"Phil?"
Phil groaned and rolled over onto his stomach, pulling the duvet up over his ears.
"Phil?" came the voice again, louder this time, and laced with panic.
Phil opened one eye to see Dan's shadowy form standing beside the bed. As Phil transitioned into wakefulness and his senses grew sharp, he realized that Dan was bent nearly in half, clutching his side for dear life, and as breathless as if he had just finished a sprint.
Phil sat bolt upright. "What's happening?" He demanded. "Are you ok?"
Dan shook his head, unable to speak, and sank down to his hands and knees. Phil jumped out of bed, grabbed his glasses, and ran across the room to turn on the light. Now that he could see better, he realized that Dan had sweat rolling off of him, his hair stuck up in wet spikes. The sleeve of his hoodie was stained with fresh blood and his face was whiter than Phil had ever seen it.
"Dan, can you talk to me?" Phil asked, terror welling up in his chest and making him nearly as breathless as Dan was.
"I'm ok," Dan gasped, obviously lying. He made an attempt to straighten up his posture, but quickly fell back onto his knees with a cry of pain. "I'm fine—I just," he gulped in a breath of air before continuing, "I just think—I should maybe—go to A&E?" He leaned up against the side of Phil's bed, exhausted from the effort of speaking.
Phil was already wriggling into a pair of jeans. "I think you're right, Dan," he agreed, using every ounce of restraint within him to keep his voice calm and collected. "Should I call an ambulance?"
"Please don't!" Dan cried. "I'm fine—just—a cab—will do." He coughed harshly into his elbow, a wet, drowning sound that was quite a change from the dry cough he had had for the last month and a half. As Dan lifted his head, Phil realized that that was where the blood stain on his sleeve had come from—he was coughing it up.
Phil grabbed his phone and called for a cab, simultaneously slipping into the first pair of shoes he could find, and grabbing a pair for Dan as well. He put his arm around Dan's waist, careful to avoid the sore spot on his rib cage, and together the two made their way down to the front door to wait for the cab to arrive.
The journey to the hospital felt like it lasted for hours, Dan curled into a ball struggling to breathe and Phil watching helplessly, rubbing little circles on his friend's back. When they finally did make it to the emergency room, the staff wasted no time in bringing Dan back and getting him onto a bed. Phil had worried that they might have a long wait once they arrived in A&E, but when the triage nurse got one good look at Dan she let him through straight away.
Everything happened quickly after that: a nurse placed an oxygen mask around Dan's face, while a tech drew blood for labs and placed an IV in Dan's arm. The nurse started a bag of IV fluid and set to work listening to Dan's lungs, his face a mask of concentration as he focused his attention on what he was hearing. A look of concern flickered across the nurse's face for a nanosecond before he straightened up, placing his stethoscope back around his neck. "The doc will be in with you shortly," he announced before retreating from the room.
Phil wondered what the nurse had heard that had caused that barely-noticeable change in expression, but when the doctor came in to listen for herself she hovered over the exact same spot, pursing her lips in concentration. She then set to work feeling around Dan's chest, palpating his ribs. Dan was breathing easier now after some oxygen and a small dose of morphine, but even so, when the doctor reached the upper left side of his chest he nearly leapt off the bed with a startled yelp.
"My apologies, Mr. Howell," the doctor murmured, her tone kind but brisk. "We'll get you a bit more morphine—you could clearly use some. Now, I've put in for an X-ray and a CT scan to see if we can figure out what's causing this. My initial thought based on your symptoms is a possible broken rib, which could potentially have collapsed your lung, although you have no recent injury that would theoretically have caused such a thing—is that correct?"
"Not that I can think of," Dan answered.
"Well, either way, these tests ought to clue us in and help us decide what to do next. Once you've finished in the imaging center, you will be brought to the ICU for close monitoring, at least for the next day or so. Now don't let that scare you—at the moment I would consider you relatively stable—but myself and the intensive care doctor would feel better if we had a close watch on you until you feel a little bit better."
