#also once the had to use an ultrasound to find a vein and they let me watch the screen and and showed me some cool stuff

[lillybean730]

wish me the fortitude needed to treat my pulmonary tests as a test of normal function and not a game i have to beat lol

[glassartpeasants]

Like Father, Like Son

Overhaul x F!Reader

Warnings: Angst, unhealthy/toxic relationships, child abuse, mentions of needles

A/N: This is a post based on a head cannon made by @yandereacademia which you can see here. I promise I will continue the DDLC AU but I needed to get this angst outta my system because I’ve been really stressed lately lol. Also the original storyline is kinda bumped up to fit the story

~~~

The only reason you were with the sociopath called Overhaul is because of a stupid mistake you made about 5 months ago. If you could go back in time you would’ve never drank that much until you were blackout drunk. You had somehow managed to sleep with the germophobic man after you both crossed paths when you both were blackout drunk. Which leaded where you are now. In the Shie Hassakai base, pregnant with his child. 

Once you showed him the test he demanded- no, MADE you quit your old job ad live in the base with him. Not in his room of course.Who knows what germs you could be carrying! You don’t get special treatment even if you are the mother of his child. And If we’re being honest, he doesn’t really see it as his child. More like an heir. How else would the Shie Hassakai live on? 

He doesn’t even see you that often. He sends either Chrono or Mimic to look after you. Sometimes Setsuno. You liked Setsuno since he actually treated you like a human rather than a burden. Chrono was a bit better than mimic. Mimic was just a plain ass. 

Your entire pregnancy was all about check ups. Healthy food, did I mention checkups? It was almost every Tuesday and Friday that he made you come into a little doctors room and inspect you and give you ultrasounds. You felt more like an incubator rather than a mother, but you digress. Once you got the news that the child was a boy you bet your ass Overhaul was way more worried about you than he originally was.

You wanted to run really. You saw what horrible things Overhaul had done. You didn’t want your child to end up like Eri or to turn into a shit human being like Overhaul. You wanted your child to grow up compassionate and kind, not a stone cold murderer with no remorse for human life.

Maybe once your child is born you can teach him those things in secret...

~~~

2 years after the child is born

You were right, Overhaul wanted nothing to do with the baby until it was old enough to be taught the ways of the yakuza. He wasn’t even impressed when the baby started talking and walking! You wanted to yell, scream, argue, and just hurt the man in general. A child needs support, not a unimpressed look everytime they do an accomplishment. 

You always supported your son. Showing him how proud you were whenever he handed you a drawing of him and you. Overhaul barely even saw the kid which affected him to the point where the kid didn’t even draw him in pictures.

You were happy that your baby didn’t see/look up to Overhaul as a fatherly figure. Man didn’t deserve to be called one or be one. You were worried if Overhaul would use your son as a experiment like he was using Eri.  

Speaking of Eri, you finally convinced Overhaul to let you see her and comfort her after he used her for the bullets. She was such a sweetie and especially loved how you would sing her to sleep whenever she has a bad day. You didn’t get to see her a lot, but you did what you could when you did. If only you could make Overhaul see what he was doing to everyone around him...

~~~

Your son just turned 8

Everyday your son looked more and more liked his father. Not to mention he inherited Overhaul’s quirk It wouldn’t have bothered you that much if it weren’t for the fact that he started looking up to his father. Whenever your so was getting put to bed by you, he would always tell you about how much he wanted to be the next leader. He would tell you how he watched Overhaul to paperwork, sat next to him in meetings and such. The finally straw for you was when he told you that Overhaul let him use his quirk on a living breathing human being. To say you were furious was an understatement. All you saw was red. 

You smiled at the boy before pressing a kiss to his head and walking out his door while whispering goodnight before your started your expedition to give Overhaul a piece of your mind. You’ve stayed quiet for to long. You couldn’t just let him expose your child to such violence at such a young age! All you saw was red as you walked to his office door. Giving it a harsh knock you were allowed entry.

Upon entering you notice that you are the only one there with him. Just the two of you. You were afraid yes, but your anger out did it.

“Did you seriously let our son use his quirk on someone at such a young age?! He’s only 8! He doesn’t need to be exposed so early!” You yelled at him with your hands on your hips. You knew if you pointed at him you could say goodbye to that finger.

“He’s going to be the next leader. It’s only natural to start him off early. And I don’t remember giving you a say in the matter.” His voice cold and stoic but a hint of annoyance caught your ears.

“8 is way to early! Please Overhaul, Just give me 2-3 more years without him experiencing what you do.” You begged him. Tears threatened to spill from your eyes. You only wanted what was best for your son. Your heart stopped when you heard Overhaul get up from his desk and his footsteps come near your now slightly shaking form.

“Bold of you to assume I would let him miss out on very needed skills to become the next leader. We both know that if it weren’t for him, you would have been dead the second i found out I slept with you. That boy is the only thing that kept you alive. So, from now on, I expect you to never come to my face. Talking about him needing to be kind and compassionate, is not the way of the yakuza. One more incident like this, than I’ll make him kill you myself.” Your eyes widened as you looked at the man in front of you. You can feel your blood run cold in your veins as it circulates through your body. Tears streaked down your face as you felt so defeated. Your entire body felt like you’ve been crushed by a car. 

You turned around and walked out the door and into your room. Locking the door your jumped onto your bed, grabbing the pillow before screaming into it. Your tears stained the pillow case as your body shook. You felt so hopeless and so helpless. Where was a hero when you truly needed one?

~~~

The next day

You were just finished changing before your son barged into your room. You were about to say good morning to him before he started screaming at you. Shocked you told him to calm down, but in the corner of your eye you saw the purple feathers that you have learned to fear walk by.

“What are you saying? Please calm down!” You say as you try to soothe your screaming child.

“How dare you try and take me away from dad! Dad told me everything!” Your son flailed his arms up and down while stomping on the ground. His screams soon turned incoherent.

“Baby! I would never-”

“Liar! Dad told me that you wanted to leave him! He said that you thought he didn’t deserve a son!” You didn’t say that what was he on?! You only wanted to protect him! You loved your son to the point you would die for him! What had Overhaul said to him!

“Please sweetie calm down-”

“No! I never want to talk to you again!” Your son ran out the door before slamming it shut. Your heart felt shattered as you heard Overhauls voice on the other side, ’calming’ your distressed son. You felt your world crumbling around you as your son was the only thing that kept you happiness in these dark times. Him and Eri. Oh Eri, if he grows up that means...

You felt vomit rise in your throat at the thought of your own son hurting such a sweet, innocent, little girl. You fall to your knees as tears spill down your cheeks. You couldn’t just run away from the Shie Hassakai ever. The base is fully guarded, and has high max security cameras. Not to mention the probability of them finding you and your son right away. If you even tried, you would probably get you and your son hurt. Maybe even little Eri. 

Your whole body felt numb. You just wished it was a horrible nightmare.

~~~

5 months later

As the weeks pass by, you felt your hurt break more and more everyday. Your son had kept his word when he said he ever wanted to talk to you again. You haven’t heard your baby's voice since that day. Hell, now you barely even see him! You see Eri more than your actual son now. ANd seeing Eri was not that often.

You felt hopeless. You wanted nothing more to do than crawl in a hole and die. Every night was spent crying over your son and how your life and gone so down hill so quickly. You didn’t even feel like moving. You just sat in the corner of the room since it felt like the only warm spot in the entire room. This little corner felt like some sort of sanctuary in this horrible place you call home. 

~~~

Your son just turned 13

Day whatever of the last time your son talked to you. And day whatever since you’ve left your room. You had no reason anymore. Overhaul officially banished you from ever seeing Eri again. Your world was crushed once more. At this point you felt like your whole existence was useless. 

Your days grew darker by the minute as your mental health seemed to be slipping through your fingers. You only ever moved when you needed to go to the bathroom or to drag the food plate that was brought to you by some employee of Overhaul. You barely ate anything anyways so you really saw no point in doing anything anymore. 

It only hurt more knowing that today was his birthday. You had asked the employee that brought you food if he had a party or just something to celebrate. You felt the last of your hope crushed once you heard his answer.

