A/N: Holy moley it's been a long time! I kept changing my mind about how I wanted to end this story and my extreme indecisiveness led to a lot of time in between updates. My goal was to not post any of this until I had completely finished the fic, but it's taking longer than I had anticipated, and I felt like it was time (more like way past time) for an update! Hope you all enjoy and I hope to have more coming your way soon, or at least sooner than the gap between this and my last update!
Kurt burst through the doors into the operating room, holding a mask over his face. He glanced around quickly, trying to gather exactly what he had missed. Emma was standing next to Ava, holding her hand as she was put under anesthesia. Other doctors were gathering surgical instruments and hovering, waiting for Ava to be asleep so they could prep her head.
"Emma!" Kurt called, catching the clearly distraught woman's attention. She was too close to Ava, all the doctors were. They were all completely wrapped around her fingers, bending to her every will. That's why it was imperative that something good happened in this room today.
"Emma, as soon as she's under come brief me while I scrub." She nodded and Kurt exited the surgical space and began to meticulously clean his hands in the connected scrub room. Emma was in moments later, talking a mile a minute.
"She was fine, just sitting talking to me and then she started seizing. And then she coded. We got her back and the seizing stopped but she couldn't talk and we did an emergency scan and she's… she's bleeding from somewhere. Thompson thinks it's coming from the other tumor…in the hippocampus, but the blood is everywhere. She was losing consciousness on and off before we got her under." Emma was trembling slightly, her eyes shining a little around the edges as she blinked furiously and fought to keep her voice even. Kurt would normally have scolded her for being too emotionally involved, but he didn't want to be hypocritical, as he felt choked up himself. Instead he nodded, and gave her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.
"Don't worry, we've got this" he whispered. He was ready to operate, and he turned to re-enter the OR, silently hoping harder than he ever had before for a miracle. It was a miracle Ava had stayed alive and mobile for so long with the tumors she had. It was a miracle she had brought Blaine and Kurt back together, a miracle that she had even been born in the first place. And Kurt hoped that there was enough magic juice left for one more miracle for Ava Stinson and her strange but loving little family.
"Oh," Kurt said over his shoulder to Emma. "Blaine is probably running around here somewhere, raising hell, looking for someone to tell him what's going on." Kurt almost chuckled when Emma rolled her eyes, both of them knowing that was exactly what was happening in some other part of the hospital. "Please find him." He said quietly. Emma smiled knowingly at his pleading tone that revealed just how close he was to this case, then she took her leave.
Kurt breathed deeply when he saw Ava on the table, her small head scarred and cut open, a permanent reminder of all the things she had already had to deal with in her nine short years that most people never would.
As Kurt got to work, he was attentive to every tiny detail. Every cut was triple-checked and planned out several steps ahead of time. Kurt had always had a knack for perfecting even the smallest of things, and it served him well here. Working in a pediatric hospital meant that Kurt's day was filled to the brim with sick kids. Young children who had only ever known sickness, some who would never know anything else. Seeing so many kids lose their battles during his career was disheartening for Kurt sometimes. Some days it felt like, even if he had a thousand victories, a thousand turned-around hopeless cases, it could never live up to the one child who had only gotten five years spent in hospitals when they deserved an entire life well lived. Kurt had learned he had to focus on the good turn outs, though. The kids who were destined spend the rest of their lives bouncing from hospital bed to hospital bed once they received their grim diagnosis, but ended up experiencing so much more than white walls and scratchy sheets. Kids who would become adults and feel happiness and love, deal with heartbreak and working two jobs to make ends meet everything else that comes with growing up. Kids that would grow up, because of Kurt and his team and the work that they did.
Kurt silently promised himself, and Ava, that she would get through this. She would see more of the world then the insides of a hospital, no matter what it took. Ava Stinson was going to live, he was sure of it.
