Martha used her medical authority to get updates, but they consisted of him remaining in surgery and the procedure going as planned and nothing more than that. She was paged five hours later and she left the waiting room promising to return to let Jack and Donna know what was going on as soon as possible. She was called to the recovery room and she was immensely pleased to see that the Doctor was in there. He was ventilated and her initial observations of him showed he was a reasonably colour, he was pale which was to be expected when he was so ill, but his lips were pink.
She checked the monitors, playing a special notice to the independent recordings of his right heart. It was beating. It wasn't a particularly strong or healthy rhythm, it was tired and lazy, but it wasn't skipping beats or racing or failing to pump blood. There was definitely improvements and the photo images of the scans taken after surgery showed a good blood flow through the heart muscle when prior to surgery it had been reduced to zero in places. They just had to see how the heart muscle itself would improve and heal over the coming days and weeks. It would heal as any injured muscle would. As long as none of the tissues had been starved of oxygen to the point of tissue death he stood to make a reasonable recovery. He was straight out of heart surgery and it was positive, that his left heart took a lot of the load also meant he was more able to recover.
His capacity to heal and to improve was now the mainstay of how he would get over it. The damage done by the virus had been reversed and the virus was gone. They would have to support him medically while he recovered but they would also have to support him emotionally. Everyone who knew him was horrified to think that the Doctor had suffered a heart attack. How he was going to feel and respond to that news was going to be difficult to determine. They were not going to be able to predict it. It was hard enough to be able to predict how he would react to the news that it was raining outside his TARDIS never mind something as serious as he had a heart attack and he still didn't know that the virus that had caused the damage had been given to him deliberately in order to turn him into an antibody farm.
They were going to have to pass information onto him in a controlled manner so that he didn't put his hearts under strain, but it was clear that unless they kept him isolated from everyone else at UNIT that things would get back to him. He could not be allowed to get excitable too soon, and he was going to be kept under heavy sedation, enough to keep him asleep. He would be asleep and ventilated at last throughout the night to give him the best chance to recover, then they would slowly bring him back round again a bit at a time so they could properly maintain his state of health and his pain levels. They had to keep him under minimal stress and that could be a tricky balancing of medications in humans, Martha was going to be heavily involved in this process with the Doctor as she was the one who would know best if he was responding in the same way as a human would in comparison to how he would normally behave.
Martha explained all they were going to do to Donna and Jack. The relief that he had made it through the surgery was good. They were then going to time the reduction in sedation so that they aimed for him to wake around mid-morning the following day. It would mean there were resources available if something did go wrong. He had that evening and the night to monitor his heart beats under full sedation and then the following day they had the afternoon and the evening to manage his medications to ensure he remained comfortable throughout.
He remained in the UNIT intensive care suite and was lying on the bed with the head end raised slightly. The foot end of the bed was also raised so that he was bent at the knees and his feet were level with his shoulders but flat along the bed. The olive green compression stockings had been put back on him in order to assist in the circulation. By mid-morning he had the ventilation completely removed and just a nasal line providing oxygen to him and he was maintaining good oxygen levels. He had electrodes all over his chest still and there was a long white strip of surgical dressing passing down the middle of his chest. It was clean having been changed when the wound was checked first thing that morning. Because of the position of his heart further away from the side of his chest than in a human with a single offset heart they had been also required to break three ribs on the right side to access it. It was going to mean he was going to be uncomfortable and sore for a while which was another reason why everything was measured and controlled and slower than usual.
By lunch time he would be able to wake but would be drowsy and exhausted with the drugs. His hearts were both looking better than they had done since he'd been found on the boat. The surgery had done as much as they could have realistically hoped. He was not out of the woods, but there was some sunlight dappling the forest floor now. The next indication of how well he was would come when he woke up. No one dared to use the word 'if' in that regard, but Martha at least knew that perhaps they should be. Not with the Doctor, though, 'if' was not part of the vocabulary associated with his recovery.
It was late afternoon rather than mid-morning when he looked like he was close to waking. Martha asked Jack and Donna to leave the room. She was very apologetic about it and it was not because she didn't want him there or because she was going to do any tests on him, it was simply because he was still heavily mediated and she didn't want him to have to try to split his focus between three of them and risk confusing him. She promised to see how he was when he woke and if she judged him capable of dealing with a brief visit she would allow them to come back in though it would likely be one by one. Jack and Donna both left the room, relegated this time to bench seats outside in the corridor.