“The only thing he got was a official Shie Hassakai mask.”

~~~

Your son turned 15

You body was weak. You had refused to eat anything seeing no point in it anymore. You were always tired. Only getting up to go to the bathroom then sitting back in the corner that once gave you sanctuary. 

You heard footsteps on the outside of your door as the familiar voice of Overhaul was on the other side. Another voice rang in your ears and it hit you like a train once you realized who’s it was. It was your sons. His voice was so much deeper than the little boy’s you had once heard. It only deepened your sadness. You blinked but didn’t even turn your eyes once you heard the door opening. 

“We can test the serum out on her first. She’s too weak to fight back.”

“I didn’t know my mother had a quirk.” You couldn’t even make your eyes turn to look at them. You didn’t want to see the monster your son had become. Your heart couldn’t take anymore heartbreak, You felt like you would crumble into nothing.

You felt a light get shine into your eyes. You didn’t even blink during it. Once the light was gone you got a clear look at your once loving son. A mask covered his face just like his fathers did. He looked you in the eyes and you did the same. You wanted to cry but held it down. 

A latex hand grabbed your arm before you felt the needle being poked into it. You didn’t even flinch or wince. Almost as if you were a lifeless doll. A hand moved up and down your face as if to see if you were even alive or ‘there’.

“She isn’t responding to anything. She didn’t even wince. She’s breathing but she looks like she’s sick.” All that was one ear and out the other. Finally you felt the needle leave your arm as a sigh escaped Overhaul’s lips. 

“Well wait for about an hour or two and see the effects. For now, we have to do more tests on Eri. Lets go.” So...he was apart of the team experimenting on Eri. You felt like throwing up. How could the boy who you raised to be kind and compassionate turn into such a disgusting monster.

The sound of their footsteps leaving the room hit your ears. From the corner of your eye you say your son about to leave before you spoke up,

“You are not my son.” You saw him stop in his tracks as he turned to look at you. His eyes a bit wide but said nothing.

“I never want to hear you call me your mother ever again. Your a monster undeserving of one. I can’t believe I gave birth to someone like you. I never want ot see your face again.” In your monotone words they’re were spikes laced in venom. You couldn’t even look your own son in the eyes. As they we’re the same as his monster of a father. 

“Get out of my room and never come back.” You heard him close the door slowly as you let out a breath once you finally saw him gone. You can barely stand to see the monster your child had become. But, you didn’t see nor hear the way his breathing became ragged. Or how his eyes felt like spilling tears. Or how his body slowly shook at your words. 

‘It shouldn’t hurt. This shouldn’t hurt me. Why does it hurt so bad? Please stop it. Her words shouldn’t affect me. Why does it hurt?’

[hurting-fictional-people]

Day two

Just a quick disclaimer: I tried to read about blood loss and stuff to make this as accurate as possible but in the end, the real scientific and completely medically precise source used to describe how Noah feels is how bad I feel after drawing blood when I can’t eat beforehand. So just ignore the medical inaccuracies please hsdjfhj

CW: lab whump, medical setting, needles, drawing blood, manhandling, restraints, muzzle

Previous

“Mr. Reeve, the doctor has requested you.”

It was weird how, sometimes, words felt physical. Noah was sitting on the bed one moment, trying to talk to his roommate – who kept dodging his questions –, and in the next, he was up and backing away to the wall farthest from the door and the guards waiting there, hands raised in surrender as a shiver ran through his body.

Even though he could hear his heart racing and feel his stomach churning, Noah grinned at the guards and crooned “You can go and tell dear dr. Carver to shove his request up his– “

Before he could finish, three guards hovered over him. Unforgiving hands grabbed his arms and hauled him out of the room, jerking in the tight grip.

Maverick, who had kept mostly to himself as Noah tried to get him to spill out everything he knew about the facility, stood up with a frown and called his name, but Noah was left guessing what he was about to say as the doors locked them each in one side.

He thrashed and kicked for half of the way before giving up.

“Fine, I’ll stop fighting, you guys can let me go. I’ll lose my arms if you keep cutting off my circulation like this.”

As soon as the hands left his arms, though, Noah darted forward. The hallways were endless and identical, but he would never forgive himself if he didn’t at least try to leave.

Noah didn’t even get to the corner before he was thrown to the ground face-first, avoiding breaking his nose by turning his head in the last possible second, hands held behind him and a knee on his back. A high-pitched yelp escaped his lips as the guard barked at his ear, “done with the antics, kid?”

He nodded against the cold tile. The man pulled him up but didn’t let go of his arms, still painfully twisted behind his back. Noah groaned, but didn’t bother complaining – he knew he wouldn’t be heard anyway.

Noah tried his best not to think of where he was going or what might be awaiting him, but when they stopped in front of sliding metal doors, he was already trembling. One of the guards typed something on a keyboard by the door, and as it opened, Noah had to lock his knees to keep them from bucking.

He stood before a wide lab, eyes darting between trays filled with needles, flasks, and sharp objects he didn’t know the name of but filled him with unease either way; cabinets he was sure held more of the frightening instruments; and the metal table, right in the middle of it all, surrounded by restraints.

He swallowed audibly and started to back away instinctively, earning a growl from a guard and an annoyed shove forward.

Dr. Carver looked up at him from where he rummaged through a cabinet and straightened up, smiling at the false bravado Noah was trying to pull.

“Noah! How nice of you to join us,” the doctor cooed, giving him a wink. Noah wished to have his hands free so he could punch that fucking wink out of that smug face. “On the table, please.”

“If your henchmen stop trying to dislocate my shoulder,” he hissed, writhing against the hands holding him.

The doctor only tilted his head to the side and admired the scene as the guards pushed him down on the table and buckled restraints around his ankles, his wrists, his chest, his hips. Noah swore through gritted teeth, loudly and profusely enough to feel burning glares from the nurses and other doctors strolling around the lab, casually ignoring him until then.

“Language, kid,” Dr. Carver chastised.

“Fuck you, you crazy fucking psycho, sadistic creep,” Noah grunted.

“Quit insulting me, Noah, it won’t do you any good.”

“I wasn’t insulting you, asshole, I was describing you,” he replied, pushing against the restraints and finding no give.

He expected annoyance at least, fury at best in response to his retort. Instead, he was met with an amused smile.

“Did you know we’re recording every test and experiment?” the doctor said softly, towering over Noah’s defenseless figure. “I’m going to take great pleasure in watching this later, once I’ve taught you how to behave properly.”

“We’ll see about that, doc,” Noah smirked, hoping it would conceal the dread pooling in his stomach.

“This is one of the wild ones, huh? We’ll see how long It lasts,” someone muttered behind him, earning low chuckles from faceless people. Suddenly it was too hard to keep up the fearless facade as helplessness fell over him like a thick blanket, stealing his breath away. They talked about Noah like he was a zoo animal – locked up against his will, just a helpless and unwilling entertainment. A lab rat. It was hard not to feel like it.

“Are you done being a brat?” Dr. Carver asked, dragging a stool and a metal tray on wheels next to Noah. “Let us begin, then.”

“Don’t fucking touch me!” he shouted, but no one listened.

Noah trashed as hard as he could, but all he could do was scratch his skin against the harsh material strapping him to the table.

“I’m not doing anything yet, kid. Hold still or this is going to be a lot more painful than it has to,” Carver warned with a look a parent might give a disobedient child.

Noah only thrashed harder.

Hands came from everywhere, grabbing his body all at the same time. A tourniquet was tied to his arm way too tightly, a cotton-tipped swab stuck up his nose so high it burned and made his eyes water. Before he could do as much as take a breath, a needle was stabbed into his vein so harshly and abruptly he couldn’t help by cry out.

“I told you to hold still,” dr. Carver said in a sing-song voice that got Noah clenching his fists and gritting his teeth.

As people continued to poke and prod him, Noah searched for the small black circle of a camera, finding one in each corner of the room. Staring straight at the closest one, he screamed “I want this to stop now! I do not allow my body or my image to be used in this experiment! They are keeping me captive and using me against my will!”

When he finished, shaky hands, gasping breath and raw voice, a chuckle filled the room.

“Cute,” Dr. Carver commented, patting his hand. He didn’t get a chance to scratch the man before he took the hand away. “But the recordings are mine and are never going to be seen by anyone else. Nice try, though.”

He would have replied, weren’t for the harsh hands suddenly holding his head still. Noah tried to bite and scream, but he was truly helpless to stop them when a piece of metal was shoved inside his mouth, keeping his tongue uncomfortably pressed to his palate, his jaw unable to fully close or open, and someone held his head up as another buckled straps behind it.

A muzzle.

They muzzled him.

Noah stared at dr. Carver with wide, betrayed eyes. The man simply giggled and continued to fill a bag with his blood. He tried to force his jaw open, to say something, anything, but the muzzle was strapped tight, and all he could produce was a pitiful whine. Shame filled him to the brim, making his cheeks burn.

“Don’t worry kid, this is just so you stop screaming and don’t give us a headache since we’re going to be here for a while,” the doctor said in a tranquilizing voice. “We’ll take it out once we’re done.”

He looked at Noah expectantly, as if waiting for a response, his smile wrapped in just the right amount of mockery to make Noah seethe.

With even his words taken away, Noah let his body sag on the table, eyes closed to keep the tears from falling as the doctors went on.

They took X-rays, ultrasounds, and countless tests no one cared to tell him the name of or what they were for. His body was handled by precise, impersonal hands, moving him slightly when needed, like a puppet being rearranged on stage. Like an object, made to be played with. Whenever he had the chance, Noah writhed as best as he could just to annoy the doctors, but the satisfaction it earned him was quickly muddled by the pain when they tightened the restraints so hard his extremities started to tingle.

It wasn’t the pain he was scared of. He had agreed on participating in the experiment before he knew it was actually a prison, knowing it would probably include some degree of pain. It was the lack of freedom that made him sick to his stomach with panic. The loss of his free will, which he had fought so hard to conquer, now being taken away in the blink of an eye. It hurt more than anything those so-called doctors could do to him.

And so, it hurt inside and out, as strangers with apathetic eyes used his body as if there was no one inside, whimpering softly and hoping that dreadful day could just come to an end.

-

After what felt like forever, when Noah was already dizzy and weak from all the blood they’d taken – why did they need two blood bags and that many tubes, anyway? –, dr. Carver smiled sweetly and shook his shoulder to get him out of the sleepy daze he didn’t realize he was in.

“We’re all done here, kid. I’d say you did good, but you really didn’t. You also lost quite a bit of blood and haven’t eaten anything, so I’d recommend resting and eating whatever we send to your room unless you want to be back here sooner rather than later. Hopefully next time you’ll behave better, and we won’t have to use the muzzle or the restraints, huh?”

His head was lifted, the muzzle taken away, leaving his jaw aching and his pride scattered somewhere along the floor, replaced by anger and embarrassment.

“Let’s not pretend you wouldn’t tie me down just to see me struggling, doc. I can see it in your eyes,” he said, working his jaw to try and alleviate the ache.

“You’ll be so cute when you learn to keep your mouth shut, Noah,” Carver sighed, not looking at all as annoyed as his words might’ve suggested. Actually, he sounded more entertained than anything.

With an indifferent nod to someone Noah couldn’t see, the doctor patted his cheek patronizingly and turned away.

A part of Noah felt the impulse of provoking the man one last time, just to try and get a reaction out of him, but the rest just wanted to curl up and sleep, forget that this day ever existed. So, when the guards surrounded him, unbuckling the restraints with maddening slowness, Noah just laid there and waited, too worn out to do or say anything.

The walk back to the room looked more like two grown men dragging a rag doll through disturbing hallways, but Noah was so faint and defeated that he just sank in their grip and stumbled across the cold floors.

He didn’t even realize they were already in front of his cell until the guards let go of his arms and shoved him inside. The ground approached quickly as his knees bent with the sudden push, but instead of being met with chilly tile and pain, he was enveloped by warm arms and a comforting presence holding all his weight.

“Thanks,” he murmured as Maverick helped him straighten up before staggering toward the bed.

“You are either the most intriguing subject they ever got their hands on, or you really pissed someone off if they left you like this on your second day here,” Maverick remarked, sitting on his own bed across Noah’s.

“I don’t think Carver likes being called a crazy fucking psycho,” Noah said in as smug a tone as he could muster, “or a sadistic creep.”

Maverick pursed his lips, but a snorted laugh was quick to escape them. He shook his head slowly, laughing audible for a moment before forcing his mouth back shut and replacing the softness the laughter had spread across his face with a slight frown. “Bold. But you shouldn’t do that, Noah. The sooner you stop resisting, the less they’ll actively hurt you.”

“They are keeping me captive; they are hurting me either way.”

Maverick glared at him, jaw pressed tight. “You are hardly escaping. It’s better to comply and accept the mercy you can have than fight for a lost cause.”

“The day I stop fighting, Maverick, is the day my fucking soul dies. If I comply, then I give up and I am never doing that. And you know what? You shouldn’t either – if you let them convince you that you can’t escape, then you really won’t.”

The words fell out of his mouth in a stumbling croak, his tongue feeling weird and sore inside his mouth. Even so, Noah would’ve kept going if the other man hadn’t turned his face away, brows furrowed and gaze furious. He would’ve been sorry for scolding him, but Noah truly meant what he’d said.

“Hey, how long have you been here?” it was hard to keep a lighthearted tone when he felt absolutely miserable, but Noah forced himself to roll to his side and swallow down the nausea and the humiliation that seemed to have stuck to him.

“I don’t know, they don’t let us keep track of time,” was the low answer, a hint of sadness tinging every word. “You have to make peace with what you’re living now, Noah. I’ve been here for longer, and I can tell you for sure: people don’t leave this place. The only thing we can do is hope that today doesn’t hurt as badly as yesterday.”

Helplessness emanated from Maverick as the words left his mouth. Noah’s roommate had clearly been through a lot more than he had, and he knew that arguing would render him nothing. So Noah kept his mouth shut and silently promised himself he would prove Maverick wrong. 

“Are you okay?” Maverick asked suddenly.

“Yeah, why?” 

It was a flat out lie. Noah’s body felt feeble and strained after so many hours held in the same position, his head hurt, and he feared he might start crying anytime.

“You are so pale your lips have disappeared.”

Noah pouted, trying to see his colorless lips.

“Damn, I can’t believe I’m already making a bad impression. Wanted to look nice at least on the first few days, you know?” he mumbled, the instinct to joke and hide his vulnerability taking over.

“You look like a very handsome ghost, don’t worry.”

Noah managed to crack out a smile as Maverick stared so intensely at his face, he feared he was looking at his soul.

“I think you’ll be okay, you just need to eat something and rest for a bit,” his roommate finally stated, glancing at the box attached to the wall from where the meals came in. “I’ll keep watch for when they deliver some food. You should sleep for now, I know you didn’t last night. Tell me if you start feeling worse or if anything changes, alright?”

Noah nodded once before curling up and closing his eyes. Strangely enough, he quickly fell into a dreamless sleep, too exhausted to even think about how he could still feel the muzzle pressed against his face. For once, he just laid there and let himself be lulled by the warm presence watching over him, knowing he wasn’t alone after such a terrible day.

When Noah woke up, he was alone in the cell, Maverick’s absence feeling like a weight on his stomach. This time the unease he felt looking around had nothing to do with blood loss.

Next

[lotusss-flowerbomb]

We Have A Situation (2)

Bucky x reader

Warnings: None for this chapter.

Word Count: 1,473

********

The morning sickness was killing you. Every morning at about 5am it started. 

"Can't we do this around 9:30?" You rubbed your stomach. 

You hadn't started showing yet, but it was already becoming a habit to talk to the baby. You had your first official ultrasound appointment today. You  and Bucky were going to hear the baby's heartbeat for the first time.

Later on after the rest of the world woke up, you made your way down to breakfast. Bacon and oatmeal seemed to be the only two foods you could keep down lately and that's what Sam had waiting for you. You thanked him and sat at the table with everyone else.

"So, do we find out if it's a boy or a girl today?" Sam asked.

"No, it's still too early. Today is first heartbeat day," you answered. Bucky squirmed in his seat. "Nervous?"

"No," he quickly denied.

"Then why did your heart rate just speed up?" Steve chimed in. 

Bucky rolled his eyes at his best friend and clenched his jaw. You looked at your phone and grabbed your dishes.

"Almost time for the appointment, Buck. Don't be late." You called over your shoulder as you walked out of the kitchen. Even though you two didn't get along, you wanted him to be involved with the process and he'd agreed.

You showed up first to the lab. Dr. Cho instructed you to sit up on the table and lay back. She asked a few questions for small talk until Bucky showed up. He walked in and saw you already laid back with your feet in the stirrups. 

"Did I miss it? I thought I was on time?" You could hear the panic in his voice.

"No, we haven't started yet." You reached out your hand for his. 

He walked over, grabbed it and took a seat next to you. He turned towards the door just as the others burst through it.

"We're here!" Sam announced.

"Yes, I see that. What are you guys doing here?" You questioned.

"Yeah right, you couldn't pay me to miss my niece's first ultrasound," he scoffed.

"You mean my nephew," Steve followed. 

You looked around at the others.

"I own the building, so I can go into any room I want." Tony.

You rolled your eyes and shook your head. Both Wanda and Nat were on a mission, so they were missing the action. You nodded at the doctor for confirmation that she could continue. She grabbed the probe she’d prepared.

“Whoa, wait! What’s that?” Steve questioned, horrified.

“That’s what she’s gonna use to see the baby,” you explained.

All the men in the room looked at one another and quickly turned their backs.

“Bucky, you’re the reason we’re here, you can watch,” your voice riddled with humor.

“I’m good,” he fired back.

Dr. Cho chuckled and proceeded with what she needed to do.

"There goes our little one," the doctor smiled at the screen. You couldn't help but look over at Bucky and the look of amazement on his face when he turned towards the screen made you smile. "Oh," she exclaimed.

"Oh? 'Oh' what is something wrong?" You asked.

"Sounds like we have a second heartbeat over here." She shifted the probe.

"Please tell me this kid has two hearts," you said.

"Nope! Looks like we've got ourselves a set of twins. Congratulations!" She happily announced.

You were just as close to her as you were with the rest of the team, so she's genuinely happy. You looked over at Bucky. He was staring at the screen in disbelief. He began blinking rapidly before getting up and leaving the room. Steve and Sam both went after him.

********

"Buck!" Steve called jogging behind him. "Hey man, what's going on? You shouldn't just leave like that."

When Bucky finally turned around they could see the tears in his eyes that threatened to fall. 

"What if I screw this up?" He asked them. "What if I've screwed them up? He added referring to the serum coursing through his veins.

Both Steve and Sam's hearts broke for their friend. They knew he was still fighting demons from his time with HYDRA.

"Don't worry about that right now. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," Steve told him.

"Everything will be fine. Just enjoy the process," Sam assured. 

Bucky nodded in agreement and the three men moved back towards the room. You looked at Bucky and started to make a joke, but decided against it. You saw the tears in his eyes and would find the time to talk to him later.

********

They were spoiling you and it was becoming annoying. Everyone constantly asking if you needed anything and coming to your room to check on you, but they weren't letting you have the one thing you wanted — to go on a mission. Even if you stayed on the jet to just be the eyes. You wanted, no, needed to do something besides sit in the tower all day long. You even unsuccessfully tried to get Bucky on your side at one point.

"Come on, I haven't been able to go on any missions since I told you guys. I'm dying of boredom!" You followed behind Tony.

"Then go find something else to do. Go to the park, go swimming, go make a candle, blow something up in a lab." Tony said.

"Do not go blow something up in a lab," Steve interjected.

"Bucky, come on, I need you to back me up here, please?"

"And why exactly would I do that? I don't want you in danger, because that puts the babies in danger."

You stomped back inside. You were tired of everyone treating you like you couldn't handle yourself. You sat down in the media room and lifted your shirt. At 12 weeks, you had a little pooch in your stomach. 

"You guys have your dad and all of your uncles treating me like a delicate little flower." You said to them.

Luckily, the mission had only been a few days. You texted both Nat and Wanda constantly while they were away. 

You made a huge dinner for them upon return. You’d also baked a few cakes that took hours to decorate to pass the time. 