Sarah read a book once that said that people only cried to get attention. The narrator cited the fact that, when a child falls, they only start to cry once their parents begin fawning over them, and went on to say that we never lose this childish part of ourselves. We cry as a plea for help or to be noticed, no one cries alone in an empty room. Sarah had believed this to be true up until this point in her life, because now it seemed like she spent most of her time crying alone.
She felt so guilty every time hot, salty little traitor slid down her pale cheeks. It was true that she was distraught over everything happening to Ava and her family, but there was a part of her that knew part of her constant sadness was due to her own situation. She knew she couldn't be pregnant and keep her job, there were too many other talented young girls waiting to take her place the second she was out of the picture. But she couldn't even think about not having this child. And she was terrified of telling Wes amidst the rest of the craziness they were in the middle of.
But what scared her most of all was seeing Ava lying in that hospital bed, sick and scarred, and imagining it being her own child. Seeing Blaine and Claire trying to hold everything together as they both came apart at the seams, and picturing herself and Wes trying to deal with the unimaginable fear of losing their child.
And so Sarah excused herself from the waiting room that was suffocating with unspoken fears and panic. She wandered around until she found a single-person bathroom several halls away, and she leaned against the door and let the tears fall until they stopped. She couldn't think of a time in her life when she wanted to be as invisible and unnoticeable as she wished she was right now.
Wes was thinking about baseball. There was a rerun of an old game playing on the tiny television hung awkwardly in the corner of the ceiling, and he couldn't help but glance at it every once in a while as he stared intently at the clock next to it, watching the minutes pass as though every spin of the second hand was not moving them closer to a tragedy no one was prepared for. He knew that they had no control over what was happening in the operating room a few halls away, and he knew that there was nothing in the world he could say or do that would make Blaine and Claire feel any better.
He knew he was powerless to stop the pain, but he couldn't think about that. He couldn't focus on how inconsequential he was, or it would eat him up inside. So he focused on baseball instead.
One thing about the sport that had never failed to astound him was the rate of failure that was accepted in the sport. A successful major league hitter had a batting average of about .300. That meant that, out of ten hits, they would screw up seven times. With a 70% failure rate, players were considered solid hitters.
Wes thought about how his life would be if he failed at 70% his endeavors. He decided, as he watched the long black second hand complete its circular dance once again, that he would not be doing so great if his life worked that way. He fleetingly hoped that surgeons were more successful than major league baseball players.
Claire heard a faint buzzing in her ears. It had begun the moment Blaine had called her, hysterical, telling her to come back to the hospital, and had yet to fade or pause. She couldn't tell if anyone was addressing her or making small talk in the small room. She doubted they were, though. She thought if she tried to speak, no words would come out. The only noise she could even imagine making was a prolonged scream that echoed the shredding of her weak heart.
Austin had been calling and texting Claire constantly since he had returned from his business trip to Mexico. Without international call time on his company phone, he had been completely in the dark until three days before when he had returned to an empty home when he was expecting Claire and Blaine and Ava. Claire hadn't even been able to explain the situation to him, Wes taking over quickly after she had dissolved into silent sobs that shook her tiny frame. Austin had promised to leave for New York as soon as he got out of work on Friday, as he was out of vacation days and he couldn't afford to lose his job, especially with the monster medical bills looming on the horizon.
Claire chewed on her bottom lip until she could taste blood. It was a bad habit but sometimes she felt like making a small hole in her skin could release some of the pressure building up inside of her, so she could put off her eventual explosion for just a little bit longer. The buzzing in her ears was wearing on her brain cells, shutting them down one by one until the imagined disturbance was the only thing that made sense to her.
She knew that once the doctor came in to deliver the news, good or bad, that feeling of nothingness would be gone forever. She would have to deal with whatever came her way, good or bad was all that was really left now. Two options and a choice that would be made for her. And she knew there was a 50% chance that she would spend the rest of her life wishing for that buzzing and that time before she knew to come back to her.
