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Part 16

Before he showed them to Kim's room in the pediatric ICU, the doctor warned them again.

"Your daughter has numerous other injuries, the most serious of which is a large skull fracture, a broken collar bone and two broken arms, but at this stage, we are most concerned with the head injuries. Her whole head and facial area is experiencing tremendous swelling, but that is normal and expected, considering what happened to her. Once she's stable, we'll be able to address the other injuries, but we want to make sure she's up to more surgery, before we do."

He showed them to the doorway leading to the pediatric ICU and Mac momentarily hesitated, wondering if it was really her place to go inside with Harm. Military hospitals usually limited access to family members, particularly in the higher-dependency units.

"Please…" Harm tightened his grip on her hand, "I don't think I can do this alone…"

That was all Mac needed to convince her; she may not be a family member, but Harm was and she was the only person here to support him during this terrible ordeal. She'd come to love him deeply over the last few months and there was nothing she wouldn't do for him or his daughter.

"Oh God!" Harm exclaimed, once they were inside the door, the grip of his hand almost crushing hers for a second or two, "She's so small…"

Kim's tiny, but swollen frame was dwarfed by all of the machines and the lengths of tubing and wires surrounding her. A nurse was already in with her, checking Kim's vital signs and all the of the machine readouts.

"Don't worry, Mr. and Mrs. Rabb," she told him kindly, "I'm sure that this is a lot to take in, but all of these machines are only here to help your daughter. Just you two take a seat here and if you have any questions or need anything, a nurse should be in and out every five or ten minutes."

Harm and Mac sunk into the two chairs that the nurse had pulled up beside Kim's bed, never taking their eyes off the bed's tiny occupant. The rhythmic noises of the machines and monitors were the only noise in the room.

As promised, nurses were in and out regularly, taking notes of Kim's vitals and adjusting the machine settings as needed. After just under an hour, however, one of the nurses hurried out of the room, returning shortly with Colonel Redgrave.

"What's wrong, Sir?" Harm asked fearfully, when the nurse immediately showed the surgeon something on the monitors.

"Your daughter's vitals are becoming more erratic, Commander, Major. We're assuming that this is because of building pressure inside her head. Her condition is not as stable as I'd like it to be, but I'm afraid that we'd be foolish to wait much longer to operate. We need to perform the ventriculostomy, to counteract the brain swelling that Kim's beginning to experience. We had hoped that medication would control the worst of it, but it appears to be much worse than we were expecting. At the same time, we'd like to perform another CT scan, so we can monitor the brain bleeding that we discovered, earlier."

"I'll sign what I need to, whatever will help her," Harm didn't hesitate to reply, asking, "Is this surgery going to be a major risk to my daughter, Colonel?"

"It will be very serious," the tall colonel admitted, "but nowhere near as dangerous as leaving your daughter in the condition she is now, Sir. I'm going to ask a colleague of mine to consult with me on this surgery. I have built up a great deal of respect for him in the time I've been working here in Indonesia. Colonel Grant has spent much of his career working on the frontlines of war and treating a great number of patients who have sustained head-injuries similar to your daughter's. He will have invaluable expertise, so together we will know best how to proceed, once the ventriculostomy is done and Kim's condition has stabilized."

A nurse came and took Harm to the nurse's desk, while Mac stayed with Kim, as the doctor and nurses prepared her for surgery.

"She's very like you, Colonel," one of the nurses commented, while they arranged the wires and tubing so that they wouldn't get in the way and prepared the machines for transport.

Mac didn't have the strength to explain that it was just coincidental, since she wasn't biologically related to Kim at all, so she just smiled and commented, "You're not the first person to tell me so!"

Once they had everything ready, they told Mac that they would wait just outside the door, so that Harm could finish with all the forms and then the two of them could have some privacy with their child before they took her downstairs to the OR.

"You can touch her, Ma'am," another nurse told her, reassuringly, "Just be careful of the wires for the monitors."

Mac leaned over and kissed Kim carefully on a small patch of skin, in the middle of her forehead, one of the few places where Kim wasn't either bruised, scraped or cut. Harm soon joined them and for a few minutes, they were left alone with the child.

"We'll have to take her now, Sir, Ma'am," a nurse apologized, once she slipped back into the room, "We'll take very good care of your daughter, while she's downstairs with us."

"Thank you, Ma'am," Harm told her, before he leaned down once more, for a final kiss to Kim's bruised, battered face.

"Stay strong, baby-girl," he told Kim, "The doctors are going to take care of you now and Mac and Daddy will wait up here for you to come back, okay? We love you…"

"Yes, we do," Mac nodded in agreement, stroking Kim's cheek gently with the back of her hand, "We'll see you soon, sweetie."

After she was wheeled out, Harm couldn't hold back any longer and sank into Mac's arms, where he let out all of the emotions he'd been keeping inside, ever since they got to the hospital.

Mac maneuvered them back into a couple of chairs, holding him as he found a cathartic release for his emotions, her heart breaking for him.

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