Once everyone changed, they all headed down to the dining room where you had everything prepared. You all sat around and talked about the mission. Sam mentioned how Bucky jumped out of the window of a building just before it exploded. He shrugged at the look of horror you gave him. Before you could say anything, his phone started ringing, he excused himself and disappeared. You hated the twinge of jealousy you felt knowing it was probably another woman.

********

Later that night, unable to sleep, you sat in the media room with a slice of cake and some ice cream. You heard an unfamiliar laugh in the hallway and when you got up to investigate, you could see a woman down the hall being led into the elevator. The light shined off of Bucky's arm and your chest tightened. 

There it was again. The jealousy. You shook your head and went back into the media room. It had to be the hormones. You didn't care what or who Bucky did... So, why were there tears streaming down your face at the thought of him touching another woman?

You stared at the large screen unable to pay attention to the giant shark hunting people. You'd have a talk with him about it tomorrow. You closed your eyes and was able to drift off to sleep like you weren't wide awake seconds ago.

The next day, you were feeling better. You went up to Bucky's room around lunch time and knocked on his door. He answered with nothing but a towel around his waist. Your eyes traveled the length of his body. That night flashing in your mind.

"Eyes up here, baby doll," he smirked. 

Your eyes snapped up and connected to his. Seriously, these hormones were too much.

"Um, so last night," you found your voice, "I was down in the media room when you came back with your... guest and I was wondering if you could not bring people here anymore?" His face twisted in confusion, so you began to explain. "The hormones. I think they have me super sensitive and last night, hearing her, I just didn't like it." You bit your lip.

He didn't say anything for a few seconds and you thought he was going to step back and slam the door in your face at such a ridiculous request, but he didn't.

 "Okay," he stated with a nod.

"Really?"

"Yeah, I don't want to stress you out, so if it bothers you, I won't bring women here."

"Thanks," you turned and power walked down the hallway. 

You didn't think it would be that easy. Maybe this co-parenting thing wouldn't be so bad after all.

********

@titty-teetee

@fandomfavesss

@literaturefeen

@angrythingstarlight

@toni9

@beautifullmelodyxx

@thewolfgirluniverse

[myhauntedsalem]

30 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics Describe their Most Disturbing Medical Stories

1. The Guessing Game

“I work as an ICU nurse. A mid-20s female came in with some serious cardiac abnormalities and then went into respiratory distress. Never had any medical history at all. We had to put her on the ventilator, but she was on just enough sedation to keep her lucid. She could nod/shake her head yes and no appropriately to questions.

One night, the patient in the room next to hers died, but the body was still in the room about to be taken to the morgue. The female patient’s door was closed with curtains drawn, so she couldn’t have seen what was going on next door. When I went in to check on her, she had a look of sheer panic on her face, trembling. I asked her a series of questions to see if she was cold/hot/in pain/etc. and she denied all. I asked her if she saw something—she started to aggressively nod her head YES. She wasn’t on any drugs that would make her hallucinate. I went on to get details on what this thing looked like. After playing 20 questions I got this: a man, pale white, left arm missing, heavy, bald, standing still, behind me. This was the man who had just died next door.

I spent the rest of the night consoling her.” – whites42

2. Life After Death

“When I was on an ER rotation during med school we got a call about a 23-year-old woman who was shot in the head, and who was already completely gone, but was reportedly five months pregnant so they were doing CPR until they got her to the hospital to see if the baby was viable. They got her to the ER and did an ultrasound and turned out the baby was full-term so they did a C-section in like under a minute and got the baby out.

I don’t think it’s so incredibly uncommon but it was pretty surreal to see a baby delivered from a dead person with their brain exposed and she was pretty close to the same age I was at the time.” – bluegraypurple

3. The Last Goodbye

“When I was a student, I got called in on a stroke patient. She had coded and they were doing CPR. They worked for 45 minutes, but she died. They cleaned her up, and called on the family to say goodbye, but by that time the family left. She had been both brain dead and without a pulse for more than 45 minutes. Blood had filled her brain, and she was completely grey and started to smell. Suddenly, she sat up, and called for her family. The nurses rushed to get monitors and equipment back on her. They started working on her again, she stabilized, said goodbye to her family, and promptly died a second time.” – simplesimon6262

4. Miracle Man

“When I was in trauma surgery in upstate by, got a notification about a man who was shot 3 times in the head. He comes in, literally one eye hanging out of the socket, blood everywhere, and he’s slumped forward. Apparently, he was shot in the temple, exited out his right eye socket, in the nose exited from the roof of the mouth, and In the cheek one with exit from the side of the head.

At this point, I’m thinking they just brought him in so we can pronounce him in the ER because he looked dead. I go to examine him and tilt his head back, and he says ‘Yoooo be gentle!’ I jump back and scream like a little boy, as did everyone in the room. Literally, the bullets missed his brain in every single shot.” – Noimnotonacid

5. Bleeding

“One of the aides I work with said she was doing postmortem care on a patient who had been on many, many anticoagulants before death. She said when they turned her on her side she started bleeding out of every orifice—eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. She said her and the nurse went home and had nightmares for a week.” – sparklingbluelight

6. The Haunted Hospital

“My town has two really old hospitals. One no longer functions overnight, and the stories are unsettling. No one cleans the old ER alone because all the lights and call bells go off. On other floors, there’s a kid with his ball, a lady in a white dress, etc. A coworker was cleaning an entire floor utterly solo (the norm) and bounced between rooms because the cleaning solution stays wet for a few minutes. Upon returning to a freshly wiped bed, hand prints were clearly visible.” – Sapphire_Starr

7. Eyeless

“I used to do home care for an elderly lady with learning disabilities and no eyes (they were removed due to a congenital condition). She was lovely but prone to wandering around her flat at night in total silence, which led to several horrifying situations where I left my room at 2 am only to encounter her standing silently in the hallway, turning her eyeless face towards me.” – NovelistResearcher

8. Lonely

“One call that will always haunt me was on an unresponsive female at around three in the morning. We get there and do some pointless CPR along with the fire department… She had been dead for a while; no shock-able rhythm, and clear rigor mortis. The most disturbing part was that the original caller was her 11-year-old daughter, who had just spent three days with her mother’s corpse and called 9-1-1 because she was ‘lonely’. It also didn’t help that the victim was completely naked when we arrived.” – CupofJoe776

9. Clear Waters

“I have quite a few stories, most of them are hilarious and then there are those you never want to think about. What fucked me up the most was when I saw how eyes change at the moment of death. Imagine you are looking at clear water but that clear water changes to foggy in an instant. In my 8 years here I’ve only seen this once, and I’ve personally seen well over 250 dead or dying people.” – ImCuden

10. Night Lights

“I work nights in a long-term care facility as a nurse’s assistant. I have two men under my care and both of them are unable to use their call lights. They have severe dementia and debilitating Parkinson’s disease but still, their lights are looped around their bed rail. One night their light came on and I went to answer it already confused and creeped out. I turned it off and left the room. Before I could get two doors up the light came back on. I went in there and both lights were unplugged from the wall and thrown under their beds. I fished them out, plugged them back in and left.

I’ve seen shadows standing over the dying and felt a tap on my shoulder while doing chest compression’s so I knew that lady had passed.” – beeoakly

11. Holding Hands

“I’ve had a couple of weird calls. One was a major MVA-head on many, many years ago when we played M.E. as well. We had 2 DOA (husband and spouse) that were killed instantly in a head-on collision. They had a 12-year-old daughter that was in between them and they actually took the impact, saving her life.

While en route, we noticed the husband’s arm had come loose so I went back to re-strap it. As I was doing that, the wife’s arm suddenly fell out as well, and her hand fell into her husband’s. My boss was watching in the rearview mirror and helped clear the way as I ran back into the front. It spooked both of us. Apparently, the couple (mid 30’s), had just found out he was cancer free after his last treatment.” – Anonymous

12. Last Meal

“I had an old lady come in by ambulance, near death. She was a DNR (do-not-resuscitate), so we weren’t going to do much for her. She didn’t have any family that we could find. The hospital was full, so we had to keep her in the ER for the night.

Again, she was near death. When you’ve seen enough people die, there’s no mistaking it, and she was almost there. Barely responsive; pale, cool, breaths were really irregular, heart rate was up and down, too. We just turned the lights down and kept an eye on her monitor, basically waiting for her to die.

About an hour later, she’s standing at the door of her room. She’d gotten up and put on all her clothes. We were all like, ‘WTF?’ One of the nurses went to check on her, and she said she was hungry. Not knowing really what to make of things, we got her a chair, a bedside table, and went to the cafeteria and got her a tray of food.

She sat there, ate all her food, talked with the staff a little. After about an hour, she told her nurse that she was tired and wanted to lie back down. We helped her back into bed, and within 30 minutes she was dead.” – Anonymous

13. “Don’t Let me go Back there”

“When my mom worked as an E.R. nurse a guy came in from a car accident and was losing blood. In the midst of resuscitation, the man jolts awake and screams ‘Don’t let me go back there! Please, please, please don’t let me go back!’ A few seconds later they lost him.” – JeremyHowell

14. The Rusty Old Saw

“This woman was clearly struggling mentally. She went into her basement and started sawing at her wrists horizontally with a rusty hacksaw, bleeds a good amount, and then starts walking around the house. She wasn’t dying quick enough, so she sat down in a chair in the middle of the living room, and started going at her wrists again, this time with a pair of scissors.

I was the second person inside the house. It looked like a massacre. We searched the house top to bottom, fully expecting to find multiple dead bodies in there. I’ve never seen so much blood in my life. Every single room had a trail of blood in it.

The woman was found on a chair in the living room. Rigor mortis had contorted her body into a really strange, unnatural pose, and her face was haunting. Literally the stuff of nightmares. Her wrists had huge chunks of skin/veins/muscle missing from them. Saying she slit her wrists is inaccurate. She ripped them to pieces.” – anoncop1

15. Visitors

“I work a stroke/telemetry floor on the bought shift. Most of our patients are elderly. Apparently, there are two things that patients see before they pass away. Some will say that two men are walking in their rooms and telling them to get ready to leave. The patient will call and tell us that these men are big and abrasive in their demeanor. They are either terrified or annoyed when they see the two men. The other thing they will see is a little boy who will go into their rooms and try to wake them up. The boy is usually loud and runs around their rooms. The patients will call and ask who’s letting children just run around late night. Several nights or even that same shift we’re coding or cleaning the patient for the funeral home to pick up.” – pokfynder

16. The Handsome Man in Black

“I used to work in a skilled nursing facility, usually assigned to the Alzheimer’s ward. One night I’m in the linen room stocking my cart, and I heard someone shuffle up behind me, then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and there was no one else in the room. The door was still shut too.

Another lady started to complain that a man was coming into her room at night (again, Alzheimer’s so I didn’t think much of it) so to reassure her, I told her I’d check on her throughout the night. She complained of this man for every night for two more weeks when I asked her to describe him to me.

‘He’s real handsome, and wears a black suit. Oh. He’s right behind you now, honey.’

That freaked me the f*ck out. Of course, there was no one behind me. She died the next night in her sleep.” – Anonymous

17. The Blender

“We got a call for a male in his early 30s with ‘heavy groin trauma’ (exact words of the dispatcher). We roll up lights and sirens and the guy is waiting for us on the front step with a towel over his crotch. We barely come to a stop and the guy is already running towards the rig holding this towel. I asked him what was wrong and he moved the towel and this guy’s dick was just barely hanging on. Apparently, he had ‘lady problems’ so he decided to fornicate with the food mixer he had in his kitchen and accidentally turned it on.” – YayShinny

18. The Charred Skin

“Motorcycle driver, accident, third-degree burns, arrived DOA. Had to transfer him from ambulance gurney to ER bed. As we were moving him with a transfer sheet, the liquefied/cooked subcutaneous fat caused the charred skin on his back to separate and his body slipped onto the floor (despite several of us trying to ‘catch’ him).” – Doc-in-a-box

19. Dead Man Moaning

“Worked security through college at a local hospital. The only ‘creepy’ thing I remember is when a dead man moaned. One of my duties was to help wheel patients who had expired down to the in-house morgue. Once we were wheeling an older man from the ER down and halfway down the hallway he let out this low moan. I started to panic, thinking that he was coming back to life but the RN explained to me (newbie) that sometimes the air in the lungs doesn’t come out until sometime later or is delayed for a bit.” – ill_do_it-later

20. Otherworldly Screams

“I have had fellow coworkers swear that strange things have occurred in the ER. Two people that I work with were charting at the nurse’s station when they both heard a scream followed by incoherent words come from one of our open bays. There were three patients in the room and they denied screaming or hearing anything. I have also had fellow coworkers talk about hearing strange voices especially after really bad codes and one person states she felt someone grabbing her shoulder after the doc pronounced a trauma code. These are all respectable people and I do not think they would lie.” – Anonymous

21. Blank Stare

“We got a call to go out to a scene for an elderly woman with chest pains. I arrive at the house, front door is open. We knock, hear the old woman calling out from the back ‘I’m in the back room’ in a very monotone and calm voice. My partner and I go to the back of the house looking for this woman, and that’s when we smelled it. Nothing prepares you for the smell of rotting corpse. I’ve smelled it a dozen times, and it never gets any less disturbing. We radio for police and ALS backup as we move through the house.

We opened the door to the master bedroom, and there is our patient. She is approximately 80, and she is staring at the master bathroom with these cold, dead eyes. She never once looked at us as we approached her and began talking to her. I got to the bedside and got in front of her gaze, and she just looked right through me. I turned around to see what she could possibly be looking at, and there was the source of my smell.

A man, about the same age as my patient, is on the floor with very little left of his head still attached to his body. A shotgun lay on the floor next to him, and most of his head was strewn about the walls and bathroom counter. We loaded the woman up in the ambulance, and our police backup pulled up.

I don’t think that woman blinked once the entire time she was in our care.” – TheFilthiest

22. “Bill’s Here”

“I’m an RN and while I was a student I was caring for a lady who had an end-stage renal failure, had a DNAR (do not attempt resuscitation) and was shutting down. We were having a little chat when she stopped, looked over my shoulder and said ‘Bill’s here love, I’ve got to go,’ and swiftly stopped breathing. Read her old notes and Bill was her deceased husband.” – Jesspandapants

23. The Body on the Floor

“The call was for an older woman, lying in bed. When we get there, the smell is horrendous of a dead body. There are millions of flies everywhere and a little old lady in lying in the bed, alive. About five feet away, there is a body covered up by a sheet. The lady was a dementia patient, and her husband (the deceased) was the primary caregiver. Based on the number of flies and state of decomposition, the police estimated the guy had been dead for about three weeks. The woman must have been getting some food out of the refrigerator, but it was totally empty by the time we arrived.

The creepiest part happened on the way to the hospital with the woman, she said, ‘I hope that nice man on the floor is OK’.” – Tools4toys

24. The Fallen Cross

“I responded to a call where a janitor was dusting quite a large stone cross in the middle of a church. He had been up on a ladder cleaning, when he slipped off, and proceeded to try to hold onto the cross to keep from falling. Unfortunately, the weight of the 200-pound man was too much to support. The cross fell towards him, landing on his left arm, with a part of the horizontal stone of the cross, pushing his muscles and tendons out of his wrist like a squeezed toothpaste tube. Then the cross fell completely on him splattering his brain across the floor. Quite disturbing, and definitely the most horrific and gore filled call I had ever witnessed.” – UpboatOarKnotUpboat

25. The Headless Nurse

“I used to work in St Barts Hospital in London, which in parts is over 1,000 years old. One of the buildings had 2 floors (with massively high ceilings), and so the floors were taken out and rearranged to make into 5 floors. The nurses working night shift would often tell us of the ghost of a night nurse who wandered silently doing her ’rounds’ at night—but due to the new floors, only her head would be visible drifting down the ward.” – jenthejedi

26. Monsters

“I was still a nursing student at the time, but this was from when I had my psychiatric clinical placement in my 3rd year.

I was assigned to a young male patient with schizophrenia. He had been a voluntary admission because he heard voices telling him to hurt people around him, and he admitted himself because he was afraid of actually going through with it.

Anyway, I went into the room alone, as usual, and did the usual introduction and asking how he was doing. He was at a desk drawing creepy, hideous monsters—each monster had its own page, and there had to be at least half a dozen of these pages scattered around him. I asked him what they were. He answered that those were the monsters he saw. They were the monsters that whispered to him and told him to hurt people and do awful things. Guarded, I asked him, ‘Are they telling you to hurt me?’

He answered, ‘Yes.’

I didn’t stay very long in that room.” – duckface08

27. The Man in Black

“People turn batshit crazy and creepy as hell when they get really sick. There’s even a term called ICU psychosis…and trust me, it’s real. Anyway, the creepiest that takes the cake for me is this (am an ICU nurse, btw): Had a patient who was admitted for overdose. Very long history of mental health problems. She was thrashing around in bed, very combative, kicking people’s asses for days, totally incoherent.

Well, the night I had her, she started making decent sense, but still not oriented at all. She was extremely paranoid and kept talking about the man in black in the corner. I’d hear her talking to him and screaming, all night long. So I’d go in there and try to calm her down, but you could see the fear in her eyes. she was talking other nonsense about how she was in space and shit, and with certain patients, you try to redirect their ‘reality,’ but what I did didn’t help. She said ‘that man in black! Don’t you see him!’ and pointed to the corner. I said ‘there’s nobody here.’ I stepped in the corner she was pointing to and waved my hands around. While I’m waving my hands around in the air, she had the most horrifically terrified look on her face that actually scared the shit out of me, like I had just assaulted the man in black. I said ‘see, there’s nobody here’ and she said in a matter-of-factly that’s what you think.’ I promptly got the fu*k out of there.” – HeatherTakasaki

28. Eyes Wide Open

“I work in palliative. Most deaths I’ve seen have been more or less peaceful, though the ones that are not, stick with you. One guy was silently screaming through his last few hours of life. Another guy (who up until this point had been unresponsive) reached up and grabbed me when we attempted to lower his bed to turn him.

One time while doing post-mortem care I walked into the room and thought ‘that’s weird, how come nobody has closed his eyes yet?’ He had that movie-perfect dead look, with pale blue staring eyes and slack jaw and greyish, waxy skin. I closed his eyes and started the care, and when I looked again those eyes, still staring at me, were slowly opening, one slightly slower than the other. He groaned when we turned him to wash his back and his hand managed to clamp onto the bed rail and we had to pry it off. When we finally got him onto his back again, there was a foul-smelling, oily black, viscous liquid on the pillowcase. I cleaned his mouth again thinking it must have come from there, but his mouth and nose were clean. The best I could figure the stuff had come from his eye. I couldn’t wait to get that bag zipped up.” – draakons_pryde

29. Crawling up the Hallway

“I used to work as an STNA in a nursing home. Worked third shift throughout university. During the night we turned half the lights off so it was darker for the evening and didn’t get a lot of light in the residents’ rooms. We had one resident who was younger (70s) and was mostly in for mental reasons. She had long, dark hair and was very thin.

I was sitting at the nurse’s station at the top of the hall and heard a call light go off. I stood up, looked down the dark hall, and on all fours—straight out of The Ring—this resident was crawling up the hall toward me. The other STNA had forgotten to put the bed rail up and the resident was VERY good at climbing out of bed.

Needless to say, I needed some new britches and my heart was racing a mile a minute.” – blameitonthewookie

30. Heaven

“Had a young woman in full liver failure. She was orange in color and she was still conscious. She asked me what I thought it would be like to die. I told her I didn’t know but I hoped it wouldn’t be painful. She then asked me if I thought I would go to heaven. I told her that I believed I would. She asked me if I thought she would go to heaven, and I told her I wasn’t able to answer that question.