There were ten chairs in the waiting room. Since Sarah had disappeared some time ago, there were three people including himself present. There were 36 full lift-away ceiling tiles above them, which meant the room was a perfect square. The floor had a grey and white checker pattern in the tiles, 288 tiles of each color. Blaine had counted the squares along the perimeter, then done the math. He checked and triple checked and only four minutes had passed. So he counted every single square – once, twice, three times. Over and over until the tile pattern was burned into his corneas, until he saw grey and white checkered floors when he closed his eyes. 288 was the answer every time.
He counted the days they had spent at the hospital: eleven.
He counted the dot-like marks on the bottom of the TV that served as the channels for the sound from the speakers to escape: ninety-six.
He counted the cups of coffee he had consumed that day: five.
He counted the flowers hand-painted in random locations on the otherwise bare walls: fourteen.
He counted until he could only think in numbers. Seventeen more seconds until nine more minutes until one more hour until it would be three hours until it was the next day. Blaine counted each minute with a memory.
8:52… Ava's first Halloween when they had dressed her up in a warm pea-pod costume to be carried around and fawned over by the neighbors.
8:53… The time Ava had run behind swing set and accidentally been kicked in the face by a swinging child.
8:54… Sitting in the car with Ava later that night while Claire waited in a never-ending line at the emergency room to get her split lip stitched up.
8:55… Watching Ava eat Animal Crackers while they watched television together, her biting the heads off and Blaine pulling out the legs as she threw them back into the box.
Blaine remembered little moments with his beautiful family until the hospital waiting room disappeared, and he was at home watching family videos and laughing as Ava hopped from his to Claire's to Austin's lap, always demanding to be the center of attention.
Blaine was so intent in his counting and reminiscing that he almost missed today slip into tomorrow, but he looked up just in time to see the clock strike twelve, and he wondered if his little princess was going to make home from the ball in time.
There came a time, usually about six hours into a difficult surgery, where Kurt felt his knees get a little stiff. If the patient wasn't in any danger, he would take short break. He would shift back and forth from leg to leg, trying to give each a short reprieve, and roll his neck around until it stopped cracking. He didn't really enjoy this break in concentration, but he knew it was necessary. The discomfort would start to take a toll on him otherwise. He would get distracted by the pain, make a mistake. Kurt was determined to make as few mistakes as humanly possible in all his cases.
Today, though, Kurt didn't feel the pain. Six hours passed, then seven, eight, and still he kept working. Checking every possible place for the bleeding other than where he hoped it wouldn't be. Searching for the tiniest contusion that would mean that he wouldn't have to take the risk and cut into the part of Ava's brain that made up who she was. He pictured the little girl who had called him a prick, who had refused to lie down in the hospital bed to be returned to her room. The little girl who was so like Blaine that it made his chest ache for fear that she could lose even the slightest bit of what made her the most intriguing little girl he had ever had the chance to meet. She was the best of both her father and mother, from what Kurt had seen, and he was determined to keep her that way. To heal her and return her to the world, no worse off.
When he was sure there was no other explanation for the bleeding, when the other healing area had been meticulously searched for a recurrence of growth and none was found, Kurt finally moved on to the second tumor.
The bleeding had all but stopped once Ava's brain had been given room to expand and relax, but the fact that the bleeding had occurred at all meant that the tumor was growing, and that was not a good sign. From here, it was a roll of the dice: remove it now and risk almost certain memory loss, or try chemotherapy and radiation and hope that it shrank the tumor to a more manageable size. Kurt flicked between the two options as he looked at the tumor, memorizing its edges and girth. What he saw drew a small, involuntary sigh from his lips as he fixed them in a delicate 'O' shape.
"Call the Chief," he said solemnly, breaking the silence in the room. There was a flurry of motion as all those present tried to do as he asked all at once. He felt his neck tensing up then, stress hitting him like a freight train square in the chest as he waited for his superior to come confirm what he already knew, and help him decide how he should proceed from here.
A/N: Shoot me a review if you wanna make me smile! Hope you all enjoyed reading!