What happens when Beverly loses control...not something that happens often...

"Dr. Crusher! Dr. Crusher! Wake up!"

Beverly's eyes, blinked open to see the duty nurse standing above her.

"Whaaat? What's wrong?!"

"It's the Captain, sir."

It didn't' take anything more for Beverly to fly out of the bed she lying in and run out of the on-call room.

She made it to his room in the Critical Care Unit in record time, only to discover he wasn't there. Terror immediately overwhelmed Beverly, as she searched for someone to inform her about what the hell was going on.

Maybe I should have let Nurse Taylor finish her sentence before I ran out of there like a mad woman.

"Dr. Crusher! Shouldn't you be with the Captain?" a voice behind her asked.

Beverly spun around to see an intern staring at her questioningly.

"I most definitely should considering I am his doctor and I would be with him if someone would to their damn job and tell me what the hell is going on!"

The intern looked absolutely terrified at Dr. Crusher's sudden outburst.

"Well…?!"

"I…I…I'm surprised Dr. Layton didn't fetch you… considering you're the attending doctor on the Captain's case. But…umm…the captain went into cardiac arrest from a pulmonary embolism. She took him upstairs like over an hour ago."

All color immediately drained from the doctor's face, and then immediate realization and anger overtook her.

"I left very specific instructions to be paged if there was any change in Captain Picard's condition. I was down the hall in the on-call room, which everyone knew. What didn't they wake me up?!"

"I was going to wake you up myself, Doctor, but Dr. Layton insisted that she would fetch you personally."

"Well she didn't…I don't understand…Wait you said she took him upstairs…?"

"Yes, to the surgical floor. They tried busting the clot with medication to no avail."

Holy crap. What the hell does Dr. Layton think she's doing?!

"Do you know what room they're in?"

"I believe four was open.

Had she not been working solely on adrenaline, running all across the hospital would have become quite tiresome to Beverly, but worry and fear alone kept her going.

She still didn't know how badly off Jean-Luc was at this point, and this whole thing with Dr. Layton was irking her. Dr. Layton was a resident and had absolutely no authority or qualifications to make decisions about anyone's care, let alone those involving the most decorated captain in Starfleet. At this point, Beverly could only hope that Beverly's nagging suspicion, that Dr. Layton had decided to try to play hero, was wrong.

Maybe this is all just some giant misunderstanding.

But of course, Beverly's instincts had been on par, only the situation presented in front of her was something far worse than she could have ever imagined.

When she reached OR Four, Beverly knew that something had gone very wrong. She could hear an anxious voice giving orders loudly and she recognized that voice as that belonging to Dr. Emily Layton.

Her anger immediately resurged and any hope she had of this being a misunderstanding completely went away.

Entering the surgical suite, Beverly immediately went numb. And for a whole 10 seconds, it was as if she had turned off completely.

Monitors were desperately announcing that the patient on the table was dying, and if that wasn't enough to instill intense fear in the doctor, then the fact that there was bright red blood covering the floor definitely did.

My god…what has she done to you, Jean-Luc?!

"Okay, is someone going to tell me what is going the fuck on?" any ounce of professionalism that Beverly had left inside her had completely gone out the door.

People looked at her, but no one said a word.

"Well? Dr. Layton, the patient on the table in front of you is obviously in great distress. When I left him three hours ago, he was stable and on the mend. Now, are you going to inform me of what happened in those three hours or are we going to wait until he dies and then let an autopsy tell me the story? Just let me be absolutely clear, right now, that if Jean-Luc Picard doesn't make it off this table, I will have your ass and make sure that your license to practice medicine is revoked permanently. I won't say that won't happen anyway, but you sure as hell won't have a future if he dies. Make your choice. Now."

The resident looked absolutely terrified, and for good reason, but to her credit, she spoke.

"Captain Picard went into cardiac arrest about an hour ago. We tried the typical clot-busting medications but nothing worked. I made the decision to take him to the OR and open up his chest in the hopes that I would be successful in removing the clot from his lung. I…I…I…I…nicked the aorta."

"Oh my God."

Rushing to the captain's side, Beverly immediately assessed the situation.

Dr. Layton's finger was blocking off a deadly tear in the main artery carrying blood from the captain's heart. Beverly could tell that slowly but surely the hole was increasing in size. Every single time his heart beat, the pressure caused the tear to widen and blood to shoot out like a fountain. The situation looked horribly grim.

I won't give up.

She was so unbelievably angry that the life of the man she loved was again hanging in the balance…All because some stupid resident wanted to play hero…

I should never have left his side. This is as much my fault as anyone else's. I abandoned him, for what? A couple hours rest? Now look where we are! My hands are inside his chest…

The monitors continued to whine their death cry, and Dr. Crusher could not help but wonder if she would, yet again, be forced to bury the man she loved.