DISCLAIMER: I do not own Chicago Med or any of the characters. Next chapter, please review! I have a few ideas up my sleeve, but would love to think what you all think! Please comment some suggestions! Enjoy!
Halstead's vision was a blur of shapes and colors as he scrambled his way up to the surgical floor like a mad man. He had seen Sarah, hands on her knees out of exhaustion, on his wild sprint out of the ED.
Two elevator rides, one long climb of stairs, and 6 hallways later, Will flew open the door to the scrub room, with a perfect view of the operating room behind the glass. His eyes were crazed, delirious with doubts, and he barely managed to loosely apply a surgical mask and enter the OR when a figure at the door barred him from doing so.
"No, Will," Choi the human wall said to his distressed co-worker, "Don't."
"Choi, I can help," Halstead weakly tried persuading his friend to let him in, "Just let me see him, see what I can do-"
He didn't have the chance to finish. Ethan's expression was like stone, shaking his head.
Now Will was furious.
"I sat outside for hours waiting, sitting, laughing. All the while one of my own is bleeding out two hundred yards from where I stood. How would that make you feel? Huh? Ethan, I need to go in and see. I need to know that this isn't, in some twisted way, all my fault. If I had only just been there, stepped in to see and stop this son of a-"
Again, Will was cut off by Choi who was looking perfectly calm…on the outside.
On the inside, Choi was cussing himself out as well. Where were you, Ethan? Where were you when Sarah, a first year psych resident, was doing all the dirty work?
He tried to remember, oh yeah, that's right. He was in the break room eating his packed lunch. How productive.
"Will, I understand how you feel," Choi began, continuing as Halstead was about to protest, "Believe me, I do. The best thing that we can do right now though is get downstairs, find this bastard, and help save some lives. Have you met Rhodes? The guy won't bite it without rubbing it in first."
Will sighed, mentally drained, "Yeah well, don't think we're going to be getting any more patients today. All traumas are being rerouted to other hospitals because of the lockdown."
Great, Ethan groaned inwardly as he and Halstead exited the scrub room, Nothing to keep us busy then.
….
When Dr. Shulks stepped into the ED, slipping off his scrub cap, Maggie, Sharon, Choi, Manning, Will, April, and Reese slammed him with demands of Rhodes' status.
"How is he doc?" Maggie asked, her breath caught in her throat.
"Frankly, Dr. Rhodes is an extremely, extremely lucky fella. A couple minutes longer and I'm sure we would have lost him. The surgery was difficult, and he still isn't out of the woods yet. These next few days are crucial, Dr. Rhodes is in the ICU now, we have him sedated and on a ventilator. His progress will determine when we can wean him off the sedatives and have him breathing on his own. When he wakes up, we're going to be sending in a neurologist as well to determine his cognitive and motor skills."
The ED staff clung on to his every word, everyone breathing in relief when they heard their friend was still alive.
"When can we see him, doctor?" Mrs. Goodwin asked.
"I'll be sending a nurse down to inform you when, but only two people in the room at all times, his immune system is incredibly weak and we need to limit the amount of human contact he has," Dr. Shulks sympathetically answered.
She nodded and he exited the ED into the elevators.
…
Halstead was right, there were no more incoming patients which meant the doctors all sat around the break room table, trying not to let their worst fears get the better of them.
Of course, Mrs. Goodwin excused all of them to go home early, but nobody did. Nobody could. Not when Connor was lying in critical condition a few floors above them.
Will felt absolutely miserable, he couldn't help blaming himself every chance he got. He was sure Natalie felt the same way with the grimacing look she had.
A nurse came into the break room a few hours later, seeing all the doctors sullen sitting around the round table.
"Ummm…Dr. Rhodes?" the nurse asked, confused. All the doctors and nurses in the room stood, immediately running up to the small nurse who felt greatly overwhelmed.
"How is he?" Will started off the bout of questions.
More questions flew in the nurse's direction, but she cut them off by saying two people were allowed to visit him now.
Will and Maggie immediately volunteered, nobody protesting.
On their way up, Will started to feel slightly apprehensive. They were walking into a patient's room, with a surgeon consulting them, except this time the roles were reversed. Rhodes was the patient, it wasn't right.
As they walked into the ICU, Will couldn't help but be surprised. Compared to the loud hustle and bustle of the ER, the ICU was a library. Everyone spoke in hushed voices and the floor itself was small.
They followed the nurse like ducklings as she weaved her way through the halls and finally turned into a doorway, entering the patient's room. Their patient's room.
Maggie and Will both stopped outside the entrance, trying to prepare themselves to enter. It was ironic, ER doctors and nurses tended to make good ICU staff because they were accustomed to brutal traumas. This was no where near the same thing.
They hesitantly entered the doorway.
…
Rhodes was lost in his own mind, a deep, black nothingness which, honestly, he didn't want to come out of anytime soon.
This was the most amount of sleep he had gotten in days, though something felt wrong in the back of his mind. He remembered getting up, going to work, none of this sleeping stuff.
And then it hit him like a wave. The memories of the moments leading up to his peaceful blackness. A glint of metal, a telephone on the wall, headaches, broken mirrors, then nothing at all.
He was angry and anxious and unable to move. He had to get out of here, get that bastard that tried to kill him. But try as he might, there was no way getting out of this darkness that had grabbed ahold of him.
His nervousness couldn't stay bundled inside him, his mind, one that was supposed to be resting, was resisting. It was like he was trapped in a useless body, a corpse.
He needed to get out of here.
Then the bad things started piling on top of each other.
….
"He's seizing!" Halstead screamed from Rhodes' ICU room.
One minute, he's checking Connor's vitals, the next, he's having a tonic-clonic seizure on the bed.
Maggie had left to go start her shift downstairs maybe 45 minutes ago, Reese the next on the list to visit.
Of course, Reese thought, first he's coding on my watch, now seizing. What's next?
Sarah jumped in to help Will turn Connor on to his side, a few nurses rushing in, one pushing a crash cart along with her.
Will blurted out a few names of medication that a nurse plunged into Rhodes' IV. The heart monitor was having a field day as well, Connor's heart like a race horse.
She held her colleague's side as he continued to seize, the medicine not kicking in yet.
"What could have triggered this?" she asked Will, dropping all formalities after such a long day.
Halstead put a hand through his hair, equally exhausted, and responded with a small, "I don't know," so the nurses couldn't hear him.
Slowly but surely, Connor's convulsions began to cease, Sarah letting out a sigh of relief.
Will instructed a nurse, angry, "Get a neurologist and respiratory specialist down here. Check to see if the intubation tube didn't cause any damage and have neuro report straight to my face what the hell happened here."
….