Disclaimer: I don't own Grey's Anatomy, or the characters, and chances are that I never will.
A huge thank you everyone who have reviewed and read this fic so far! It really encourages me to keep writing.
Sorry for the delay!
I hope you all enjoy this chapter!
When Izzie returned to the hospital several hours later, and she found Alex's room empty, she went straight into panic mode, something was wrong, she just knew it.
Having seen Izzie go past the nurses' station Amy, the nurse who had found Alex in distress earlier, quickly went over to Izzie, and got her attention. "Dr Stevens?"
Izzie turned on her heels to face Amy. "Where's Alex?!" She questioned the young nurse abruptly.
Then, in a tone of voice that was supposed to be comforting, but really only added to Izzie's concern, Amy said. "Dr Stevens, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but he has been taken back into surgery. Dr Shepherd found a spinal cord injury, he took Alex straight into surgery."
"Is he alright?" Izzie said, trying to regain her composure.
Amy placed a steadying hand on Izzie's arm, as she noticed the doctor sway. "Last I heard he was stable, but they are concerned that he may be paralyzed from the waist down."
Alex made it through the surgery with flying colours, it was then a waiting game, it wasn't until three days later that the swelling in his spinal cord had gone down.
In those three days he had spent nearly every waking minute trying desperately to move his legs, even just a toe, something to tell him that there was hope, and when finally after three nerve wracking days …success. His right big toe twitched.
Izzie was sitting beside him on his bed, watching his face contort with effort, silently praying for a miracle, praying that Alex would walk again, that he would get back to his former self, when suddenly his expression switched from despair, to surprise, to joy. "Alex?"
"It moved. Iz, I moved my toe." Alex said, somewhat shocked.
Wordlessly, Izzie wrapped her arms around Alex as best she could, and hugged him, kissing him passionately, overjoyed. As she pulled away, she warmly said. "I knew you would."
But his recovery was still far from over, just minutes later their private celebration was interrupted by Callie, she was carrying several large white envelopes. "Oh, sorry guys." She apologized before asking. "How're you doing, Alex?"
He was really getting sick of that question, for the past few days he had answered the same, a simple 'okay', but this time Izzie answered for him. Excitedly she told their friend. "He moved his toe!"
To anyone outside of the situation it would have seemed a strange thing to be so excited over, but Callie knew what this meant, there was a chance for recovery. "That's great news." She enthused.
"It is, isn't it." Izzie replied, matching Callie's tone. "Did you just come to visit?"
Callie looked over at Alex, and she told him. "I have wanted to come see you, but I do need to go over the x-rays we did yesterday." She moved closer to Alex's bedside, and pulled out the first film. "All the leg films showed good alignment, as did the forearm fracture and the prosthetic humerus bone is holding well, but as you see here" She pointed out a spot on the chest x-ray "the sternal bone is not aligned well enough, it could cause problems down the track. I know this isn't what you want to hear, but I need to take you back into surgery to realign the bone. I've booked an OR for tomorrow morning."
The next morning, after Alex had been taken back into surgery, Izzie was sitting in his room, waiting for him to be brought back, when Meredith came in. "Hey Iz, any word on Alex yet?"
"Not yet."
"How're you doing?" Meredith asked as she sat down on Alex's unoccupied bed.
"I just want all this to be over and for things to go back to normal." Izzie said softly, looking down at her wedding ring. It was only a month ago that they had thought that she wouldn't survive, that she would never come back to work, and now it was happening all over again to Alex.
They sat in silence for some time before Izzie asked her friend. "Why did it take four days for us to notice the cord injury? How did we not see the signs earlier?"
Meredith sighed softly. She too had been thinking about this. "I don't know, all I can think of is that up until the night before he had been heavily sedated, only awake for brief periods. It was really the swelling that caused the paralysis, so I guess that it might have taken several days for the swelling to get to that point, and it's entirely possible that Alex wasn't lucid enough to realize the problem. And we weren't looking."
The latest surgery went without a hitch, and by the next afternoon Alex was being moved out of the ICU as he was now finally considered stable, as the gurney was being rolled down the hallways with Alex sitting semi upright on it, when Derek approached him.
"Hey Karev, good to see you getting out of the ICU." Derek said as he kept pace with the gurney. "I was just coming to see you. We've got your latest MRI scans, the last of the swelling in your brain and spinal cord has gone down, so I've arranged for someone from physio to some talk to you. And once they've got you in your new room, I'll take the bulky dressing off your head, work on making you feel a bit more human."
"Okay. Any word on when the cardio-thoratic guy will come clear me, and give the order to take the tubes out?"
"Victoria Rivett did your surgery, I thought she would've been around to see you, I can give her a page. The sooner the chest tubes come out the sooner we can work on getting you out of bed."
They reached the room in the high dependency ward soon after, and while Alex was being settled into the bed, Meredith and Izzie came by, Meredith had gone back to work that day, and Izzie had left Alex to go have something to eat in the cafeteria.
Izzie moved to Alex's side and greeted him, while Meredith moved over to where Derek was standing in the corner of the room. "Hey. How's it going?"
Derek kissed Meredith lightly on the lips before going on to tell her. "Very well, Alex is doing well. How's your first day back? Been busy?"
"Not too bad so far, but I'm on trauma call, and I've got back to back surgeries this afternoon, the three-thirty one got cancelled, that's why I'm here, it's the only chance I'm going to get to see Alex today."
Before Derek could say anything further, one of the orderlies who had been moving Alex came over to the couple. "We're done now, Dr Shepherd."
"Thank you." Derek replied, and once the orderlies were on their way out, he moved along with Meredith over to Alex's bedside. "Okay, Alex, let's get this done, then I'll leave you guys to visit."
"What's going on?" Izzie asked.
Derek took a pair of medical shears out of his lab coat as he explained. "The skull flap should be stable enough now for the dressing to come off."
"That's great." Izzie said happily, gently squeezing Alex's hand in comfort as she and Meredith watched Derek cut through the layers of gauze, and eventually pull away the bandage. It was a shock to see Alex with the bandage gone, his head had been completely shaved for the surgeries, and there was a long curved incision on the right side of his head, covered by a clear plastic dressing, along with a smaller incision just behind Alex's right ear, which they knew came from the emergency burr hole procedure.
It only reinforced the severity of the situation, serving as a further reminder of how close their friend came to death.
TBC...
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