She then told me ‘I am going to heaven and I know it,’ and I asked her how she knew that and she told me something that I will never ever forget. She told me ‘I know I am because that man over there told me so.’ I asked what man and she said the man sitting on the end of the bench. I asked her what he looked like and she said ‘he looks just like the Jesus on the windows of my church.’

Well, to tell you I was pretty well affected by that statement. She then went on to say ‘And he says that you are going to go to heaven too.’

We then prayed and I will never forget that interaction between the two of us. About a week later she passed away. I hope she made it to heaven.” – Anonymous

[unichrome]

I’ve been wanting to write down as much as I can remember from the month at the hospital in April, and this tumblr blog is the only thing I have that even remotely resembles a journal. So here it is, feel free to read and comment if you’d like, but please don’t reblog.

I was living in Copenhagen when this happened.

A few weeks prior, I started a new medication, an antipsychotic so the usual side effect was to be expected: tiredness. But I’ve been in this carousel before, I know the worst is over after a week or so. I did indeed become extremely tired, and this was during working-from-home corona days so most shifts I ended up napping in the couch at any chance I got. Easily slept 12+ hours per night. It kept getting worse, I couldn’t stay awake during the days, became extremely lethargic. And it didn’t get better after a week, it just kept getting worse. So I called my psychiatrist and told her the medication wasn’t working and I felt so very bad and tired.

I got a new appointment with her, which I can’t even remember really. She got worried and sent me off to the psychiatric ward, where they did the standard blood test. Then sent me off to a room. Luckily I had anticipated for something like this to happen, so I had brought the work phone as well as chargers, so I could call in sick to work. A while later, three people suddenly entered and told me I had to go to the hospital right now, two of them were from the hospital transport. They took me to Amager hospital, I was so confused and not really present at all. I don’t know what they told me, but I needed a blood transfusion immediately. I stayed there for a night, the only thing I can remember is going to the bathroom once.

The Amager hospital apparently wasn’t capable of providing the care I needed, I was transported yet again, to Rigshospitalet. The memories from here on are very blurry and sporadic. Eventually I heard that both of my kidneys were failing, when I was admitted on April 22nd, my kidney functionality was around 18%. If it drops under 20% it becomes lethal. Kidneys are also responsible for the production of blood, which wasn’t happening anymore and I had a very dangerously low count of red blood cells.

I’m super difficult to get blood from if the first attempt isn’t successful, as the poor nurses became painfully aware of after failing on the first try. During one of the first days there, when the daily blood test was to be taken, they didn’t succeed. Three nurses tried, eventually they called for a narcosis doctor to try with a ultrasound machine to find my veins, but it didn’t work very well either. They stung me all around the body, down to my feet and it took at least an hour to get the sample and my body had pretty much gone into shock since medical procedures and needles of any kind are one of my worst fears. Because of this it was decided to install a port for draining blood so this wouldn’t have to be repeated every day.

A kidney biopsy was ordered as well as more detailed blood tests to figure out why this kidney failure was happening. I would also have to call my parents in Sweden and tell them what was happening, and the fact that they couldn’t come and visit me, at all. I was in a quarantined zone of the hospital where no visitors were allowed, not even family. But also Denmark had closed its borders at the time, so they couldn’t even enter the country in the first place.

My only contact with the outside world was my phone that I treated as the most precious thing in the entire world, it was also pretty much the only thing I had with me. I would have long calls with my family talking about the most mundane and boring things but it was such a blessing to hear about, I would drag out the subjects as much as I could and so would they. I’d often cry after having to stop the calls.

The biopsy and tests revealed that I had antibodies that shouldn’t be there. My immune system was attacking the body, pretty much. This autoimmune disease is very rare, Microscopic Polyangiitis, and will cause kidney failure (and other organ failures) if not discovered and treated in time. Since I barely had any prior symtoms, it wasn’t discovered in time. My lungs were also examined as the disease usually targets kidneys and/or lungs, but no significant damage was found there luckily.

I was put on steroids (prednisone 60 mg) that would support the kidneys and dampen the damage from the antibodies as well as chemotherapy (Sendoxan 100 mg) that would shut down the immune system almost completely. Synthetic hormone injections every week to stimulate the production of red blood cells.

Every morning a blood test was done a 6:00, as well as checking the temperature and blood pressure. I was forced to drink 3 liters of fluid every day (which I logged on a paper meticulously - every ml counted) and I could only pick between water, disgusting orange juice or disgusting apple juice. Except during lunch, when I got a small package of milk - this became pretty much the highlight of my day. One glass of milk. That was like pure joy, it tasted so divine. In just a few days your entire world shifts in such a way that this package of milk is what you look forward to the next day.

All day I was bedbound and in a haze, time was entirely dependent on medicine, meal and test times like a work schedule, from the 6:00 tests to the final 23:00 medications, that left 7 hours of rest that was robbed from me because prednisone makes you unable to sleep well, even with the sleep aids I got. Despite being in bed almost all day every day, I was constantly sleepy and tired but I would never get any rest. Couldn’t even pee normally either, had to collect everything in a bottle for them to log.

But of course it would get worse. After about 6 days, my doctor came in and told me that the treatment didn’t seem to be working fast enough. My kidney functionality kept dropping, now at 13%, creatinine levels above 400 (it should never be above 80 for women, around 200 is kidney failure). They had one more weapon to combat this - plasmapheresis. This would mean connecting me to a machine that would take out my blood, clean it from the harmful antibodies, and put it back in again. Hopefully this would buy me time for the treatment to win. To do this, they had to cut up my throat to insert two tubes that would take in and out the blood. I had to be awake during the whole procedure to control the breathing as instructed.

I wasn’t connected to the machine all the time. A few hours every other day. It was noisy, sounded like a miniature washing machine, and I hated it so much. The tubes in my throat, blood going in and out of me, it was just pure terror even if the procedure itself didn’t hurt. I got some mild sedatives but they were way too mild and didn’t do shit. The fact that I didn’t have to be connected to the machine every other day became yet another highlight like the milk. I’d talk about how today was such a good day because it was a no machine day, like a holiday.

Showering was horrible too. Because of the tubes I had to avoid getting them wet as much as possible while still somehow washing the hair. Then the tape around the tubes had to be changed and I hated anyone touching that area. I went for as long as I could between the showers, up to 9 days.

I was quickly becoming very weak, as the medications and chemo ate away at my bones and muscles. My legs have always been strong, I’ve had no problems doing squats with a grown man hanging on my back. But one day when I was in the bathroom, I spilled some toothpaste on the floor. I squat down to wipe it, but I couldn’t get back up again. My legs were way too weak. I ended up having to drag myself up via the toilet and sink, it felt so humiliating I refused to use the button to call for help. I bet it took several minutes to get back up standing.

It was still very unsure if I would make it, the plasmapheresis wasn’t a guaranteed help. One day a psychologist came to talk to me, but the only thing I remember is that he asked if I was afraid of death. I told him that my current biggest fear was the damn tubes in my neck, the constant needles, every day the touching and prodding of my body, but it didn’t seem like it got through to him. Maybe because my Danish was so damn shitty too, I could barely articulate myself and what I felt in Swedish, much less in English or Danish, I think I was mostly rambling incoherently.

In the meantime my parents had been writing the hospital for updates and visitation possibilities, and eventually the kind nurses and doctors there started fighting for getting my parents to visit. They got granted an exception by the hospital to visit my room once per day, but they still couldn’t get into the country. My parents contacted the Danish police asking if an exception could be made since it now was entirely possible that this could be the last time they’d see me. They were eventually granted permission and now the final hindrance remained - getting there. Since they live far up north, the transportation options are limited especially during corona. There were essentially no flights, so the second best option was train for about 2 days.

As luck would have it, the plasmapheresis did help, my kidneys were slowly recovering and once I got up to around 25% functionality, I was free from the damn machine and the medications now had the upper hand against my stupid immune system. In the final days at the hospital, my parents arrived. And we could actually be happy because it seemed like the danger was over. I begged the doctor to release me and let my parents help me at home instead. I knew how to take the medications by now and it wouldn’t be necessary for daily tests anymore. She agreed but I had to come to the hospital every few days for a checkup.

And that concluded my first chapter of this disease and kidney failure. Thank you for reading all the way to here, I appreciate it.

[fakeyellow]

They knew having a baby was going to be hard. They just didn’t realise it’d be this hard. 

Angsty Part 2 of Kamilah and pregnant!MC. Based on anon prompts. TW: miscarriage. Part 1 here. 

It starts off so well. They go to Adrian, and although he gives her the same talk on expectations that Kamilah had, he agrees to start the project in his labs. 

Due to the impossible nature of their desire, Ava is started on a treatment of various hormones in order to do a lot of her things to her body- There are a lot of words and scientific jargon thrown around but Ava doesn’t really care for the details other than the fact that they are going to have a baby. A beautiful, squishy baby with Kamilah’s eyes and her lips.

And then it happens.

The scientists successfully plant an embryo that is a perfect mix of Kamilah and Ava into Ava and all of a sudden, that beautiful squishy baby with Kamilah’s eyes and her lips is so near.

The first time they hear the baby’s heartbeat, Ava can’t stop beaming and even Kamilah seems awed at this proof that there is a living baby inside Ava. 

Ava finds it more cute than suffocating how overprotective of Ava Kamilah becomes, her hand always wrapped around her waist. 

Kamilah has lived for over two thousand years on this Earth but this, this is something she’s never experienced and it’s terrifying and thrilling all at the same time but she can’t imagine ever having loved someone more. She’s never not worried for Ava’s health but Ava always says she’s fine and places Kamilah’s hands on her belly and somehow that is always able to quiet her worries.

Kamilah often lies awake at night, spooning Ava and wondering if she’s allowed to be this happy after the life she’s led, the lives she’s killed. But if anyone tries to take this away from her, from Ava, she will end their lives with her own hands.

At 12 weeks, Ava has the smallest little bump, but it’s solid and it’s real and Ava can’t stop touching it reverentially. Neither can Kamilah.

They tell the others and Lily screams out in joy, jumping up and down as she hugs Ava. Kamilah monitors this and Jax is more controlled but he also expresses how happy he is for them. Even if he doesn’t quite understand how it’s possible.

Ava’s always going into the lab, being monitored and undergoing tests to make sure their miracle baby is doing well. She’s nauseous one day and even as Kamilah rubs her back soothingly at the toilet, Ava is ecstatic that this is yet another sign of their baby. She’s getting morning sickness, this means that their baby is getting bigger and stronger.

And then Ava wakes up one day and she’s still feeling a little sick so she goes to the bathroom. But she sees little spots of red on her underwear. 

She straightens and splashes some water on her face before stiffly going over to Kamilah who’s awake and waiting for her to get back in their bed.

“I don’t want to worry you,” Ava says and Kamilah’s face already shutters over, “But we should go to the lab.”

There’s a flurry of action in the small lab and Ava sits on the examination table, her arms hugging her baby protectively. Kamilah stands at her side, a warm and steady presence that helps Ava calm down just a little bit.

But they eventually come in to tell her that they’re so sorry but the ultrasound showed that there was no heartbeat anymore and they’re sorry but the fetus is gone and they’re sorry but they have to wait for her body to expel it on its own.

And Ava can only shake her head in denial because no, she can still feel the solid presence of their baby in her stomach. There’s no way their baby is dead. They heard its heartbeat just yesterday and it was so strong and there is no way that she was pregnant 24 hours ago but not anymore.

Kamilah’s face is unreadable but she embraces Ava fiercely and Ava still refuses to believe that this is real. 

“They have to be lying Kamilah, there’s no way our baby…” Ava shakes her head furiously into Kamilah’s chest before she finally bursts into tears. She hiccups and sobs and she can’t breathe amidst her cries for Kamilah and their baby but Kamilah doesn’t let go of her and they continue to clutch each other in that white, sterile room.

The first day after, Ava can’t stop crying and Kamilah checks them into a hotel room because their apartment is filled with too many reminders. For one of the first times in her long life, Kamilah is at a loss for what to do.

The second day and onwards, Ava stops crying and Kamilah almost wishes she’d cry again. Ava lies in bed, clutching her abdomen as cramps tear her apart from the inside out, expelling all of the evidence of their once-living baby, and she only gets up to put the bloody remains of her cramps into plastic baggies so the scientists can analyse it.

The bleeding lasts for two weeks but the small little bump remains for longer and Ava can’t stand looking down at herself, at her traitorous body that doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo that there no longer is a baby inside it. 

Ava withdraws from Kamilah and Kamilah can only watch as the woman she loves wastes away. They sleep on opposite sides of the bed, Kamilah staring at Ava’s curved back. But Ava can’t stand anyone’s hands on her body right now. 

She doesn’t know what’s worse, that she doesn’t have a baby anymore or that she can’t stand being touched by Kamilah right now even as she misses her. 

They’ve faced so much together, from Vega to Gaius to Rheya, but Kamilah fears that this is what’ll make her lose Ava and the prospect of that is somehow more terrifying than anything she’s ever faced before.

Once a month has passed with this strange distance between them, Ava declares that she wants to try again. Kamilah keeps her reservations to herself and accompanies Ava to the lab.

They put Ava on a strict regimen of four shots every day, one on her thigh, one on her stomach, and two on her butt. Although Ava is the one scared of needles, Kamilah is the one to balk at the number of shots, but Ava resolutely agrees to it.

At first, Kamilah is the one who administers the shots because this is the only way Ava lets Kamilah near her.

But weeks pass and it’s like nothing has changed since before Ava first brought up the idea of having a baby. Her body is stubbornly normal, her stomach flat, and Ava is filled with a greater sense of desperation.

This desperation is what causes her to go to the lab one day, when Kamilah’s at work. She asks the scientists if there are any experimental drugs they’re testing because she’ll take anything if it’ll give her even a slightly better chance at having a baby.

They’re hesitant but eventually, she breaks them down, and they give her a set of highly temperamental drugs that they warn is likely to cause a lot of side effects. If she ever passes out, they tell her to stop immediately. She dutifully nods but she has no intention of stopping.

She stops the daily 4 shot regimen in lieu of the riskier treatment but Kamilah is just happy that Ava seems to have stopped killing herself in order to have a baby. 

Ava feels selfishly grateful that she and Kamilah have stopped sleeping together because her body is perpetually bruised and tender from the experimental treatment. She feels guilty about actively deceiving Kamilah but the thought of their baby, their beautiful, squishy baby keeps her going forward. 

She learns to hide her symptoms from Kamilah, sending her lover off on menial tasks that she insists only Kamilah can do, and using that time to hurriedly vomit and clean herself up. She learns to hold in her gasps of pain whenever she brushes against tables and doors.

Ava looks at herself in the mirror one day and is surprised at how fast she seems to have aged. Even though her dream is to have a round belly, Ava doesn’t think she’s ever been skinnier and unhealthier looking than she is right now. 

She looks gaunt and haggard, her collarbones jutting out from her skin and the skin under her eyes dark. Veins protrude from the hands that grasp onto the bathroom counter and Ava keeps reminding herself of that beautiful, beautiful baby that will come at the end of all of this. She pats on a thick layer of makeup and puts on a loose sweater, pasting a smile on her face.

Then she starts blacking out. They start slowly at first and thankfully, during times Kamilah is at work. Ava begins to wake up on the floor, her head and back aching from their impact with the ground, and she learns to tell the signs that she’s going to be passing out. 

But of course she can’t hide forever, and Ava’s unable to get Kamilah away when the grey spots suddenly appear and consume her entire field of vision faster than they ever have before. 

When she comes to, she’s in her bed and Kamilah is looking grimly over her, the corners of her mouth firmly downturned. Ava slowly raises herself into a sitting position but even that is too fast, and Kamilah reaches out to stabilise her when she sways. 

“You need to stop.”

And then erupts one of the most vicious fights they’ve ever had in their years together.

“No,” Ava says stubbornly, her gaze focused on her lap.

“Ava,” Kamilah cries out in frustration before composing herself and sitting back at Ava’s side, “Were you ever going to tell me you were still trying?”

The hurt is palpable in Kamilah’s voice and this is what finally gets to Ava, making her wince. 

“I was going to tell you once it worked.”

“How long have you been passing out?” Kamilah asks but Ava remains silent, nervously fiddling with her fingers. Kamilah repeats herself and Ava quietly answers.

“Three weeks.”

“Three weeks,” Kamilah echoes, running a hand through her hair in shock before her face turns resolute.

“That’s it. You’re stopping now. I won’t see you killing yourself over something that was impossible to begin with.”

Ava’s head jerks up at this and she glares at her lover, “So you’re just going to give up on our baby? Just like that?”

“I love you Ava. I won’t lose you for a groundless dream. You are all I need,” Kamilah says firmly, placing a hand on Ava’s cheek so they are looking right into each other. 

Ava’s eyes begin to water for the first time in months and she shakes her head furiously, “Stop that. Stop lying. I know you haven’t forgiven me for losing our baby.”

“What?” Kamilah is momentarily speechless but she quickly recovers because that is not what Ava needs right now. She tenderly wipes away a tear from the corner of Ava’s eye before speaking slowly and carefully, “What happened was a tragedy. But it was not your fault.”

Ava’s face crumples at this and now the tears run freely as she whimpers out, “How can it not be?”

“It was our baby in my body but I wasn’t able to protect it. I lost our baby, I-I couldn’t protect it, I wasn’t strong enough… our baby, Kamilah, our baby.”

Kamilah tightly embraces her and Ava breaks down in a way she hasn’t let herself, her weak frame shuddering with inconsolable sobs. She feels wet drops fall on her shoulder and she realises that there are also tears running down Kamilah’s face.

“You are strong. You are brave. You are the most wonderful woman I’ve ever met and we will get through this together.”

“I promise.”

A/N: That’s the second fic I’ve ended with the words “I promise,” but I couldn’t think of anything else.

Anyway, this was a really heavy topic to write about and I can only hope I haven’t trivialised it or offended anyone. This isn’t an area I have any experience in so I drew from a variety of sources.

[fan-imagines]

Jackson Avery ~ Bleeding Out

MASTERLIST

<follows storyline, so may contain *spoilers*>

Jackson Avery x NeutralReader

Synopsis - You leave the OR to get blood and run into Mr. Clark. He shoots you and you fight to stay alive in the small supply closet.

Word Count - 2.3k+

**Warnings** mentions of mass shooting

“Dr. Y/l/n, would you mind going to get more O negative blood and also more gauze, please?” Dr. Altman asks me. I am scrubbing in on a surgery with Dr. Altman, Dr. Hunt, and Dr. Avery. Normally a nurse would do this, but I find It better for me to move around in surgery, even if it’s just for two minutes. All the doctors believe I shouldn’t, but Dr. Altman understands and only asks me to do so when we are at a slow moment in the surgery that she knows I can do.

“Yes, of course. I’ll be right back.” I smile, but she can’t see through my surgical mask.

“Thank you.” I nod and leave the OR. I take off my gloves and take off the additional protection I have on for surgeries.  

I go to the blood supply room, and I don’t see O neg blood. I groan, annoyed because I’m missing the surgery. I continue walking down the hallway, and start to wonder why I don’t see anyone. I make It to the other blood supply room, and I look around. I hear the door open and close behind me. I turn to the sound, expecting to see a doctor, but instead I see Mr. Gary Clark.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Clark. You can’t be in here. This is private for staff.” I tell him as nice as I can. I was one of the residents on his wife’s case. She turned out to be brain dead, so we had to unplug her.  

“You were one of the people on my wife’s case. One of the supposed ‘doctors’ that should have saved my wife. You killed her.”  

“I’m sorry, Mr. Clark. I don’t specialize in neuro, Chief Shepherd does. If I saw anything that I thought was remotely suspicious, and could have saved her, I would have spoken up. I’m so sorry, sir.” I tell him, totally genuine.