Martha stood at the Doctor's bedside. She propped her crutches up against the wall and she lightly caressed his head for a moment before making a deliberate attempt to rouse him.
"Doctor?" she spoke authoritatively as she rubbed his shoulder. She stuck to the right shoulder as his left remained sore looking. She was sure it should have healed by now as well, but that it remained painful was likely due to his general ill health. "Come on, Doctor, it is Martha. It is time to wake up," she instructed. It took two more attempts but the Doctor grumbled some sort of garbled incoherent complaint that made Martha smile. She wasn't going to worry about him making too much sense on the cusp of heavy sedation. It would take him a moment to fight through the fog of sedation if he could manage it, if not she would lower it and then they could try again.
"That is it, Doctor, open your eyes for me?" Martha instructed as she gently caressed his cheek. She rubbed his shoulder again when he didn't open his eyes. It was that he didn't like and he slowly realised the only way to stop it from happening was to do what the voice said and open his eyes. They felt like they just wanted to close again straight away but he got a slither of light to his optic nerves. That counted.
"Hello," Martha smiled warmly at him when he did manage to open his eyes long enough to focus and found her with his gaze.
"Martha?" there was a question in his rasping tone. Oxygen and intubation had stole his voice from him. "Whah?"
"You're going to be okay," Martha assured him. "You'll be feeling strange at the moment because you have got a lot of medication in your system. It is to help keep you feeling nice and calm," she told him. "It might make you feel a bit disassociated emotionally for a bit," she explained. "Do you understand what that means?" she checked when it was unclear if he was processing what she said.
"I don't really care," the Doctor offered. Martha looked at him and didn't know if he was saying that he didn't care in response to her question, or, he was answering her question with the blasé version saying that the drugs will make him feel like he didn't really care. He gave a small but tired smile and she knew he was making an attempt to play with words.
"Very funny," Martha offered. She watched as the Doctor winced and then sighed as his eyes began to close again. "I would like you to try to stay awake for a little while if you can?" Martha commented. "Do you want a drink of water?"
"No tea?"
"Not just yet," Martha denied him.
"Oh," he confirmed then half smiled. "I don't… really care."
"Well, the drugs must be working if you don't care about tea," Martha told him. She poured him a beaker of cool water with a stray in and then held it while he had a sip. When he raised his arm to take Martha's with the intention of thanking her he halted and winced.
"What was that?"
"Wrist hurts," he complained.
"Are you in pain anywhere else?" Martha asked him.
"Yeah."
"Okay," Martha caressed his head. "Do you want to tell me where?"
"All over… I think… I think it's… all over."
"Is there anywhere that hurts more than everything else?" Martha asked him patiently. It was only after they started to reduce the medication further that they would start to get more of their Doctor back, but she was happy with how he was doing, even if his eyes were sliding closed without him answering her question. She wanted to avoid giving him too much pain relief because she needed to know if there were any complications as they arose and pain was often the first indication. "Doctor?" She got his attention again. "Does anything hurt more than the rest?"
"My chest…" he offered and went to touch it. "And… my wrist…" he went to touch it with his other hand. "Both… wrists?" he persevered for a moment and had a look at his wrist. It was not bandaged or supported but he could see it was looking swollen and there was very dark bruising mottling all over the inside of his wrist. It spread right up into the back of his hand and part way along his forearm. He didn't comment on it. It looked seriously injured but if it was then they'd not just have left it. He looked at his other wrist. It looked even worse. He then looked down at the dressing that covered the ten inch line of staples along his chest and bruising that spread across his right side, visible between all the electrodes stuck to his skin. They had shaved his chest hair off. It took him a few moments longer to make a deduction about what he was seeing as he put the pieces of evidence together, but then he just sighed. "Oh," he commented sleepily.
"Yeah, oh," Martha agreed with him. It was all he had to say on the matter as his eyes closed and remained that way. Martha didn't disturb him again, she caressed his head lightly and let him dript back into a peaceful sleep. Once he was asleep she reduced the rate of the sedative he was receiving and she increased the level of pain relief. Ideally she wanted him to be able to stay awake for a while without having to battle to stay awake, but it was going to be a difficult balance to find and as he continued to recover it would shift and the sedative would be less effective.