Dan nodded, eyes wide. Phil wondered if it would be weird for him to reach out and give Dan's hand a quick squeeze to comfort him, but under the circumstances he didn't think Dan would mind. Phil was surprised by how cold Dan's hand was, considering the fact that he was still dripping with sweat.
"Listen," Phil said, "I'm going to wait for you upstairs. As soon as you are settled in your room I'll be there, okay?"
"Ok," Dan answered. His voice was still weak and his face still pale, but Phil felt a thousand times more at ease leaving him now that he wasn't gasping for air anymore.
Phil headed off down the hall, stopping at the nurses' station to ask where he should wait. The directions he got took him through a maze of hallways to an elevator, which he rode up to the third floor. When the doors opened, the first thing Phil saw was a large sign saying, "Medical Intensive Care Unit," and under that a smaller sign that said "Family Lounge" with an arrow pointing down the hall to a little glass-walled room filled with couches and televisions.
Phil had the place to himself, which wasn't all that surprising at four o'clock in the morning, so he stretched out on one of the couches and shut his eyes. It didn't take long at all for him to fall fast asleep, worn out by all of the night's happenings.
When Phil woke again, he glanced at his phone to check the time, and was startled to find that nearly two hours had gone by and nobody had come to tell him that Dan was ready. He had been promised that a nurse would come out to get him as soon as Dan was settled and ready for him. Had something terrible happened?
Phil pulled his knees to his chest. Surely somebody would have come out and told him if things had gone wrong. Maybe they were still getting him settled. Phil didn't know how long a CT scan took—maybe it took two hours just for that. Maybe they had decided to run other tests as well. Maybe Dan was just sleeping and they wanted to let him rest a while before bringing Phil in.
Phil was so busy contemplating all of the things that might have gone wrong (or not) that he didn't notice the scrub-clad young woman that had stepped into the room until she called his name. "Mr. Lester?"
Phil snapped to attention and stood, his knees cracking as he straightened them. "That's me."
"I figured," the woman said with a smirk, glancing around at the otherwise empty room.
Phil laughed nervously. "Sorry."
"I'm Kate, Daniel's nurse," she announced, reaching out for a handshake. "I apologize for the delay—we had a few things we needed to get done when he got to the room. But he's ready now."
"Thanks, Kate," Phil said, instantly put at ease by the nurse's calm, friendly demeanor and kind features. He followed her down the hallway, past the nurses' station with all its beeping monitors, past rooms full of patients hooked up to ventilators and numerous IVs and other machines that Phil couldn't identify. He wondered what he would find when he reached Dan's room.
Kate stopped in front of the very last door in the hallway. "This is you," she announced. "I'll leave you to it, but let me know if you have any questions."
"Thanks," Phil relied, steeling himself with a deep breath. He gently pushed open the door and eased himself into the room.
In the middle of the room was a very complicated-looking hospital bed, with a very frail-looking Dan huddled in it under a mound of blankets. He was fast asleep, so Phil sank down into a chair beside the bed, crossed his legs under him, and began to take stock of his surroundings.
Beside Dan's bed, on the far side, was a tower of IV pumps stacked on a pole. One had what was obviously a blood transfusion running through it, and the others had various fluids and drugs, the labels of which Phil couldn't read at this distance. On Phil's side of the bed was a contraption he had never seen before—a narrow plastic box with some measurements printed on it, filled up to the 65-mark with a bloody-looking fluid. The box had a tube leading in the direction of Dan's chest, although Phil couldn't see exactly where it led because of all the blankets in the way. He gathered that it was a drain of some sort, and he decided that he would ask Kate about it whenever she came back in.
The last thing Phil noticed was that Dan was no longer wearing the big, clumsy oxygen mask he had been wearing in the emergency room. It had been replaced by a thin nasal cannula draped under Dan's nose, and Phil found the sight very comforting—he knew that the nasal cannula delivered less oxygen than the mask did, so that must have meant that Dan wasn't requiring as much as he had been.
He looked peaceful as he slept—his breathing was slower, deeper, and his face was no longer painted with the panicked expression of a person drowning in his own fluids. He looked so peaceful, in fact, that Phil felt compelled to take a picture of the sight before him. Maybe he would post it for the fans to see later on, or maybe he would just keep it for himself, but either way he wanted to capture the immense relief that he felt now as compared to the fear and urgency of the past several hours.