“It’s too late for sorry.” He pulls out a gun, and my eyes go wide. He points it at me, and shoots it to my stomach. I fall to the ground, and grunt. He leaves the room, but I can only hold my stomach. It feels like I got stabbed with fire. I feel hot tears fall down my face as I squeeze my stomach to stop the bleeding. The bullet hit me in more of my spleen area. If it hit any major organs, I could very well bleed out from the inside. I grab a kit I can use to give myself a blood transfusion. I attach the O neg bag to a needle, and IV. I can easily see the veins in my arm, and I put the needle In. This should help a little, and hopefully buy me some time. I look around for something I can use to hold pressure. I know I will get weak soon, If someone doesn’t find me. I see a thick book, it probably has medical things inside. I reach up and grab it. I also see gauze that I can use to keep the pressure applied. I lay flat on the ground, and wrap my body with the gauze, then put the book on it, then wrap it in gauze again.  

“Ahh.” I cry out, but not loud enough for Mr. Clark to hear me if he’s near. I keep squeezing the gauze, and blood runs down my stomach, onto the floor. It hurts, but I have to make sure I don’t bleed out. I tie the gauze, and it stays in place when I let go. I try to continue to breathe, and stay awake.

!Jackson’s POV!

The door to the ER is opened, and Chief Shepherd comes in.

“Could I speak to Dr. Avery, please?” I hand the clamp I’m holding to a nurse next to me, and walk over to him.

“Yes sir?”

“How is the surgery going?”

“It is going fine. The patient is stable. They are almost finished.” I tell him.

“Once you are done, do not leave this room. There is a shooter in the hospital, we are on lockdown. Do not tell Dr. Altman and Dr. Hunt until the surgery is over. Can you handle this?” I nod, in so much shock. Then i remember that Y/n left to get blood. 

“Y/n left to get blood.” I tell him, trying not to panic too much

“I will keep an eye out and have someone let you know of any updates. Get back to surgery so they aren’t too suspicious.’’ I nod and walk back over.

“What did the chief want?” Dr. Hunt asks me.

“He was just asking how long the surgery was going to take. He needs the OR next.” I go back to my spot.

“Okay. Could you please take back the clamp.” I nod, and I notice that my hands are shaking. “Keep those hands steady. You can’t be a good surgeon If you can’t steady your hands.” I sigh, and nod.

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.” I try to steady my hands, but I can’t stop thinking about Y/n, and all the other doctors, patients, nurses. I can’t think about that now, I need to concentrate on this surgery.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Okay, we’re done here. I need to get him to ICU. He is still critical.” Dr. Hunt says.

“You can’t go anywhere.” I tell him.

“Why not, Dr. Avery? This patient still needs intensive care.”  

“You can’t because we can’t leave this room. There is a shooter and we’re on lockdown.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“Shepherd said-.” But I’m cut off.

“I need to take him. I’m going to take him.

“But Shepherd said-.”

“We can’t stay here. The patient is critical.”

“Well, Shepherd said-.”

“I know what Shepherd said. I’m still taking him.” He says.

“I’m going with you.” Dr. Altman says. They continue before they leave. I sigh, and take my gloves off. I rub my hands on my head. This can’t be happening. I can’t do this. I can’t just sit in this room, but I also can’t leave.  

About thirty minutes later,  I hear people talking outside. I go to the door and open. I see Cristina and Meredith sitting on the floor. They jump when they see me.

“What are you doing? You know there’s a shooter, right! Get in here.” They come into the room and they tell me Chief Shepherd was shot. “We have two nurses, and two anesthesiologists.”

“But we need a surgeon.” I look at Christina.

“We have a surgeon.” Christina says, and I nod.

!Your POV!

“Rising up… back on the… street. Did my time… took my chances. Went the… distance now… I’m back on… on my feet.” I sing so I don’t fall asleep, but I can’t remember all the words right now. My brain is so cloudy. I look at my stomach, and see that I’ve bled through the gauze. I reach to it, but I don’t have the strength to fix it.

“Someone… help me.” I whisper, and close my eyes. I quickly open them back up, not wanting to fall asleep. I turn my head to look at my watch. It says two-fifteen, which means I’ve been laying here, bleeding to death for four hours. I’m lucky I’m still awake. That I am still even breathing. We went into surgery at ten o’clock, they should be done by now. That reminds me of Jackson. His face. If he could just come into the room right now, that would be amazing. I take the deepest breath I can, and continue singing.

“Rising up back… on the street… did my time… took… my… chances.” I feel my eyes close, and i can’t even make myself force them back open.

!Jackson’s POV!

I sigh and walk into the on-call room. We just got out of surgery with Chief Shepherd, after having a gun out to our heads. The man has been taken care of, and the Swat team has cleared the hospital. I need to go find Y/n. I change out of my clothes, and walk out of the hospital. I see lots of people, the police are questioning doctors and nurses. Most of the patients have been transported to a different hospital. I see Chief Webber, and I go over to him.

“Hello, Dr. Avery. Are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m fine. Do you know if Dr. Y/l/n has gone home?” I ask him

“No. I haven’t seen, Y/n.”  

“Has anyone seen Y/n?”

“No one has said anything to me.” I look around, and I see Dr. Torres and go over to her.

“Dr. Torres did you see Y/n? When you were in the halls?” I ask him, getting worried.

“No, I’m sorry.’’

“Has anyone seen Dr. Y/l/n!” I shout into the crowd of doctors. They all shake their heads and say no. I run back into the hospital, and run straight to the blood supply room that was closest to the OR we were in. I open the door, but there is no one in there.

“Oh god. Y/n!” I shout as I jog through the halls. I hear something clatter, and I see another blood supply room. I open the door, and I see Y/n lying on the floor. There is a book strapped down with guaze. There is blood all over the floor.

“Avery.” I hear a breathy voice.

“Hey, you’re going to be okay. I’m here. I’m sorry it took so long, but you’re going to be okay.” I grab some more gauze and unwrap the book. The blood starts to flow a lot faster, and I quickly apply pressure with the gauze.

“Dr. Avery!” I hear Dr. Torres shouting my name.

“I need help!” I shout back at her. I turn back to Y/n, and keep applying pressure.

“Oh my god.” She says and comes next to me.  

“We have to get her to surgery, Dr. Torres.” He nods.

“Pack that gauze on and I need you to run to an OR Try your best to not move too much. I’m going to get the doctors we need. When you get to the OR, I need you to get an ultrasound, so we can get that bullet out. We can’t wait for a CT. Okay? Go. Now.” I grab some tape, and quickly pack that on the wound. I run to the OR, following Dr. Torres’s advice in not moving too much. 

“Come on, Y/n. You’re going to be okay. Just hold on.”  

!Your POV!

I wake up in a hospital bed, and to the sun. I feel weight on my hand, and I turn to it. I see someone holding It, and I follow the arm to see Jackson Avery. He’s asleep, but his grip is still strong.

“Mhmm.” I groan when I feel a headache and pounding in my stomach. I see Jackson look up and look at me.

“How you feeling?”

“Pretty good, considering I almost bled to death after laying on the ground for eight hours.” I say sarcastically. He chuckles.

“I bet. I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner.”

“Well, I’m glad you found me at all. Don’t worry about when you found me. At least you did.” I squeeze his hand, and he smiles. He leans up and kisses my cheek.

“Is everyone okay?” I ask him. He looks down and shakes his head.

“Reed and Charles are dead. Karev, Shepherd, and Hunt got shot.” I sigh.  

“I’m so sorry.” I tell him. His people from Mercy West got shot and killed because of one man.

“It’s okay. I’m okay. I was just worried about you the whole time.” I lightly smile. So many people got hurt, because of Mr. Clark. I see his face again. I see when he took out the gun. I see the ceiling that’s not as white as I always thought as I try not to die. Tears fall from my face, and I cover my face with my hand. I hear Jackson move, then I feel my bed dip on my non-injured side. He wraps his arm around my shoulders and pulls me into him. I grab his shirt, and cry Into it.

“How did this happen?”  

“I don’t know. I don’t know, but we’re going to be okay, Y/n.” He rubs my hair and I slowly fall asleep.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wake up a few hours after I went to sleep. I had terrible dreams the whole time was asleep, so I just don’t sleep. I sit and look at the clock. Jackson starts to move, and I turn to him. He looks like he’s having a nightmare, like I did.

“Jackson. Jackson.” I shake him, trying to wake him.

“Ahh!” He shoots up awake.

“Hey. Hey. You’re okay. I’m here. You’re okay.” I whisper to him. He looks at me, and closes his eyes to calm himself. “Tell me about what happened with you.”

“I was in surgery with Dr. Shepherd and that man came in and held a gun to mine and Christina’s head. He told us to stop operating or he would kill us. He shot Dr. Hunt, and almost shot Meredith and Christina. I had to unplug Shepherd from the machine so it would flat line. Then I got out of surgery, and I found you in a pool of blood. I was so scared, Y/n.” He says, and I see a tears land on his shirt. I pull him to me and kiss him.  

“All those people are alive and okay because of you. Me being one of them. I had nightmares too, and I don’t think they are going to go away soon. But, I’m here if you need me. I need you so, you don’t really have a choice.” I chuckle, and he smiles.  

“I need you.” He says to me.  

“Want to watch terrible daytime TV with me?” He nods, and I grab the remote from my bedside table. I turn on the TV, and get more comfortable with Jackson.

[intubatedangel]

Dead Drop - part 4

There wasn’t enough of them actively engaged to allow Anna to climb on the gurney to perform compressions. There were plenty of on-lookers, but they had already settled into that slack-jawed paralysis known as the bystander effect. So instead, she went to the head of the gurney to give Linh oxygen with the bag, while Carl used his longer arms to provide one handed compressions from the side of the gurney.

 They didn’t have the time to waste taking the gurney around to the dedicated entrance to the resus-suite, so instead they charged towards the main entrance of the trauma centre. Thankfully a couple of people had the presence of mind to hold open the sliding doors, allowing them team to head straight inside.

 The reception area was thankfully quiet. Less than a dozen heads turned to look at them as they raced across the room, the gurney rattling loudly. Anna noticed a mother covering her child’s eyes and ears as they charged on through. Anna understood the reaction, but this was a clean resuscitation by all accounts. No blood or gore, all the young woman’s vomit had ended up in her own lungs, then the suction device. And the gurney was high enough that anyone sat down would be unable to see the track marks in her arms, the pattern of bruises from the beating, or her exposed genitalia.

 “Hold the door!” Carl shouted at a nurse that was coming out of the central triage room. His voice carried such a thick current of command that she didn’t even hesitate, it boomed loud enough that a porter on the other side of the doors grabbed the other half and pulled it out of the way quick enough that they didn’t even have to slow down.

 They swung to the right as they passed through, lining the gurney up with the black panelled double doors that led to the resus suite. Roger and Trish appeared from the staff lounge, still straightening their uniforms, and bolted through the doors, holding them open for the gurney. “2.” Was all Roger said as they passed, but they all knew what he meant and targeted the 2nd Resus suite. Almost like performing a three-point turn, they moved slightly beyond the door, then pulled back, Anna leading the way into the room so that everything was the correct way around.

 “Let’s get ready to move her.” Carl said, halting his compressions and moving from between the gurney and the trauma table. Roger dived in to take over from the other side as people grabbed the ends of the backboard. “1..2..3.” They moved her over smoothly, Trish already in position on the step of the trauma table, keeping the cpr mostly un-interrupted. “Zee, what’s the play?”

 The Junior Doctor suddenly looked up, like a deer in the headlights. “Errr…” Her mouth opened and closed like a feeding goldfish. She jumped slightly as the suite’s door opened, Kirstie and Sara rushing in. Anna nodded Kirstie over and handed off the Ambu-bag, knowing that she’d have to do some of the more complex work. She quickly checked Linh’s pupils.

 “Pupils are pinpointed.” Anna announced.

 Carl nodded his thanks, then returned his attention to the Junior Doctor. “Doctor Patel! What is the next move?” He stared hard at her, the nurses all averting their gaze slightly. It was Carl’s strategy, one that had taken some time for the nursing team to get on board with. He would throw the Junior doctors in at the deep end, while also making it as one-to-one as possible, almost like an exam. The student response would kick in, but then nurses would actually follow the orders. It worked surprisingly well, giving them confidence that they knew what to do and they were in charge, exactly the qualities needed in emergency medicine.

 Anna knew without looking that Zainab had taken a deep, steadying breath, “We need to hook her up to the monitors.” She said.

 “Who?” Carl pressed.

 Zainab glanced around, trying to decide. “Sara.” She blurted out.

 “Ok, What next?”

 “Pupil constriction and respiratory depression suggests an opiate overdose, so let’s go with a nasal dose of Narcan while we get access.” She nodded to Jess who acknowledged the order. “Is there a good vein on that arm?” She asked Anna, who swung around the bed to get a closer look.

 “Veins are all shot here.” She replied.

 “Ok, let’s go with a tibial IO, we can put a central line in after trauma assessment.” Anna complied, pulling the nasty looking IO gun from a drawer and loading it up with a needle. Carl was nodding along as Zainab’s voice lost the edge of nervousness. It wasn’t quite the authoritative tone he managed, but it was the tone of a doctor. She stepped forward and palpated Linh’s abdomen “I want epi in there immediately. Get me the FAST scanner, abdomen isn’t firm, but I want to rule out a bleed.”

 Carl grabbed the ultrasound, bringing it over and readying the device as Anna swabbed the area just below Linh’s left knee with iodine, then positioned the IO gun on the bone. She’d never liked the device, as useful as it was, and cringed slightly as it forced the wide bore needle through the bone and into the marrow. She removed the gun, attached a syringe, and pulled a sample of blood. “Good placement.” Anna stated.

 “Good, get the sample to the lab. I want the full set of tests, including tox.” Zainab told the porter, turning to study the monitor as Sara finished attaching the various devices. “Still asystolic, or near enough, BP’s low.” She continued as Carl handed her the ultrasound probe. “Ok, hold compressions.” She probed Linh’s abdomen, getting a good look at her organs. Anna inserted the Epi, Zainab murmuring an acknowledgement as she studied the display. “I’m not seeing any free fluid; spleen looks a little swollen but there’s no rupture.” She looked up, nodding at Trish to resume cpr, then looked at Carl. “Could be the infection,” she indicated the angry red rash on Linh’s arm, “either way, she’s not bleeding out, so we don’t need surgical down here.”

 “How do you want to proceed?” Carl asked, looking down at Linh, her bruised belly bulging with each of Rogers hard compressions. Zainab considered for a moment.

 “We should assess the neck and head, establish a central line in if it’s suitable, then get saline and broad-spectrum anti-biotics going, secure her airway, and continue cpr while the epi circulates.” She says. Carl nodded, not taking his eyes off the young woman in front of them. “Did I miss something?” Zainab asked, the nervous student peeking out once more.

 “Huh,” Carl looked up, shaking his head slightly. “Sorry, no, you’re doing fine. I would add a vasopressor though, should bring her pressure up and help perfusion.” Zainab nodded at his recommendations, biting her lip and clenching her fists at her minor mistake. “Keep your head in the game Zee, you’re doing great so far.” Carl’s reassurance seemed to have the right effect, the junior doctor relaxing slightly.

 “Anna, can you get the pressor in?” Anna nodded to Zainab, taking the drugs from the crash cart. Roger, who had taken on his usual role of recorder, flashed the chart at her. Anna quickly double checked everything, nodding her approval.

 “Vasopressor in.” Anna announced.

 “Neck seems fine, I think you’re good to go for the central line.” Carl said to his Junior colleague, who had the kit in hand. He stood back enough to not be looming, but close enough to have a good view, and watched as Zainab got the IV catheter into the vein on Linh’s neck. “Good. Let’s do a pulse and rhythm check.”

 The doctors and nurses all probed the various pulse points as Trish stepped away. Nobody felt anything, most of them turning to the monitor. Anna, down by Linh’s feet, instead took a moment to get a good look at the young woman. The silk smock was still looped over her arms, half pinned beneath her. The straps of the backboard still restricted her arms and legs. Anna felt a pang of sympathy for the woman. It was clear she’d been terribly abused. She was covered in bruises, her crotch was scarred, and the track marks in her arms took months to get to such a stage. She hoped someone could find a way to help her if they successfully saved her life.

 “That’s VF!” Zainab’s excited shout snapped Anna’s attention up. The monitor showed the coarsely bouncing line. “Let’s get ready to shock her at 200.”

***

Part 1: https://intubatedangel.tumblr.com/post/183971918377/dead-drop-part-1

Part 2: https://intubatedangel.tumblr.com/post/184106937832/dead-drop-part-2-version-2

Part 3: https://intubatedangel.tumblr.com/post/184162594552/deap-drop-part-3

*

Barista’s Bad Heart: https://intubatedangel.tumblr.com/post/183863814312/baristas-bad-heart-collected-links

Intermission 1: https://intubatedangel.tumblr.com/post/183900250412/the-doctor-and-his-patient-nurse-intermission-1

[thenamesseven]

Warnings: Angst

Parked in front of your apartment Yugyeom gripped the steering wheel so tight that his knuckles were starting to get white. His hand still hurt from the punch he had previously threw to Jinyoung but the rage that kept flowing through his veins dulled the pain.

At first, when he had stopped driving and found himself staring at your apartment, the only thing going through his mind was he had to tell you about what Jinyoung was doing behind your back. He was so determined to do it, he truly felt like you needed to find out and kick Jinyoung's ass as much as you would like. That's why as soon as he saw you coming back from the supermarket, carrying a bunch of plastic bags and struggling a little thanks to your swollen belly, he literally ran out of the car.

"Here, let me help you"

His voice caught you off guard, you had been so deep in your own thoughts that you hadn't heard Yugyeom approaching you. You were a bit confused as to why he was here when he was supposed to be practicing with the rest of the group but since you were struggling to carry all the groceries bags by yourself you didn't complain one bit and allowed him to help you.

His bruised knuckles didn't go unnoticed. Sort of worried, you reached out a grabbed the hand of the younger male to stop him from hiding it "What happened? Did you get into a fight?" You frowned at your own words because, Yugyeom was such a sweet and gentle guy that you couldn't imagine him fighting with somebody.

Yugyeom, on the other hand, froze at your question. For some reason, the words 'Yeah, I punched Jinyoung' got stuck in his throat. Maybe it was because you looked so genuinely happy that he didn't want to be the one to ruin your day, maybe it was the fear that you wouldn't believe him since he didn't have any clues. Whatever it was, pushed Yugyeom to lie once again.

"I accidentally punched the wall practicing, nothing you need to worry about" He said quietly before he forced a small smile up to his lips "Nothing you need to worry about"

"Are you sure? It looks like it hurts" You muttered going up the stairs, Yugyeom let you go up first so in case you tripped or amything he could catch you.

"Ah, I'm fine, I'm fine" He insisted smiling, shaking his head "Geeze, I came here to check how you were doing not for you to take care of me"

"What can I say? I need to start practicing for when these two get out, after all you're the baby of the group" You loved teasing him about being the maknae. No matyer how tall he was or how muscular he was getting thanks to working out he would always be the baby of GOT7.

"If I had known this I wouldn't have helped you" He replied chuckling, carrying the plastic bags inside for you.

--------------------------------------------------

Back in the practice room things weren't any better. Jaebum had dragged Jinyoung out of there to take a look at his lip in the infirmary, leaving the rest of the group alone and confused. The first one to break the silence was Jackson who was sitting on the floor against the wall, a soft sigh leaving his lips.

"Didn't know Yugyeom had it in him to punch one of us" It had meant to sound like a joke but it ended up sounding like a statement.

Mark who had been practicing by himself nodded quietly "You know he and (Y/N) are really good friends, he was the one that made Jinyoung and her meet"

Youngjae frowned "What do you mean?" He asked kind of confused, not really following what they were talking about.

Bambam, taking a seat next to Jackson, decoded to join the conversation "That if Jinyoung is really doing what Yugyeom was saying, Yugyeom might feel guilty for making them...Meet" Bambam sighed shaking his head, his eyes down onto the floor.

"I don't think he's doing it" Youngjae stepped up for Jinyoung, shrugging quietly as he turned to look at himself in the mirror "It doesn't make sense, why would you throw away a life next to your wife and future kids for a...Lover? Why risk everything to get in a scandal? He could even get fired"

"We sometimes just fuck up Youngjae" Jackson muttered looking at the other male "Jinyoung may have taken the wrong decision, thought he could hide it forever and look at us now"

"Do you think (Y/N) knows something?" Bambam asked feeling a bit concerned for you, he wasn't as close to you as Yugyeom but he was your friend.

"Wouldn't she have left him?" Mark asked in return

"She might know, like, she might sense something is wrong but her feelings are making her blind" Youngjae replied "She probably doesn't want to assume he's doing something without any proves" He turned again to face the other males "Something we should also do instead of punching each other"

"Where is Yugyeom anyways?" Bambam asked frowning, he had texted the maknae after Jaebum exited the practice room with him but he never replied.

Jackson sighed "Knowing him, he probably went to check on Lucy" He mumbled playing with the hem of his shirt "I really hope he doesn't say anything or do something stupid, it's not really his news to deliver"

