probably gonna sleep more. You doing okay?"
Sophia nods. "I've got books and food and no walkers anywhere near."
That earns her a wan smile. "Easy to be content these days, huh, kiddo?"
She smiles and takes the bag from the trash can with all the used supplies and carries it to the big trash can. It's starting to get light outside, so she debates breakfast versus going back to sleep herself. A full tummy wins out, so she sets the kettle to boil.
When she returns to Shane's room to replace the trash can liner, he's asleep, but at least he drank half the bottle of Gatorade. It's a bigger one, 32 ounces, so that's a decent amount, she guesses. She's not entirely sure how to tell what's enough.
Pulling the sheet over him, she wishes she could pull the curtains closed. But he needs the cooler air more than he needs a dark room, so she leaves them alone. Stopping by her room, she sets the alarm for ten a.m., when he needs to take meds again.
The kettle begins the whine that signals it's going to whistle. She gets to it before it gets loud. One of the boxes they gathered at the two farms was instant cream of wheat. It's a banana walnut one, not her favorite maple brown sugar, but it's breakfast.
Even though it's already warm, she makes a cup of cocoa too. Sitting at the table with a normal breakfast, she doesn't eat. Instead, she covers her face and cries all the tears she didn't when she had to hurt the only person left in her world to make him better.
She wants her mama more now than she did that first night hidden in that tiny pantry in the dark.
At ten, she's jolted out of where she fell asleep in the couch after finally eating her breakfast. It takes her a minute to recognize the alarm beeping down the hall. She shuts it off on the way by.
Shane's pushed the sheet away again. There's still a rash, but it doesn't look worse than before. His breathing is shallow and labored, and he makes a whimpering sound when she touches his forehead like her mama does when she's sick.
His skin feels like it is on fire.
He doesn't wake even as she peels back the bandaging, wanting to cry in relief that the wound seems unchanged. It's still red and oozing fluid, but it's a clear fluid, like the book says it should be. She tapes the bandaging back down.
"Shane. C'mon, you gotta wake up to take your medicine."
As much as she hates it, she shakes him a little. When there's no response other than mumbled protest, she goes and gets a bowl of water, remembering her mama wiping her skin down when she had a bad fever. She sops a wet wash cloth against his skin.
It wakes him up finally. "Fee?"
She wasn't sure earlier that he was trying to say her name while groggy, but now she is.
"Yeah. It's time for meds again."
He lets her take his temperature, barely awake, and doesn't ask what she sees.
102.9.
Worried, she fumbles for the meds, starting with the pain med first. It she can get that in him, maybe he'll be able to wake up more. With a lot of pleases and repeating herself, she actually gets him to take all the pills he needs.
She paces for an hour between bouts of sponging his overheated skin before trying to wake him again.
It's easier this time. He blinks at her and drinks obediently, but only as long as she insists. She keeps at it until the bottle is empty.
The PDR says the hydrocodone can make people sleep. She hopes that's the primary reason he can't seem to fully wake up. She thinks she may give him regular Tylenol next time, just to see, if his pain isn't awful.
After going to the bathroom and getting something to drink of her own, she's hit with a rather horrifying thought. What if he needs the bathroom like this? Deciding not to borrow trouble until it comes, she mixes up Gatorade and refills the three empty bottles.
Putting two in the fridge, she takes the other back to Shane's room along with a book. She can't bring herself to stay very far away.
They repeat the process every six hours. She takes breaks to feed herself and mix more Gatorade each time a bottle is empty. Otherwise, she camps out at the foot of his bed, leaned against pillows taken from her own.
His fever dips down two hours after each dose of meds, but as soon as they wear off, it's back. Never as high as the mid-morning one, thankfully. Meds, Gatorade, sleep. Repeat.
Shane's nightmares begin after nightfall.
He begs and pleads, mostly with Rick, for things she can't always make out. He worries about where Carl is, pleading with his brother to keep the boy safe. He cries about being a killer, begging forgiveness of someone named Otis. Once, he has a conversation with his mother, seeming confused because she's been dead for years.
He soothes when she sponges his skin, so she tries that when he gets too distressed. She's afraid to sleep, in case he gets worse while she's not watching.
If he loses the battle his body is fighting against the infection, she'll be alone again.
If he dies, she doesn't think she can live with being by herself.
In the dimly lit bedroom, curled up and watching Shane caught in another round of pleading with his brother to keep Carl safe, she thinks she understands what the word hate really means for the first time.
Sometimes she hated her daddy, when he was drunk and angry and being Ed the Asshole rather than her daddy. But she loved him too. It harder to remember the good times now, when he drank less and smiled more. When she tried to really hate him, it never felt right.
But now, watching someone else suffer who was left behind to die by Rick Grimes, she remembers they aren't the only ones.
Merle Dixon got left too, and he cut off his own hand to escape being left to be eaten. He ran from walkers too. How scared would you have to be to cut off your own hand? To run and keep running, not even to your only brother.
She got left, and she's the lucky one. She didn't tell Shane how awful the first night was. She doesn't want to admit that she changed to the boy clothes at that first abandoned house after she wet herself because she was too afraid to stop running even when her bladder felt like bursting. It still makes her skin crawl with shame. But she still has all her body parts.
And here's Shane, who loves Rick and Carl so much Carl has his own room here and his nightmares center around them both. Left behind, injured and sick, running from walkers in the night. She's old enough to know a stab wound when she sees it.
Shane blames himself for that, says he did bad things. Killed people, wanted to kill Rick.
The way she sees it, everything started falling apart after Rick Grimes came back from the dead. The team trapped in Atlanta and a man left behind to die? He caused them to be trapped.
The quarry attack. The blown up CDC building he insisted they go to, when Shane wanted to go west. Going hungry on the highway, driving aimlessly when she and Shane got all the way here with no problem and plenty of food.
She doesn't trust Rick to keep her mama safe, not really. She doesn't know Daryl well enough to trust he can, either. But she does remember that when the quarry was attacked, Shane put himself in between the walkers and not just Carl and his mama, but Sophia and hers too.
Hating Ed was hard.
Hating Rick? It's as easy as breathing.
Sophia thinks if she ever sees Rick Grimes again, she just might shoot him and hope Shane forgives her for it.
Dawn lends filtered light to the room and she sees Shane sweating for the first time, and there's no more fever. Careful not to disturb his wound, she curls up against him and lets the exhaustion win.