Chapter: 12
The Accident
Eight weeks into her ten weeks of department mandated physical therapy, Renee's body finally caught up with her overworked muscles. Her therapist told her to do her exercises for half an hour every day, but Renee didn't listen to her doctor.
Renee completely disregarded what her doctor said and did her exercises for at least an hour, if not more every day.
Renee overworks her body and doesn't eat or drink. She possesses an obsessive personality, and when she hyper focuses on anything, she would forget to eat or drink from a very young age.
This is the only time in her life that her personality quirk is actually very dangerous. Eventually, her body catches up with her personality, and she collapses in Horatio's house. Luckily it happens when her brother is at home with her.
Renee and Horatio just finished watching the movie, Hacksaw Ridge in the living room when Renee gets up to walk down the hall to grab something from her bedroom.
At the moment that she gets to her bedroom door, her legs buckle out from under her. This causes her to fall forwards a little making her bang the wall very loud.
She never has a chance to catch herself since it is at that instant that Renee passed out losing consciousness. This makes her fall back, and in the process, she slams the back of her head into the corner of the thin marble console table that Horatio has in the hall. The fall ends up breaking the corner off of the table.
Horatio didn't notice that Renee left until he hears a very loud banging noise coming from the bedroom hall. The sound startled him quite a bit. With a start, he looks over to where his sister was sitting. He notices that her walker was still standing there where she left it, and Renee is not there.
Seeing her walker where it is and not seeing his sister Horatio starts to panic. Quickly running around the corner of the bedroom hallway, his heart stops.
There right in front of him, he watches his sister fall in slow motion. It was too far away from him to do anything about it. He sees her slam the back of her head into his marble console table, breaking the corner.
His baby sister lands on her back. Her legs are crumpled under her, and her arms are sticking out at strange angles. Renee's eyes are closed, and her face is turned onto the right side of her head.
Rushing over to his sister's side, he tried to wake her up, but he was getting no response from her. He tried shaking her awake, and he tried patting her cheeks too, but nothing was working.
"Nae… Nae... Sweetheart wake up. Come on, baby, open your eyes, sweetie. Wake up, Nae come on wake up," he begs his sister.
By this time, Horatio realizes that his hand that is holding her head is all bloody. He can feel the warmth of the blood run all over his hand. Cautiously and carefully, he turns her head to the left side, and his heart drops because blood is already starting to pool a little under his sister's head.
While he holds her head in his left hand, Horatio reaches for the small penlight that he keeps in the bottom drawer of the console table. He needs to check her eyes' response to light as a way to check for possible brain damage.
He gently lays her head on the floor for him, opens up each of her eyes, and shine the light in her icy blue eyes. He is looking for the eye's response to light.
When he realizes that her eyes are fixed, dilated, and they are unresponsive to light, he knows he has to get her to the hospital as fast as he can.
He can't wait for an ambulance to get there because she doesn't have any time to spare.
Fearing the worst and knowing that he can get her to the hospital faster than the ambulance can Horatio gathers her up in his arms, he rests her head on his shoulder and carries her to his car.
The drive to the hospital seems to take forever. Before Horatio leaves his house, he places her sitting up in the passenger seat then flattens the Hummer's seat down.
Quickly buckling Renee in and slamming the car door careful to keep her hands and feet clear of the closing door. Horatio rushes around to the driver's side, and he revs the engine.
Putting the portable police siren on the roof and turning it on. Horatio drives to the hospital like a bat out of hell. He just has to get to the hospital as fast as physically possible. Peeling out of the driveway, Horatio is thankful that he didn't park his Hummer in the garage that night.
"Nae... Nae... Sweetheart stay with me. Please stay with me, Sweetie. Come on, fight Nae," Horatio pleas with his sister.
Holding her hand the entire time, Horatio is driving a little recklessly, but since it is just after midnight, the Miami side streets are relatively quiet. Driving at 70 miles an hour, it only takes a few minutes to get there.
When he gets to the hospital with an unconscious Renee, Horatio carefully gathers his baby sister in his arms and carries her into the ER.
Her head is hanging backward limply, but he doesn't want to waste time resting her head on his shoulder. Time is of the essence, and she doesn't have any to spare.
Renee doesn't weigh a lot for Horatio to carry only about one hundred ten pounds. She is not tall, only five foot one inch, and he is six foot nothing. Her tiny body is fairly light for him.
"Help, I have a female in her late thirties. She fell at home, slamming her head into a marble table. When I got to her, she was not responding with pupils that are fixed, dilated, and non-responsive to light. She hasn't regained consciousness. She's an MDPD officer," he finishes explaining to the nurse.
"Get me a gurney. We need to get her into trauma room three stat," the nurse orders the other medical staff.