"Yeah specially when we don't know if he's right or not" Youngjae reminded again.

"Dude, whatever he is doing, he is lying to her" Mark said frowning "Remember when she came to our dorms? Didn't she said Jinyoung was supposed to be in a meeting with Jaebum?"

"But Jaebum was there" Youngjae said frowning.

"Exactly" Mark smiled sarcastically "He also said he got late to (Y/N)'s ultrasound because he was with the choreographer but I overheard Yugyeom telling Jaebum the choreographer was with him that afternoon" All the guys' heads snapped up to look at Mark, he sighed frustrated leaning his head back against the wall.

"So I don't know if he's exactly cheating, which he probably is, but if he's not, whatever he is doing is not good because he doesn't want (Y/N) and us to find out"

"Fuck" Jackson whispered quietly.

"Yeah" Mark muttered sighing "Fuck indeed"

--------------------------------------------------

The only sound that could be heard in the infirmary were Jinyoung's hisses everytime the nurse laid the cotton with disinfectant on the wound that Yugyeom had made in his lip. Fortunately he hadn't bled too much and the it wasn't broken, it would simply be swollen for the whole day and tomorrow it would be back to normal. Probably a little bruised but nothing make up couldn't cover.

Jaebum hadn't said anything on his way to the infirmary, he had walked behind Jinyoung to make sure the older male wouldn't turn around and look for Yugyeom and as soon as they walked inside the infirmary he had simply sat down there and waited for him to get cured. Even now, that the nurse left the room saying Jinyoung wound was going to be good, Jaebum didn't even know what to say or do with him.

"I'm going to talk as the leader of GOT7" Jaebum broke the silence after a couple of minutes, his eyes down on his hands as he fought to find the right words to say "Whatever it is going on in your private life shouldn't screw our practice" Jaebum lifted his head to look at the other male "We have photoshoots and a comeback around the corner and the last thing I need is all kind of scandals in social media because you got your lip busted and Yugyeom has his knuckles bruised" He sighed "You need to think about the consequences of every fight you start and every thing you say, the others don't deserve to be drag into your private life problems just because you and Yugyeom have things to solve" Jinyoung opened his mouth to say something but Jaebum cut him off "I'll talk with him too, he's not getting away that easily"

"And as a friend?" Jinyoung asked, tilting his head to meet Jaebum's eyes. The other male seemed to tense a little before he looked away, sighing.

"I don't really know what is going on or what is wrong with you since you hadn't come to any of us to talk" Jaebum said carefully quietly in case there was somebody around "But whatever it is, it's getting out of control and you need to solve it before you break her heart and Yugyeom breaks your face" Jaebum stood up stretching himself "You're going to be a dad Jinyoung, I think it's time to grow up and face the consequences of what you did, which again, I don't know what it is"

Jinyoung nodded, Jaebum was always right and even when he didn't know what Jinyoung had been doing he had suspected since the beginning something was going on. Just when he was about to get out of the infirmary, Jaebum stopped and turned around to face him with a poker face.

"Go home, get some rest and think about a way to fix this whole problem" He muttered looking at him before his face turned stern "Now, if Yugyeom is right and you're cheating on (Y/N), I won't stop Yugyeom from breaking your face"

Leaving Jinyoung there stunned, Jaebum turned around once again and walked away.

--------------------------------------------------

Yugyeom felt defeated when he walked out of your apartment. He hadn't been able to confess Jinyoung's crime and break that smile of yours. You just had looked so excited about the babies, about all the plans you were making to spend some more time with Jinyoung when he was free and all the things you had ended up buying at the supermarket for the twins that Yugyeom hadn't found enough strength to say 'Hold up, he's cheating'

On his way out, he spot Jinyoung getting out of his, both males sharing a look but none saying anything to each other. Yugyeom, noticing Jinyoung's body tensing, he smirked getting inside his car and seeing how he started walkkng faster upstairs.

Meanwhile, you were sitting on your couch, munching on the chocolate cupcakes Yugyeom had brought for you. Not too long after he was gone, Yugyeom bursted through the door, he looked so mad and frustrated that you were scared to even talk to him. You tried to ignore you angry boyfriend, keeping your eyes on the show you were watching when he plopped down onto the couch next to you.

"What was he doing here?"

"Yugyeom?" You asked surprised of his question, clearing your throat a little "He just came to check on me" Shrugging you look at him "He also brought chocolate cupcakes" You said smiling hesitant.

"Chocolate cupcakes" He scoffed leaning back against the couch, you really didn't understand what was wrong with him today.

"Was work...Tiring?"

"Tiring?" Whatever you said it triggered him "Of course it was tiring and I come home to relax and all I see is Yugyeom and his fucking cupcakes!" He raised his tone at the end of the sentence

"So?" You asked frowning, not really understanding his points.

Jinyoung bit his lip looking down at you. Honestly? He felt like crying again, he was so close to exploding and screaming, kicking things just release some tension before telling you what had happened earlier that afternoon. But instead, Jinyoung shook his head "Whatever, I'm going out"

He left you standing there astonished, not really knowing what to do or say. You didn't even blink until he slammed the door om his way out.

As Jinyoung walked down the street he glanced down at his phone, watching a text message from a really familiar female.

Sunhee: If you're free, I would like you to come over.

Jinyoung sighed again before walking further away from his home.

[fuckyeahalexjo]

Hi! First of all I love your posts and fics! I was wondering if you could possibly do one like jo finds out she’s pregnant a few weeks after she starts her fellowship? (:

“Dr. Karev, will you just follow my finger?”

Jo weakly attempted to slap away the ER doctor’s handfrom in front of her face, “Dr. Young, this is unnecessary, I’m really fine. Itprobably just happened because I skipped lunch.”

“Even so, you hit your head pretty hard on the basinso we need to do a full work up.” He shrugged, “Humor me. For OSHA.” Jo gave awithering look before following his finger as instructed, “Let’s just let youhang out here until that bloodwork is back and then go from there.”

Jo rolled her eyes and collapsed back into the pillow,“I’m really fine. I have some post ops to check on and that robotic tracheoplastyto prep for.”

Dr. Young looked down at his tablet, “If you think I’mletting you anywhere near that kind of procedure without a full work up, you’renuttier than a fruit cake at Christmas.” He set the tablet on the bedside tableand crossed his arms, “So for starters you can quit resisting and put on thegown. If you need help, I can get a nurse.”

“No, I can put it on,” she responded dejectedly.

“Good.” He fished his cell phone out of his lab coatand narrowed his eyes, “Now we called your emergency contact, but haven’t heardfrom him. Do you have a different number we could try?”

Jo looked up horrified as her guts dropped, “Youwhat?”

“Look Dr. Karev, several people have reported that youhaven’t been yourself today and you’ve been in and out of it since you werewheeled down here. Even if everything comes back clear, I’m not comfortablereleasing you alone.”

Jo sighed and leaned back, rubbing her eyes infrustration, “Well, the number on file is right. But he probably won’t callback. Knowing him, he’s already in the building or at least on campus dependingon traffic.”

Dr. Young nodded as he watched her vitals, “So he‘snot far then?” 

Jo smiled proudly, “He’s an attending at The FloatingHospital.”

Dr. Young was nodding in understanding when acommotion just outside Jo’s area made him turn in question. A second later thecurtain was yanked back to show a stricken Alex, his eyes wide and mouth agape,“What the hell happened?”

“Nothing,” Jo emphasized, trying to reach for his handas he rushed towards her side, hoping to soothe him, “Just calm down, youdidn’t even need to come.”

“I get a voicemail saying they are looking for yournext of kin and I’m supposed to cool my heels at work? And now I get here andsee glue all over your forehead and I’m supposed to be calm? What happened?”

Before Jo could respond, Dr. Young spoke up, “And youare?”

Alex turned back to the doc and extended his hand,“Alex Karev, I’m Jo’s husband. What happened?”

Jo rolled her eyes behind Alex’s back but nodded forDr. Young to fill him in, “She fainted and hit her head. We’re running tests.Have you noticed anything different recently?”

He turned back to Jo, his eyes full of worry, “She wascomplaining of lower abdominal pain last night and said she was queasy thismorning.”  

“Snitch.”

He rolled his lips in, a look shehad seen a hundred times before when he wasn’t sure what to say, “Jo, come on,something is obviously wrong.” He raised his right hand to rest on her head,his fingers massaging her scalp soothingly, careful to avoid the area she hadhit on the metal basin. Jo felt herself start to become emotional and reachedup blindly grabbing for any part of him, her hand landing on the back of hishead, the simple act of fingering the ends of his hair calming her instantly. Sheinhaled deeply, feeling herself relax for the first time since her fall. Heeventually moved to sit on the bed facing her, his fingers tracing the veins onthe back of her hand as she laid her head back and closed her eyes.

She felt her eyes warm withunshed tears, her mind racing with possibilities. The moment the first tearbegan rolling down her cheek Alex was back on his feet and at her side, gentlywiping the tears away, but not saying a word. She opened her eyes to look athim as they shared a look, Jo immediately understanding that his mind wasracing with the same possibilities. He had just placed his lips on her templewhen Dr. Young returned, surprising Jo that she had missed him leave, “I havethe lab results back.” He looked squarely at Jo, “Is it okay to share this?”

She glanced up at Alex, smirkingto try to lighten the mood, “Like we would be able to get him to leave now.”

Alex didn’t move, his armscrossed over his chest as he seemed to be studying Dr. Young for any possibleclues as to what was going on. The older doctor sighed and looked back at Jo, “Whitecount slightly elevated, but not enough to be vastly concerning but the HCG ispositive. I’ve put in for an OB consult and I think I just saw Dr. Anderson afew moments ago so maybe you won’t have to wait long.” He looked between Alexand Jo, who both appeared dumbstruck, “I’ll just give you both a moment. Pleasehit the call button if you need anything.”

The curtain area was silent for amoment as neither of them moved, both seemingly shell shocked. Alex moved tothe foot of the bed to retrieve the hospital gown and slowly began unfoldingthe fabric as Jo’s small voice broke the silence, “That can’t be.”

“Jo…”

Her eyes blazed, “No, I wouldknow. I would know if I was pregnant. I would know.”

“Let’s get this on, alright?” Hehelped Jo rid herself of her scrubs, being extra careful to avoid the cut onher forehead, “You’ve been manipulating your pills. First for the wedding causethe island only had a couple of availabilities and then when you started hereso you wouldn’t be on it your first day.”

“Are you saying I caused this? Ordid it on purpose?”

Alex walked down to her feet totake off her shoes and placed them against the wall. “No I’m saying it would beharder to know. It makes sense you wouldn’t know is all.” He motioned for herto lift her hips and pulled down her scrub pants and underwear, making sure tocover her immediately with the hospital gown and sheet. She watched himcarefully as he folded the garments and placed them on top of her shoes beforesitting down on the side of the bed, appearing a little timid as he seemed tolook everywhere but her eyes, “Jo, are you upset about having a baby or thetiming? Or both?”

Jo closed her eyes and leanedback, “Do you really think that I’m ready for this?” Alex’s head snapped up,his eyes wide in question, “I mean….I don’t know.  I…I want this, but it’s terrifying.”

He gave her a warm smile, “Ithink it’s normal to feel that way, Jo.”

Her eyes fluttered closed as herlips curved in a smile at his words, “What about you?”

“I’m shocked as hell, but in agood way.”

She reached for his hand that wasresting on his thigh and stroked his skin with her thumb, “Are you thinking whatI am though?”

His eyes seemed burdened as helooked up and held her gaze for a moment before he began nodding jerkily,“Let’s just wait and see what the OB says, okay?” Jo sniffled as she noddedquickly, Alex immediately twisting more fully towards her to envelope her in ahug, “It’s gonna be okay, Jo.”

Despite her best efforts, shecouldn’t keep the tears from falling once she was in his embrace and she waspretty sure Alex was losing some tears too. She later wondered how long theywould have stayed in each other’s arms had a nurse not interrupted to move themto a more private area of the ER. Alex got up so quickly Jo wasn’t able to seehis face and that seemed to upset her more. She laid her head back and closedher eyes but jerked upright when she heard the nurse disengage the break,“Alex!”

He immediately returned to herline of vision and quickly took her hand, “Hey, I’m here. Just getting yourstuff together.”

She watched as he placed herbelongings bag at the foot of the gurney and squeezed his hand tighter as thenurse maneuvered them through the ER, “Dr. Anderson should be in to see younext. She’ll be doing a vaginal ultrasound so we wanted to get you to a roomwith an actual door.”

Jo felt herself smile uponhearing Alex’s low chuckle, “Thanks.”

The nurse moved the gurney to themiddle of the room and put the brake back on before hooking Jo’s monitors backup and placing her call bell close, “Let us know if you need anything.”

After the door closed, Jo watchedas Alex looked around the room awkwardly, seeming to not want to look at her,“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he gave softly as he saton the edge of the bed to face her, “It just suddenly feels very real.”

Jo curled her lips in nervously,“Yeah.”

Alex had opened his mouth tospeak again, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. They both looked tosee an older woman step in carefully as she rubbed sanitizer into her hands,“I’m Dr. Anderson, I hear you got a bit of news today.” She rolled a stoolcloser to be able to look at both of them, “Is this a planned pregnancy?”

Alex shook his head and startedto speak when Jo interjected, “Let me help you. It wasn’t planned, but it iswanted. But we also know it’s an ectopic so I’d appreciate skipping some of thesmall talk so we can get the procedure underway.”

Jo felt Alex’s sorrowful eyes onher, but didn’t dare look up, causing him to rub her thigh comfortingly. Dr.Anderson stood, “To the point, I like it. But how do you know it’s an ectopicif I don’t?”

“I justknow. The pain and the nausea, not to mention the fainting. We know that’s whatthis is.”

“Okay,” thedoctor responded gently, “Let’s just take a look okay?”

The doctorwaited until Jo nodded and then went to the door to summon a nurse as Alex tookJo’s hand. Jo could feel her anxiety increasing with every passing second butwhen the ultrasound machine was moved closer, she felt as if she mighthyperventilate, “Breathe, Jo.”

She lookedup at her husband’s face and managed a small grin, “You too.”

“Alright,Dr. Karev. We’ll need you to place yourself like you would for a pap. I needyou closer to the end of the exam table.”

Jo movedawkwardly as Alex tried to help as much as he could, but did not release herhand, “I’d like to make a request.”

“Anything.”

Jo looked upand smiled at Alex, “Not of you.” She then turned to Dr. Anderson, who hadquirked a brow and was waiting on Jo to speak, “He gets to be in the OR withme.”

She sawAlex’s head whip around out of the corner of her eye, “Jo….”

Jo looked up, instantly regretting it upon seeing the lostlook in his eyes, “We don’t know anyone here. Robbins is closest and she wouldnever make it in time.” She then turned back to Dr. Anderson, “He’ll crawl thewalls if left alone, he’ll be inconsolable, but if he’s there…he won’t get inthe way. I promise. He would never do anything to…he won’t even break scrub.He’ll…”

The doctor interrupted as she motioned to the nurse for thelubricant, “So you’re a surgeon, too? Where at?”

Jo’s brows knitted in confusion at the OB’s calm deflection,“What does that matter?”

The older doctor smiled warmly “Dr. Karev, just let mefinish the exam first and then we’ll talk schematics if needed.” Jo lay back onthe bed in frustration and covered her eyes with her hands, trying to keepherself from crying once again, “Okay, you’ll feel some pressure.”

Jo blindly reached for Alex, hitting what seemed to be hiselbow, but he immediately took her hand into his and pulled it up to his lips,“Don’t you want to see?”

She shook her head quickly as she kept her eyes closed andher hand that wasn’t in Alex’s covering her face. She didn’t recognize her ownvoice as she answered, “No.”

Alex leaned down and kissed her temple, murmuring in her earjust for her, “I really think you should.”

At this, Jo’s eyes opened wide as she looked at the screenand then back at Alex before looking at the screen again, “It’s not…”

“Single early intrauterine pregnancy. No issues of concernseen. It may be too early to hear a heartbeat but we can try.”

A moment later a steady beat filled the room causing Alex toturn to Jo with a huge smile before kissing her soundly. Jo couldn’t believeher ears and pushed him back to be able to focus on the sound, “It’s healthy?”

Dr. Anderson stood as the nurse offered Jo a towel, “I thinkyour issue today was probably a combination of your body adapting to thepregnancy compounded with all the stress of a new fellowship, which leads me toassume that you had maybe skipped a meal or two recently.” She looked up to seeJo nod sheepishly and gave an encouraging smile, “I’d like for you to be seeneither in my clinic or one of your own choosing in a week for follow up. I’dlike to see how you have been doing: if there are any improvements in yoursymptoms or anything new and repeat some labs. If things get worse or if youhave another fall or if the pain gets worse, I want you back here to get checkedout again, okay?”

Alex nodded quickly, “She will.”

Jo rolled her eyes behind his back as Dr. Anderson smiledand handed over a single frame of the ultrasound to the excited couple, “Forthe refrigerator.”

[myhauntedsalem]

30 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics Describe their Most Disturbing Medical Stories

1. The Guessing Game

“I work as an ICU nurse. A mid-20s female came in with some serious cardiac abnormalities and then went into respiratory distress. Never had any medical history at all. We had to put her on the ventilator, but she was on just enough sedation to keep her lucid. She could nod/shake her head yes and no appropriately to questions.

One night, the patient in the room next to hers died, but the body was still in the room about to be taken to the morgue. The female patient’s door was closed with curtains drawn, so she couldn’t have seen what was going on next door. When I went in to check on her, she had a look of sheer panic on her face, trembling. I asked her a series of questions to see if she was cold/hot/in pain/etc. and she denied all. I asked her if she saw something—she started to aggressively nod her head YES. She wasn’t on any drugs that would make her hallucinate. I went on to get details on what this thing looked like. After playing 20 questions I got this: a man, pale white, left arm missing, heavy, bald, standing still, behind me. This was the man who had just died next door.

I spent the rest of the night consoling her.” – whites42

2. Life After Death

“When I was on an ER rotation during med school we got a call about a 23-year-old woman who was shot in the head, and who was already completely gone, but was reportedly five months pregnant so they were doing CPR until they got her to the hospital to see if the baby was viable. They got her to the ER and did an ultrasound and turned out the baby was full-term so they did a C-section in like under a minute and got the baby out.

I don’t think it’s so incredibly uncommon but it was pretty surreal to see a baby delivered from a dead person with their brain exposed and she was pretty close to the same age I was at the time.” – bluegraypurple

3. The Last Goodbye

“When I was a student, I got called in on a stroke patient. She had coded and they were doing CPR. They worked for 45 minutes, but she died. They cleaned her up, and called on the family to say goodbye, but by that time the family left. She had been both brain dead and without a pulse for more than 45 minutes. Blood had filled her brain, and she was completely grey and started to smell. Suddenly, she sat up, and called for her family. The nurses rushed to get monitors and equipment back on her. They started working on her again, she stabilized, said goodbye to her family, and promptly died a second time.” – simplesimon6262

4. Miracle Man

“When I was in trauma surgery in upstate by, got a notification about a man who was shot 3 times in the head. He comes in, literally one eye hanging out of the socket, blood everywhere, and he’s slumped forward. Apparently, he was shot in the temple, exited out his right eye socket, in the nose exited from the roof of the mouth, and In the cheek one with exit from the side of the head.

At this point, I’m thinking they just brought him in so we can pronounce him in the ER because he looked dead. I go to examine him and tilt his head back, and he says ‘Yoooo be gentle!’ I jump back and scream like a little boy, as did everyone in the room. Literally, the bullets missed his brain in every single shot.” – Noimnotonacid

5. Bleeding

“One of the aides I work with said she was doing postmortem care on a patient who had been on many, many anticoagulants before death. She said when they turned her on her side she started bleeding out of every orifice—eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. She said her and the nurse went home and had nightmares for a week.” – sparklingbluelight

6. The Haunted Hospital

“My town has two really old hospitals. One no longer functions overnight, and the stories are unsettling. No one cleans the old ER alone because all the lights and call bells go off. On other floors, there’s a kid with his ball, a lady in a white dress, etc. A coworker was cleaning an entire floor utterly solo (the norm) and bounced between rooms because the cleaning solution stays wet for a few minutes. Upon returning to a freshly wiped bed, hand prints were clearly visible.” – Sapphire_Starr

7. Eyeless

“I used to do home care for an elderly lady with learning disabilities and no eyes (they were removed due to a congenital condition). She was lovely but prone to wandering around her flat at night in total silence, which led to several horrifying situations where I left my room at 2 am only to encounter her standing silently in the hallway, turning her eyeless face towards me.” – NovelistResearcher

8. Lonely

“One call that will always haunt me was on an unresponsive female at around three in the morning. We get there and do some pointless CPR along with the fire department… She had been dead for a while; no shockable rhythm, and clear rigor mortis. The most disturbing part was that the original caller was her 11-year-old daughter, who had just spent three days with her mother’s corpse and called 9-1-1 because she was ‘lonely’. It also didn’t help that the victim was completely naked when we arrived.” – CupofJoe776