Suddenly, the IV pump with the blood transfusion began to beep a high-pitched, unobtrusive alarm. Phil wondered if he should use the call button to tell someone about it, but just then Kate appeared in the doorway. "That's the blood finished," she announced.
Phil watched as she took Dan's temperature, writing it down on a sheet of paper, along with his blood pressure and heart rate. She then disconnected the blood tubing from Dan's arm, flushing the IV catheter with some saline and tossing the blood bag in the biohazard bin.
Phil watched all this with curiosity—Kate looked so sure of herself as she bustled about the room, adjusting IV pump settings, giving Dan some other drug through one of his IVs, listening to his lung sounds. She came around to Phil's side of the bed and checked the drainage box that Phil had been wondering about. She marked the level of the drainage with a permanent marker and recorded it in the computer.
"Sorry—Kate?" Phil asked timidly.
Kate spun around, her flurry of activity put on hold for a moment. "Yes?"
"What is this for?" Phil gestured to the box at his feet.
"That's called a chest tube," Kate replied. "It leads through the side of Daniel's chest. It doesn't go directly into his lung, but it ends right in the area immediately surrounding the lung. Daniel had quite a bit of blood building up in that space, which we call a hemothorax, and that was putting pressure on his lung and making it so he couldn't breathe. By draining the hemothorax, we're helping to normalize the pressures and let him breathe better."
By this point, the noise and activity in the room had woken Dan up. He scooted himself up in bed, wincing in pain. "How did the blood end up there, then?" he asked.
Phil hadn't even noticed that Dan had been listening. He was happy to hear his friend's voice.
"There are a lot of reasons why that can happen," Kate replied. "In your specific case, we haven't quite figured that out just yet. But we'll keep you updated with details as we get them."
Dan settled back against his pillows. "Ok."
"Now," Kate went on, "I'm about to leave for the day. Your daytime nurse will be checking in on you shortly, after we finish meeting for report. I'll be back tonight, though, so I'll see you then."
"Thanks for everything, Kate," Phil offered. He was so appreciative of her explanations and the way she so effortlessly handled Dan's care.
"I'm happy to help," Kate replied as she slipped out the door.
Now that the room was quiet once more, Phil scooted his chair a bit closer to the bed. "How do you feel?"
Dan smiled weakly. "A million times better. I can breathe again, which is always a plus."
Phil was glad to hear a hint of Dan's natural snarkiness creeping its way back into his tone. "Can I see where the chest tube goes?"
Dan raised an eyebrow. "You want to see where a hole was sliced into my chest and a tube shoved violently inside of me?"
Phil laughed awkwardly. "Well…yes."
"I haven't even seen it myself yet," Dan mused, lifting up his hospital gown. Phil traced the tube from the drainage chamber up to Dan, following its path as it snaked up and around to the side of Dan's chest, nearly to his back, finally disappearing underneath a thick white bandage. "What does it look like?" Dan asked nervously, unable to turn and look for himself.
"There's not much to see, really," Phil answered. "It's just covered with a bandage." He gently straightened Dan's gown, covering up the area once more. "What does it feel like?"
Dan wrinkled his nose. "Hurts like hell. I can barely move, and that's even after they've been pumping me full of pain meds. But this is nothing compared to how it felt when they were putting it in. Worst thing I've ever experienced."
"I'm so sorry, Dan," Phil murmured, unsure of what else he could say.
"But it's okay," Dan went on. "Any amount of pain is better than the feeling of not being able to breathe. Now that was scary."
Phil nodded. "You really had me worried."
"Thanks for bringing me here. I could tell you were just as scared as I was."
Phil laughed. "But I was trying so hard to hide it!"
Dan rolled his eyes. "Phil. You know you suck at hiding your emotions. If I hadn't been almost dying I would have found it rather entertaining to watch you try to pretend you weren't panicking on the inside."
Phil crossed his arms. "Shut up."