Horatio tries desperately to stay with his sister as the emergency staff wheel her into the trauma room, but the staff stop him. "Only medical staff are allowed in the trauma room NO exception, we will come and get you when we have her stable," is what the nurses tell him.
With the doctors wheeling, Renee into the emergency room Horatio himself flashes back to the night of her attack. Horatio doesn't hear anything from the nurses for three hours.
Unknown to him, one of the doctors that was in trauma room three was Alexx. By the time one of Renee's doctors comes out to talk to him, he was beyond nervous. Relief floods across his face as he rushes to the doctor.
Horatio begs the doctor for any news.
"Please… Tell me she's okay," he pleas with her doctor.
Horatio quietly prays. It is not bad news.
"What happened to her was that she was severely dehydrated and physically exhausted. Her blood pressure was dangerously low, and her blood sugar had gotten so low she lapsed into a coma."
"Not to mention her head was bleeding. Her brain was swelling, so we needed to put a borehole in the back of her head. She had fractured her Occipital bone when she hit her head on the console table," is what the doctor told Horatio.
While the doctor is telling Horatio what had happened to his sister, a nurse comes up and whispers something in the doctor's ear so quietly that Horatio can't hear.
When the doctor talking to Horatio hears what the nurse is saying, he leaves with her and doesn't say a word to Horatio. That leaves poor, Horatio not knowing what is going on in the trauma room with his sister.
Inside the trauma room, a nightmare of a different kind is transpiring. When the surgeon removes the drill bit after they had drilled a borehole in her skull, Renee began to crash.
With fresh head trauma, Renee has a massive seizure, and her heart stops before the doctors had a chance to give her a dose of Phenobarbital to stop the seizure. Her seizure starts in her left hand, and it quickly sends her into grand mal convulsions. The doctors are trying to restart her heart anyway they can.
The doctors shocked her heart at two hundred joules and got no response. Gradually they start to add more and more power to the defibrillator trying to restart her heart.
Two hundred fifty joules is the next amplitude, and again they get zero response. Cranking it up to three hundred joules then three hundred fifty joules, they still are unable to get her heart beating.
The continuous loud monotone beep of her heart monitor flatlining is a constant reminder that she is dying. The doctors shock her heart countless times and even put Epinephrine and Atropine into her IV, but nothing is working.
After more than an hour of them trying, Alexx came into the waiting room. She tells him, "If Renee doesn't respond in the next five minutes, we will be forced to call time of death, and nobody wants that."
Horatio begs them to keep trying. There has to be something that they hadn't attempted yet. There was one thing that they hadn't tried yet. It is intra-cardiac adrenaline. If Renee is going to respond to this drug, it will be fairly immediately.
When doctors stab her heart with the intra-cardiac adrenaline, Renee offers no response. Renee is out of options, and the trauma room fell silent. The only noise in the room is the long continuous sound of a flatlining heart. None of the doctors want to call it, but they have to.
Alexx is forced to make perhaps one of the hardest calls she ever had to make, "Time of Death 03:46 AM."
Now she has to tell Horatio that the only blood family he has left was gone. Horatio jumps to his feet as soon as Alexx walks into the waiting room area.
"Tell me she's going to be fine, please tell me she's okay," he pleas with his friend.
Alexx is unable to relieve his fears. She slowly shakes her head. She tells him, "I'm so sorry, baby, she's gone; we lost her."
Horatio responds the way that Alexx thought that he would. He just loses it when he punches a hole in the wall and attempts to throw a waiting room chair through a window.
One of the nurses is going to call security, but Alexx stops her.
"He just lost the only blood family he has, and he is venting. Leave him be," Alexx whispers in the nurse's ear.
Horatio knows it's early in the morning, but he needs his brother-in-law there with him. He can't get himself to go into her room by himself.
When Eric sees who is calling him at 04:00 AM, he just knows in the pit of his stomach that something is horribly wrong. The only reason for H calling at that hour was if something had happened to his sister.
Before Horatio can get the words out, Eric asks his brother, "H, what happened? Did something happen to Renee?"
"There was an accident at home. It's really bad. Renee's gone, Eric. My baby sister is dead."
Was how Horatio answers Eric's question in a quiet and shaky voice.
For a few moments, Eric is totally speechless since he is in complete shock.
Quickly Eric tells his brother that he'll be at the hospital as fast as he can. It takes Eric close to half an hour to get to the hospital. With Eric there for support, Horatio is finally able to go and say goodbye to the sister that he never got to know. He can not understand why he cares so deeply for her, despite only knowing her no more than four months.
Walking into her hospital room and seeing her for the first time since he had carried her into the ER, he thinks to himself that she looks so peaceful.