9. Clear Waters

“I have quite a few stories, most of them are hilarious and then there are those you never want to think about. What fucked me up the most was when I saw how eyes change at the moment of death. Imagine you are looking at clear water but that clear water changes to foggy in an instant. In my 8 years here I’ve only seen this once, and I’ve personally seen well over 250 dead or dying people.” – ImCuden

10. Night Lights

“I work nights in a long-term care facility as a nurse’s assistant. I have two men under my care and both of them are unable to use their call lights. They have severe dementia and debilitating Parkinson’s disease but still, their lights are looped around their bed rail. One night their light came on and I went to answer it already confused and creeped out. I turned it off and left the room. Before I could get two doors up the light came back on. I went in there and both lights were unplugged from the wall and thrown under their beds. I fished them out, plugged them back in and left.

I’ve seen shadows standing over the dying and felt a tap on my shoulder while doing chest compressions so I knew that lady had passed.” – beeoakly

11. Holding Hands

“I’ve had a couple of weird calls. One was a major MVA-head on many, many years ago when we played M.E. as well. We had 2 DOA (husband and spouse) that were killed instantly in a head-on collision. They had a 12-year-old daughter that was in between them and they actually took the impact, saving her life.

While en route, we noticed the husband’s arm had come loose so I went back to re-strap it. As I was doing that, the wife’s arm suddenly fell out as well, and her hand fell into her husband’s. My boss was watching in the rearview mirror and helped clear the way as I ran back into the front. It spooked both of us. Apparently, the couple (mid 30’s), had just found out he was cancer free after his last treatment.” – Anonymous

12. Last Meal

“I had an old lady come in by ambulance, near death. She was a DNR (do-not-resuscitate), so we weren’t going to do much for her. She didn’t have any family that we could find. The hospital was full, so we had to keep her in the ER for the night.

Again, she was near death. When you’ve seen enough people die, there’s no mistaking it, and she was almost there. Barely responsive; pale, cool, breaths were really irregular, heart rate was up and down, too. We just turned the lights down and kept an eye on her monitor, basically waiting for her to die.

About an hour later, she’s standing at the door of her room. She’d gotten up and put on all her clothes. We were all like, ‘WTF?’ One of the nurses went to check on her, and she said she was hungry. Not knowing really what to make of things, we got her a chair, a bedside table, and went to the cafeteria and got her a tray of food.

She sat there, ate all her food, talked with the staff a little. After about an hour, she told her nurse that she was tired and wanted to lie back down. We helped her back into bed, and within 30 minutes she was dead.” – Anonymous

13. “Don’t Let me go Back there”

“When my mom worked as an E.R. nurse a guy came in from a car accident and was losing blood. In the midst of resuscitation, the man jolts awake and screams ‘Don’t let me go back there! Please, please, please don’t let me go back!’ A few seconds later they lost him.” – JeremyHowell

14. The Rusty Old Saw

“This woman was clearly struggling mentally. She went into her basement and started sawing at her wrists horizontally with a rusty hacksaw, bleeds a good amount, and then starts walking around the house. She wasn’t dying quick enough, so she sat down in a chair in the middle of the living room, and started going at her wrists again, this time with a pair of scissors.

I was the second person inside the house. It looked like a massacre. We searched the house top to bottom, fully expecting to find multiple dead bodies in there. I’ve never seen so much blood in my life. Every single room had a trail of blood in it.

The woman was found on a chair in the living room. Rigor mortis had contorted her body into a really strange, unnatural pose, and her face was haunting. Literally the stuff of nightmares. Her wrists had huge chunks of skin/veins/muscle missing from them. Saying she slit her wrists is inaccurate. She ripped them to pieces.” – anoncop1

15. Visitors

“I work a stroke/telemetry floor on the bought shift. Most of our patients are elderly. Apparently, there are two things that patients see before they pass away. Some will say that two men are walking in their rooms and telling them to get ready to leave. The patient will call and tell us that these men are big and abrasive in their demeanor. They are either terrified or annoyed when they see the two men. The other thing they will see is a little boy who will go into their rooms and try to wake them up. The boy is usually loud and runs around their rooms. The patients will call and ask who’s letting children just run around late night. Several nights or even that same shift we’re coding or cleaning the patient for the funeral home to pick up.” – pokfynder

16. The Handsome Man in Black

“I used to work in a skilled nursing facility, usually assigned to the Alzheimer’s ward. One night I’m in the linen room stocking my cart, and I heard someone shuffle up behind me, then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and there was no one else in the room. The door was still shut too.

Another lady started to complain that a man was coming into her room at night (again, Alzheimer’s so I didn’t think much of it) so to reassure her, I told her I’d check on her throughout the night. She complained of this man for every night for two more weeks when I asked her to describe him to me.

‘He’s real handsome, and wears a black suit. Oh. He’s right behind you now, honey.’

That freaked me the f*ck out. Of course, there was no one behind me. She died the next night in her sleep.” – Anonymous

17. The Blender

“We got a call for a male in his early 30s with ‘heavy groin trauma’ (exact words of the dispatcher). We roll up lights and sirens and the guy is waiting for us on the front step with a towel over his crotch. We barely come to a stop and the guy is already running towards the rig holding this towel. I asked him what was wrong and he moved the towel and this guy’s dick was just barely hanging on. Apparently, he had ‘lady problems’ so he decided to fornicate with the food mixer he had in his kitchen and accidentally turned it on.” – YayShinny

18. The Charred Skin

“Motorcycle driver, accident, third-degree burns, arrived DOA. Had to transfer him from ambulance gurney to ER bed. As we were moving him with a transfer sheet, the liquefied/cooked subcutaneous fat caused the charred skin on his back to separate and his body slipped onto the floor (despite several of us trying to ‘catch’ him).” – Doc-in-a-box

19. Dead Man Moaning

“Worked security through college at a local hospital. The only ‘creepy’ thing I remember is when a dead man moaned. One of my duties was to help wheel patients who had expired down to the in-house morgue. Once we were wheeling an older man from the ER down and halfway down the hallway he let out this low moan. I started to panic, thinking that he was coming back to life but the RN explained to me (newbie) that sometimes the air in the lungs doesn’t come out until sometime later or is delayed for a bit.” – ill_do_it-later

20. Otherworldly Screams

“I have had fellow coworkers swear that strange things have occurred in the ER. Two people that I work with were charting at the nurse’s station when they both heard a scream followed by incoherent words come from one of our open bays. There were three patients in the room and they denied screaming or hearing anything. I have also had fellow coworkers talk about hearing strange voices especially after really bad codes and one person states she felt someone grabbing her shoulder after the doc pronounced a trauma code. These are all respectable people and I do not think they would lie.” – Anonymous

21. Blank Stare

“We got a call to go out to a scene for an elderly woman with chest pains. I arrive at the house, front door is open. We knock, hear the old woman calling out from the back ‘I’m in the back room’ in a very monotone and calm voice. My partner and I go to the back of the house looking for this woman, and that’s when we smelled it. Nothing prepares you for the smell of rotting corpse. I’ve smelled it a dozen times, and it never gets any less disturbing. We radio for police and ALS backup as we move through the house.

We opened the door to the master bedroom, and there is our patient. She is approximately 80, and she is staring at the master bathroom with these cold, dead eyes. She never once looked at us as we approached her and began talking to her. I got to the bedside and got in front of her gaze, and she just looked right through me. I turned around to see what she could possibly be looking at, and there was the source of my smell.

A man, about the same age as my patient, is on the floor with very little left of his head still attached to his body. A shotgun lay on the floor next to him, and most of his head was strewn about the walls and bathroom counter. We loaded the woman up in the ambulance, and our police backup pulled up.

I don’t think that woman blinked once the entire time she was in our care.” – TheFilthiest

22. “Bill’s Here”

“I’m an RN and while I was a student I was caring for a lady who had an end-stage renal failure, had a DNAR (do not attempt resuscitation) and was shutting down. We were having a little chat when she stopped, looked over my shoulder and said ‘Bill’s here love, I’ve got to go,’ and swiftly stopped breathing. Read her old notes and Bill was her deceased husband.” – Jesspandapants

23. The Body on the Floor

“The call was for an older woman, lying in bed. When we get there, the smell is horrendous of a dead body. There are millions of flies everywhere and a little old lady in lying in the bed, alive. About five feet away, there is a body covered up by a sheet. The lady was a dementia patient, and her husband (the deceased) was the primary caregiver. Based on the number of flies and state of decomposition, the police estimated the guy had been dead for about three weeks. The woman must have been getting some food out of the refrigerator, but it was totally empty by the time we arrived.

The creepiest part happened on the way to the hospital with the woman, she said, ‘I hope that nice man on the floor is OK’.” – Tools4toys

24. The Fallen Cross

“I responded to a call where a janitor was dusting quite a large stone cross in the middle of a church. He had been up on a ladder cleaning, when he slipped off, and proceeded to try to hold onto the cross to keep from falling. Unfortunately, the weight of the 200-pound man was too much to support. The cross fell towards him, landing on his left arm, with a part of the horizontal stone of the cross, pushing his muscles and tendons out of his wrist like a squeezed toothpaste tube. Then the cross fell completely on him splattering his brain across the floor. Quite disturbing, and definitely the most horrific and gore filled call I had ever witnessed.” – UpboatOarKnotUpboat

25. The Headless Nurse

“I used to work in St Barts Hospital in London, which in parts is over 1,000 years old. One of the buildings had 2 floors (with massively high ceilings), and so the floors were taken out and rearranged to make into 5 floors. The nurses working night shift would often tell us of the ghost of a night nurse who wandered silently doing her ’rounds’ at night—but due to the new floors, only her head would be visible drifting down the ward.” – jenthejedi

26. Monsters

“I was still a nursing student at the time, but this was from when I had my psychiatric clinical placement in my 3rd year.

I was assigned to a young male patient with schizophrenia. He had been a voluntary admission because he heard voices telling him to hurt people around him, and he admitted himself because he was afraid of actually going through with it.

Anyway, I went into the room alone, as usual, and did the usual introduction and asking how he was doing. He was at a desk drawing creepy, hideous monsters—each monster had its own page, and there had to be at least half a dozen of these pages scattered around him. I asked him what they were. He answered that those were the monsters he saw. They were the monsters that whispered to him and told him to hurt people and do awful things. Guarded, I asked him, ‘Are they telling you to hurt me?’

He answered, ‘Yes.’

I didn’t stay very long in that room.” – duckface08

27. The Man in Black

“People turn batshit crazy and creepy as hell when they get really sick. There’s even a term called ICU psychosis…and trust me, it’s real. Anyway, the creepiest that takes the cake for me is this (am an ICU nurse, btw): Had a patient who was admitted for overdose. Very long history of mental health problems. She was thrashing around in bed, very combative, kicking people’s asses for days, totally incoherent.

Well, the night I had her, she started making decent sense, but still not oriented at all. She was extremely paranoid and kept talking about the man in black in the corner. I’d hear her talking to him and screaming, all night long. So I’d go in there and try to calm her down, but you could see the fear in her eyes. she was talking other nonsense about how she was in space and shit, and with certain patients, you try to redirect their ‘reality,’ but what I did didn’t help. She said ‘that man in black! Don’t you see him!’ and pointed to the corner. I said ‘there’s nobody here.’ I stepped in the corner she was pointing to and waved my hands around. While I’m waving my hands around in the air, she had the most horrifically terrified look on her face that actually scared the shit out of me, like I had just assaulted the man in black. I said ‘see, there’s nobody here’ and she said in a matter-of-factly‘that’s what you think.’ I promptly got the fu*k out of there.” – HeatherTakasaki

28. Eyes Wide Open

“I work in palliative. Most deaths I’ve seen have been more or less peaceful, though the ones that are not, stick with you. One guy was silently screaming through his last few hours of life. Another guy (who up until this point had been unresponsive) reached up and grabbed me when we attempted to lower his bed to turn him.

One time while doing post-mortem care I walked into the room and thought ‘that’s weird, how come nobody has closed his eyes yet?’ He had that movie-perfect dead look, with pale blue staring eyes and slack jaw and greyish, waxy skin. I closed his eyes and started the care, and when I looked again those eyes, still staring at me, were slowly opening, one slightly slower than the other. He groaned when we turned him to wash his back and his hand managed to clamp onto the bed rail and we had to pry it off. When we finally got him onto his back again, there was a foul-smelling, oily black, viscous liquid on the pillowcase. I cleaned his mouth again thinking it must have come from there, but his mouth and nose were clean. The best I could figure the stuff had come from his eye. I couldn’t wait to get that bag zipped up.” – draakons_pryde

29. Crawling up the Hallway

“I used to work as an STNA in a nursing home. Worked third shift throughout university. During the night we turned half the lights off so it was darker for the evening and didn’t get a lot of light in the residents’ rooms. We had one resident who was younger (70s) and was mostly in for mental reasons. She had long, dark hair and was very thin.

I was sitting at the nurse’s station at the top of the hall and heard a call light go off. I stood up, looked down the dark hall, and on all fours—straight out of The Ring—this resident was crawling up the hall toward me. The other STNA had forgotten to put the bed rail up and the resident was VERY good at climbing out of bed.

Needless to say, I needed some new britches and my heart was racing a mile a minute.” – blameitonthewookie

30. Heaven

“Had a young woman in full liver failure. She was orange in color and she was still conscious. She asked me what I thought it would be like to die. I told her I didn’t know but I hoped it wouldn’t be painful. She then asked me if I thought I would go to heaven. I told her that I believed I would. She asked me if I thought she would go to heaven, and I told her I wasn’t able to answer that question.

She then told me ‘I am going to heaven and I know it,’ and I asked her how she knew that and she told me something that I will never ever forget. She told me ‘I know I am because that man over there told me so.’ I asked what man and she said the man sitting on the end of the bench. I asked her what he looked like and she said ‘he looks just like the Jesus on the windows of my church.’

Well, to tell you I was pretty well affected by that statement. She then went on to say ‘And he says that you are going to go to heaven too.’

We then prayed and I will never forget that interaction between the two of us. About a week later she passed away. I hope she made it to heaven.” – Anonymous

[youcantunringthebell]

Welcome to my uterus. Here’s my story. Now get out.

I wasn’t an irresponsible teenager or a single twentysomething or a victim of rape or incest or carrying a nonviable fetus when I had my abortion.

Arguably, I’d never been in a better position for motherhood, except I was pretty old for it at 42. I was married to a good, responsible man and working a high-stress but high-paying job.

I say all this knowing it’s none of your business that I had an abortion or why. But I tell you because my right to have one is under attack, and you need to know that people YOU know had abortions, and they had their reasons, and there aren’t certain people whose right to an abortion should be protected and those whose shouldn’t. My uterus, my choice, to be made with my partner, my doctor, my pastor and whoever I wish to gather data from. Normally, I’d tell you to stay out of it, but this damn country right now is prompting me to invite you into it for a little storytime.

My birth control, taken in pill form and missed probably three times in 20 years, had failed me. Turns out St. John’s wort, which I took to deal with that stressful job, interferes with the pill. (You may want to make a note of that, fertile women.) When my period hadn’t arrived a week after its scheduled time and I felt nauseated every morning, I took a pregnancy test just to calm myself down, because I KNEW there was no way I’d be pregnant.

I sat in our tiny downstairs bathroom with my pee stick and my phone, counting the minutes, and there it was: the second stripe. I worked up another pee for the second test. Double stripes. A tiny pinprick-stabbing sensation started at the top of my head and traveled to my fingertips. A child was something I wanted for literally one day when I was turning 35 and afraid of missing out on an experience most of my friends were treasuring. On THAT occasion, I skipped the pill and had sex with my first husband, only to fearfully gulp down two pills the next morning and start watching the calendar. That’s how opposed to motherhood I’ve been. Why? Probably because I’m the oldest of five children and was helping Mommy by the time I started kindergarten. Or maybe I think my screwed-up lineage should end with me. It doesn’t matter. That’s who I am.

I felt panicky. Without ever leaving the toilet, I looked up abortion clinics on my phone, and scrolling through my whole two options, it finally occurred to me I should tell the other person involved in this situation. I pulled up my underwear and opened the bathroom door. JJ was playing a video game, which he paused when he saw my face.

“What?” he asked.

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. “Well, I told you my family’s sperm could overcome anything.”

I didn’t laugh. “We need to talk about what we’re going to do. I want to get an abortion. We also have gay friends who want a baby. Maybe we should consider that. But that would mean me going through a pregnancy and trying to figure out whether the baby would be healthy, and I don’t know if I could stand it.”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t watch people we know raising my child.”

“I saw online where I could have an abortion on Tuesday. It’s $600,” I said. 

We sat in silence until he turned the video game back on. “Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME? You’re going to PLAY A VIDEO GAME RIGHT NOW?” I yelled.

Later, I figured out that was his way of numbing himself before he had a panic attack.

I took a sick day that Tuesday, and the two of us drove to a clinic in South Nashville. The woman on the phone told us to leave everything in the car except a method of payment. We couldn’t carry anything in — for security reasons. No books. No phones. Just a credit card carried on a short walk from the car, listening to protesters across the street shouting, “We can help you save your baby! Don’t do this! Think about it!”

As though I hadn’t thought about it. As though I hadn’t spent 30 years of fertility trying to avoid it. As though I would cross the street to people who were making a hard day even harder, asking them to save me. 

A stern, beefy man at the door gave us the once-over and let us in. I wore a pencil skirt and a suit jacket, as though dressing up somehow put me more in control over the procedure. The shabby, dated waiting room was absolutely packed, every seat taken by women of all races, old, middle-aged and young, sitting next to their boyfriends and sisters and moms, watching a game show on a small, fuzzy TV or flipping through faded women’s magazines, finding summer looks and risotto recipes and not talking.

At that time, 7 years ago, Tennessee required fetal viability tests but not a 48-hour waiting period, so I had a vaginal ultrasound, but at least I didn’t have to leave and come back after it. The embryo was 5 weeks, the size of an apple seed. It was not life. It was a mass of cells with the potential for life, existing because of my life. It wasn’t a person any more than an apple seed is an apple tree. 

So I was allowed to join the other women having medical abortions -- as opposed to surgical abortions, the other option -- and they took us back in groups of six to watch the required video. I don’t remember much about the video, but I remember well the “what are you in for” conversation we had. One woman was married and pregnant by her husband, who would beat her if he found out she’d gotten pregnant again. She lied to him so she could be at the clinic that day. Another woman got pregnant by her boyfriend while her husband was out of the state on a six-month work assignment. Another said she was there for her third abortion. I couldn’t imagine having to come back to that place once I’d been.

I paid my $600, minus a $20 coupon from the clinic’s website. I had a physical exam and took the first pill of a two-pill process — once you take the first one, you MUST take the second to flush out the uterine wall or risk infection, the doctor warned. They told me to come back in a few weeks to be sure I’d totally passed the embryo.

By Thursday, the day I was supposed to take the follow-up pills, I was in a regular hospital for a deep vein thrombosis and bilateral pulmonary embolism that had actually started weeks before I knew I was pregnant -- manifesting as a persistent calf cramp and the occasional shortness of breath I attributed to being fat and stressed. Likely, the combination of birth control pills and being pregnant caused a clotting disorder. I didn’t know about it until, dressed for work and walking out the door, I couldn’t breathe while I noticed my leg turning purple.