With Eric just outside the door to the room, he approaches his sister's bed. Horatio clearly remembers thinking to himself, "God Renee, you survived five tours of duty in Afghanistan, fourteen years in the Marines, three years at the border and two years here. Not to mention a physical assault and torture that would have killed anyone else. But a fall in the house is what kills you."
Shaking his head, he quietly approaches his sister's bed and leans over to gently kiss her forehead. As soon as his lips touch her, her ice-blue eyes open wide, she gasps for air and sits bolt upright. She almost smacks her brother in the nose in the process.
To say that she had scared him would be an understatement. But he looks at her and only sees someone who is confused and scared. Her eyes are wild, darting everywhere, looking desperately for something he can't see.
As he gently touches her arm, Renee jumps out of her skin, lashing out at her brother in sheer panic and fear. He doesn't know why, but his baby sister is simply terrified of something.
"Get away from me, leave me alone I don't want to go. I want to stay here with my brother," Renee screamed in complete terror.
With her door to her room closed, nobody can hear her scream.
She is fighting an unseen force when Horatio instinctively tries to pull her close, and he attempts to soothe her.
"Nae... Nae... Sweetheart... Baby... shhh... you're okay. Your back… I'm here, and I got you. Your safe and I'm not going anywhere,"
Horatio is going to whisper repeatedly until she fully comes back to reality, but that is not happening.
When she finally made eye contact with her brother Horatio realizes that she is in a delirious hallucination. Renee seems to be looking through him… not at him.
She is alive, but she is not there. He is very scared for his sister he's never seen her like this before. "She's fighting an inner demon," is the only thing that Horatio can think of as to what is happening to his sister.
As Horatio pulls her close, she fights her brother like her life depends on it because, to her, it does.
"Don't touch me... Get away from me, you, monster." She continues to scream as she strikes her brother in the face, which leaves a deep gash on his cheek.
Wiping the blood away, everything in Horatio tells him to leave her alone, but he knows that she needs him to be there and not to leave her.
With her door shut, H needs to call his brother on the cellphone, "Eric get a doctor, she's back. I mean, she's alive, but she's hallucinating."
Renee loses consciousness again right after Eric left to get a nurse. When she collapses in Horatio's arms, he is relieved that she finally calmed down.
"What was that about," he asks his sister.
The relief he had felt immediately disappears when he gets no response from Renee.
"Nae... Nae... Wake up... Open your eyes…"
Terrified that he lost her again, he desperately checks her for a pulse. He is able to breathe a sigh of relief when he feels a strong pulse.
Eric, who at the time is standing just outside the doorway when H calls him and tells him to go get a nurse. Eric is confused but obeys and runs to grab one of the nurses telling her what Horatio had told him.
The news causes the nurse to run into Renee's room. Before she gets to Renees room, Renee collapses in Horatio's arms and slips into another coma.
Her brother doesn't know what to say to her. Renee didn't tell him that her physical therapist had told her to work for half an hour every day, but she is doing at least an hour. His sister is overdoing her physical therapy, and she isn't eating or drinking like she should have done.
Sitting by his sister's bed, he watches her sleep. He can't help but wonder why she doesn't do what her therapist told her. I mean, why did she not take care of herself when she has him ready and willing to help her.
When she wakes up a few days later, she gets the chewing out that she deserved.
"What were you thinking sweetheart, you can't overdo your therapy because you are not helping yourself at all. You are doing far more harm than good. You have to take care of yourself. You need to eat regularly and drink plenty of fluids too."
Horatio has to check himself because he is getting too worked up. He loves his sister and is trying to look out for her like any big brother would.
Renee is just not used to having someone she can count on since her mother died some seven years before. She is used to doing everything for herself. She is glad to have someone that she can count on, so she relents and listens to her brother's admonishment.
When she is released from the hospital a few days later, Horatio insists that she accompany him to work. With her walker, Horatio puts her to work, helping in the lab just to keep her busy and to make sure he can keep an eye on her at all times.
The last time he left her alone, she ended up in a coma and needed to have a borehole drilled into her skull. The last time he left her, she was declared dead, but she fought her way back to the land of the living. He is not going to risk losing her permanently.
Horatio and his team still need to find out who had put hits out on his sister and her dogs.
The Serbian Mercenaries are being very co-operative to Horatio. They want to avoid the death penalty. Horatio needs to be very careful and not let them see that Renee is very much alive.
They are only cooperating with him since they thought that they killed a cop.
Canaan is the most helpful, even offering to wear a wire and get the person who had hired him to confess on tape. To say that Horatio is surprised by this man's desire to be of help would be a gross understatement.
Horatio knows that they only have one chance to catch the person who put the hit out on his sister, and to do it, he will have to use the dogs again as bait. He knows he can't ask her again to risk her dog's lives. They will have to find another way. Maybe they just need a little help from the outside, and maybe some fresh eyes would be nice.