My primary care doctor at the time was the sweetest human on the face of the planet, so when he met me in the emergency room, he didn’t bat an eye at the news I was in the middle of a medical abortion process. “Just take the second dose of pills, and we’ll keep an eye on you here, overnight,” he said. He told me about a dear friend who died on a treadmill from this very clotting disorder, and how relieved he was that I’d come in when I did. Not an ounce of judgment or blame.

I’m not sure how I would have dealt with a pregnancy and treatment for my clotting disorder at the same time. I didn’t have to find out, because Tennessee law allowed me to make that decision about my own medical treatment, and an abortion clinic was available to me. That very clinic is closed now, regulated out of business by men and their self-hating women enablers bent on turning America into a theocracy. Neither JJ nor I regret our decision, and we are grateful for the men and women who risked their safety so we could make it. Some of them have been gunned down in the street for their roles in helping women like me. 

I absolutely respect people who are pro-life, as long as they don’t attempt to regulate my medical care and they do demonstrate a love for life already in the world. (Hello, Tim Kaine.) To those who would take away my rights: Ending abortion access wouldn’t have made me carry that embryo. I’d have spent my last dime traveling for an abortion, and I had dimes to spend. Women who don’t will do like a friend from the Kingdom Hall’s daughter, who punctured her uterine wall with a wire hanger when we were teenagers.

So I’ve told my story. If you can, tell yours. If you can’t, I completely understand. And I mean you too, men. Now get out of my uterus.

P.S. Apropos of nothing: The closest I came to losing it over having my abortion was when my editor at the paper assigned me to go back and cover a special protest IN FRONT OF THE SAME CLINIC only a month or two later. It was a bunch of teenagers led by a priest who taught at a Catholic school. I kept my composure and did the job. A few months after THAT, the priest called me up wanting a story done about the fact he was releasing an album, so I met him at a Music Row studio and wrote up a religion column about him. I asked if we could use a clip of one of his songs to run online with the column. He said no, because “someone might steal my licks.” In my opinion, the licks were not stealable, and to my knowledge, few people ever heard them, never mind stole them.

[gamearamamegathons]

Trauma Center: Second Opinion: HEART GLASS

[Content warning for surgery and stuff! And also for suicide, a topic that this game handles miserably, so be prepared for that. Actually, let's also add a content warning for verbal abuse towards a suicidal person, just to be safe.]

Circe here! Time to fix more organs! We open with episode 1-6. Angie is really worried about this patient, because his blood tests are off, but Derek just blows off her concerns. This surgey is pretty straightforward, we're treating inflammation and removing tumors, but Derek is continually ignoring Angie pointing out that something more seems wrong. Our protagonist has gone from a newbie doctor to a bigshot episode in the space of six scenes. Amazing. Well, after we finish up the surgery, Derek hurries off to some doctor event thing, but it turns out that the patient had more inside bad stuff that blew up, so he almost died. Whoopsy. We don't actually operate on this patient again, instead Derek basically gets fired for negligence. Angie says that any suspicion, no matter how tiny or inconsequential, should be taken seriously, which is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say, because there were actually quite ample reasons to think something was wrong.

Have I mentioned that this game's writing is...uh...a little strange? The characters react to every surgery basically as if they were operating on someone they know, and while it's admirable to care about people that passionately, this just isn't realistic, because that kind of attitude isn't sustainable when you're treating life or death situations every day. I dunno if this is typical for medical dramas, but I find it a bit jarring. At the very least, though, I guess comments like this help us understand the driving philosophy of the game's narrative.

Anyway, Derek is moping outside, when he hears about a car accident. It seems that one of the victims is being taken into emergency care, and Derek knows that there aren't enough doctors, so he rushes in and is, like, emergency un-fired, I guess. Was he really fired, or did they just yell at him a lot? I dunno, this game's fuzzy about that. But who cares because this guy's got HEART GLASS! That's right, when we cut the guy open, we find that his heart has been pretty much pincushioned with glass shards, which I'm pretty sure would mean he'd just be dead. To make things worse, as soon as we remove all the glass, another huge piece just, chestbursters out of his heart, which

I mean

I'm *pretty* sure that'd kill him.

Just when we think we've got this guy all patched up, another laceration appears on his heart, for reasons that aren't even really clear this time. In a moment of panic, Derek fixes it with magic.

...what? You heard me. This is the point at which we're introduced to the Healing Touch, a rare magic power possessed by only a handful of surgeons that allows them to go into bullet time to do surgery super fast and save people from dying. Have I mentioned that this series is a bit weird?

Anyway, no time for that now. This is the remake, remember, and bit that I'm pretty sure is new to this version is a side story featuring another surgeon named Nozomi Weaver. We don't learn much about Dr. Weaver except that she's a master Japanese surgeon who's currently practicing in America, and also she's shaaaady. In this surgery, our patient's arm bones are shattered, so we do the logical thing and collect all the pieces, jigsaw them back together, and smear some antibiotic gel all over it so it heals real good. Uh, I didn't mention this, but there's a line of dialogue early on about this gel being a cure-all, and I guess they weren't fucking kidding, were they. This surgery also introduced an unfortunate complication to my clever emulated control scheme. To put the bones back together, you have to rotate the Wii remote, something I hadn't really bothered to configure. I had to concede the need to use an analog stick here for precision, so I ended up with the controller sitting in my lap so I could operate the stick and the mouse at the same time. It was, uh, a little less than elegant, but it was the best I could do. I kinda hope they don't require any more of the Wii remote's features in future surgeries.

Back to Derek. Next up, we gotta fix these little blobs that are traveling through a guy's spleen, and every time they go through it hurts him. We're doing pretty good until there's a lot of them going really fast, so Derek once again draws on the power of magic to fix it all in time. Word of Derek's dark magic reaches the hospital director guy, and he explains that Derek has a rare magic power, and that having such great healing power is a heavy burden to bear, so he should give up on it or he'll never be happy. Derek ignores him though, like any good protagonist, so we learn how to activate Healing Touch manually by drawing the shape of a pentagram in the air.

Nope. Not kidding.

Derek explains this away as him concentrating on a simple shape to increase his focus, but also fuck you, you're invoking dark magic with a pentagram. I fucking own it when I use dark magic, Derek, and you should do the same. I should also note, invoking the Healing Touch involves holding B and Z and drawing at the same time, which is a manuever that was definitely kind of a pain to configure so I could carry it out comfortably. Oh yeah, I forgot, we also learned how to use defibrillators earlier! That requires you to use B and Z at the same time also. Gotta be real careful about zapping a guy's heart and stuff.

Aaaanyway. The next patient's got lumps on his organs that keep bursting, so we gotta cut the lumps out and stitch his veins back together. This surgery actually kinda sucks, and I lost several times before I got it, because it takes a massive chunk out of the patient's vitals when his stuff bursts, and they will, no matter how quickly you work. Near the end, there's four of them at once, and you gotta use the Healing Touch to not lose. Unfortunately, this leads to Derek passing out for three days. Whoopsy again. When Derek comes to, veteran doctor guy tells Derek that dark magic places a lot of strain on the body and he really shouldn't overdo it, because if he passed out in a surgery that would be, uh, pretty bad. I gotta side with veteran guy here. Pulling a spirit muscle is *way* worse than pulling a physical one.

So then we get to Linda. Let me tell you about Linda, and how Angie becomes the worst character in the game for all time. So, Linda is a 17 year old girl who comes in with lacerations on her lungs. Which sounds pretty bad. This is a fairly basic surgery, although we also learn that we need to close very large lacerations with the forceps before we can stitch them closed. Where things really go bad is after the surgery. It turns out that Linda was suicidal, and didn't really want to be fixed at all. So Angie does the logical thing, and yells in her face that clearly the surgery was a waste and Linda should just die if that's how she feels about it.

so

uh

hm

So yeah, Angie is total scum. Let's move on and see how it gets worse. After that shameful display, Derek tries to help Linda by giving her a little pep talk, which I don't think would actually help, but hey, the guy's heart is in the right place I guess. Later, we learn a bit more about Linda's home life, and there's some stuff that kinda sucks, but, in Angie's words, 'nothing worth dying over'.

as you can see angie understands suicidal ideation very well

Later we learn that extremely high levels of some kind of antihistamine was in Linda's body, and it's not even on the market yet, nor is there any evidence she was taking it, so her body was just kind of, creating it somehow. Apparently this huge drug overdose caused a mood swing that led to her feeling suicidal, which means

w h i c h m e a n s

which means Linda was feeling suicidal because she was sick. Angie screamed in a sick person's face that she should die because she was sick. Angie should be fucking fired, quite possibly even sued for some kind of negligence, I don't know. She certainly shouldn't be allowed back into the plot as though she just got a little upset and said some things she didn't mean. Angie even has the gall to later whisper ominously about a rumored 'death doctor' who euthanizes patients, and how it's good that Linda was treated by Derek instead of that guy. As if Angie herself wasn't literally saying Linda should be dead fucking yesterday. Fuck.

Okay, deep breaths. I'm getting ahead of things a little. While the plot is getting horrible, the surgeries are getting *amazing*. After all this, Linda suddenly starts complaining of excruciating chest pains, so we gotta treat her again. After we fix up more lacerations, we find out the reason why Linda's body has been all weird and messed up: tiny monsters in her lung! Yes, that's right. We use the ultrasound to detect a tiny winged creature moving around inside Linda's lung, and it's creating more lacerations, so we have to cut the sucker out and laser it to death. A few more of these things crop up, and we take them out one by one, until all of Linda's lung monsters are taken care of.

This is GUILT, the game's made up...disease...monster...thing. It's a little hard to be sure what they are, because the game talks about GUILT as though it's a disease, but they appear to be, like, parasites or something. Maybe it's a visual metaphor? For...something? Well anyway, Linda's all better. Veteran doctor guy whispers in hushed tones about GUILT, and says that nobody outside of this room should talk about what we saw.

So, with that major development, I think this is a good cutting off point for now. I wanna focus on the fun parts, and not as much on how Angie is a detestable human being, so let's review: HEART GLASS, jigsaw bones, and lung monsters. This game is only going to get more absurd from here, and as far as I remember, there is 100% less of characters being absolutely monstrous to teenage girls, so I hope you're looking forward to it.

[divescustos]

the drabble symbol + the birth of renesmee!!! - oraculumin

i feel like oprah. you get a chapter! and you get a chapter! and you get a chapter!

WE HAD REMAINED STILL AS statues for only a moment before rushing into action. 

The plan we had made with Carlisle — Bella, Rosalie and I — would now have to exclude him. Between the two of us, we had three medical degrees, but neither had specialised in childbirth. Carlisle, thank God, had some knowledge and also many books on the topic, which we had all read through, gaining any and all information we could. We had all decided it would be much safer for Bella and the baby if Carlisle performed a c-section, and that was what we had prepared for. The birth we had planned for in a few days was to take place now, and without the surgeon we had counted on to perform it.

Rosalie, having caught Bella after her fall, gathered her up into her arms and together we ran up the stairs to the library turned operating theatre. I felt a stab of horror at each broken bone our baby caused in his panic to escape, the cracks echoing in my ears. I could hear the pain and fear in his mind as he lost the ability to breathe. He was trying to fight his way out, the way his instincts were telling him to, but in the process, he was killing Bella. The two beings I loved the most were battling with each other for life. 

On our way up, Rosalie took control and called down instructions to Alice. There was an earpiece that could be used so we would have our hands and still talk to Carlisle, and Alice went in search of it. Jasper also had to get away — he had left the moment Bella started vomiting the blood. 

“Morphine!” I yelled at Rosalie as she lay Bella down on the hospital bed in the middle of the room. 

“Alice — get Carlisle on the phone!” Rosalie screamed, ignoring me altogether.

I gathered up the syringe myself, already full of the morphine, and pressed it quickly into a vein in Bella’s arm. Her skin was almost transparent in the glare of the electric lights, and it was easy to find. Rosalie was ripping the clothes covering Bella’s body, clearing the way for us. 

“What’s happening, Edward?” someone asked me, and I was far too focused on my task to figure out who.

“He’s suffocating!” I snapped, gathering up any and all supplies we could possibly need. The thoughts of our child were making me panic, his inability to breathe the loudest in the room. 

“The placenta must have detached!” Rosalie realised in horror, her eyes wide. We both knew what that meant, and what must be done. 

“Get him OUT!” Bella screeched, having finally come back around. “He can’t BREATHE! Do it NOW!”

The force of her voice, the effort she put into it, burst several vessels in her eyes and I sucked in a breath at the sight of the red spots spreading there.

“The morphine—” I growled, unable to control my tone in my panic. My wife and baby were both dying in front of me. It hadn’t been long enough for the medicine to spread, Bella would be in even more agony if we started to get him out. 

“NO! NOW—!” Bella screamed, before blood in her throat cut her off again and she began to choke. 

Unable to do anything else, I rushed behind her to hold up her head, my hands splayed around the back of her skull. If I could get her mouth clear, then she at least could breathe. The blood continued to bubble up her throat, erupting from her mouth. 

Alice returned then, and clipped the earpiece under Rosalie’s hair before backing away again. Although she had fed recently, she didn’t trust her control enough to play an active part in this. How I wished she could see the baby! Or could see Bella, despite him. If we had some idea of the future, of how our idea would play out, things would be much simpler. 

Carlisle’s calm voice came through the phone, and Rosalie hissed at him all that had happened. Her words were frantic, panicked, and he was trying to calm her, but even without the benefit of his thoughts, I could tell he too was worried. We knew this would be dangerous, even with the plan we had put in place. What had meant to be calm and relatively straight forward was now an emergency. Bella’s skin was covered in bruises, more black and blue than anything else, and the bump was slowly being covered in crimson blood from the inside. In places, I could make out a tiny hand- or footprint. 

Rosalie began to move, a scalpel in her hand. 

“Let the morphine spread!” I begged her, unable to think straight.

“There’s no time,” she replied. “He’s dying!” 

The scent of yet more fresh blood hit me. This time, it was not the strangers from the bags we had been giving Bella, but the same floral I had become so accustomed to. The one that had tempted me so through our initial time together. The one I had lost the interest in drinking once I had faced a world in which I thought Bella dead. 

And one that was still unbelievable tempting to vampires.

“No, Rose!” I roared, immediately catching the turn in her thoughts, the swift loss of any humanity in her eyes. She was a predator who needed to hunt, and fresh blood was still pouring from Bella’s stomach where she had made the incision. Had I been able, had I not been holding Bella’s head up to keep her from choking on the blood her stomach was still retching up, I would have been the one to tackle her myself, to take her away from the temptation. 

Before I even had a chance to issue an instruction, Jacob — who I hadn’t even noticed was in the room with us — had leaped over the table at my sister. A low growl wanted to leave my lips; Rosalie and I didn’t often have the closest of relationships, but I would protect her from the wolves in a heartbeat. I held it in, knowing that it was for the best, especially once Alice had grabbed Rosalie and began to drag her from the room. Our connection to Carlisle was lost when the earpiece had been crushed, and I wanted to let out a hiss of frustration.

I’m sorry, Edward! Help the baby!

“Alice, get her out of here! Take her to Jasper and keep her there!” I ordered, finally getting a grip on myself. If Rose was going to lose it, it would be best not to have her here at all. I didn’t need even more to worry about. Now I was aware of him again, the wolf could make himself useful. “Jacob, I need you!”

Below me, Bella was starting to turn blue, her inability to breathe now matching our child. 

“CPR?” I growled at him, praying to any god that would listen for deliverance from this.

“Yes!” he replied, and I could have kissed him with relief. 

I could see him analysing me, wondering if I would react anything like Rosalie. I wanted to give him the whole sordid tale, the reason I would never be capable of hurting my wife like that, not now, but I had more important matters to contend with. 

“Get her breathing!” I barked. “I have to get him out before—”

An earth-shattering crack interrupted me. For a moment, I was bewildered. What in the name of all that was holy could that have been? My eyes shot to Bella’s face, waiting for her to react in some way that would indicate it had been to do with her. In the split second that I did, I realised something. 

Her legs had gone limp.

“Her spine,” I said, choking on air as the horrific truth punched me in the gut.

“Get it out of her!” Jacob snarled, throwing a scalpel at me. It was the one Rosalie had been using, the one she had stabbed in his arm. “She won’t feel anything now!”

I steeled myself, realising what I must do. 

Don’t worry, loves, I thought to them both as I placed the scalpel to line up with the cut that had already been started. I can do this. I love you.

I pressed the blade down, and more blood rained from Bella’s body. Her heart gave a faint protest, but it still beat on. I dragged the blade along her skin, feeling the resistance we had encountered weeks ago. The same that could not be entered by needle or ultrasound. A skin as hard as that of any vampire, immune to any human blade. 

But not immune to me.

Tossing the scalpel aside, I sent a silent apology to Bella, and bent my head over her stomach, pushing aside the skin I had just cut. Under my mouth, beneath the hands I had braced against either side of the bump, my son sent out terrified thoughts as he continued to be unable to breathe. I made a swift job of biting through the membrane, pulling my head back up in order to get a good view. It would do no good to injure him in trying to get him out. 

Reaching inside, I found the tiny body of the baby Bella had fought so hard for. Almost as if he was reaching for me too, he latched onto one of my hands as I drew him from the dark, warm place that had been his home for these few weeks. Drawing him up into my arms, I realised our mistake. This was not the little boy Bella had described to me — this was the girl she hadn’t really believed could be possible. 

“Renesmee,” I whispered, running a finger over her perfect cheek. She had hair already, plastered against her skull, but even with the blood and other fluids, I could see my own red tones there. When she opened her mouth to draw breath, I saw a set of teeth already in her mouth — the thing she would have used to escape her mother, had I not done it for her. She was beautiful, inhumanly so, and my heart was already filled with love for her.

Her eyes fluttered open, and I saw Bella’s deep brown replicated in perfect miniature. 

“Let me…” I heard a voice croak, and I smiled. Bella had woken again. “Give her to me.”

I walked to Jacob’s side, as close as I could get to Bella without going all the way around the bed again. Resting the baby on Bella’s chest, I began to make note of the damage in the back of my mind, preparing to begin the change, while most of my mind focused on watching my wife with our daughter. 

“Renes… mee. So… beautiful.”

Before I could watch anymore, I saw our child rush to the blood she had craved so much while still in her mother’s womb. I couldn’t stop her before she had bitten Bella, and I pulled her swiftly back up into my arms. 

“No, Renesmee,” I told her, and she gave me a tiny pout that made her look like she understood. Perhaps she did. Maybe her mind was as advanced as her growth, or even more so. 

Even with so much of my attention focused on the impossible being in my arms, my ears were always tuned to the thump of Bella’s heart. It had beat faithfully, if a little unevenly at times, since the first day we had met. It was the most significant sound in my world. 

It fell silent. 

My eyes snapped to Bella’s still form, and Jacob’s body now standing over her, performing chest compressions. Renesmee seemed to sense the tenseness in my body, and she looked between me and her mother for a moment, judging how it was she should react. 

“What are you waiting for?” Jacob demanded, continuing to pump her heart. 

“Take the baby,” I told him, knowing exactly what must be done now. This was the part I had planned for with Carlisle — but I needed my hands free. 

“Throw it out the window,” he growled, and I nearly reciprocated. 

“Give her to me,” Rosalie murmured from the doorway. 

For a moment, I clutched Renesmee to my chest, knowing that her tiny heart still did beat out its light flutter, and that she was covered in fresh blood. Only minutes before, Rosalie had almost fallen into a frenzy. A low snarl left my chest, warning her off from taking my baby from me, my daughter. 

“I’ve got it under control,” she continued, her voice steady and her mind clear. “Give me the baby, Edward. I’ll take care of her until Bella is more stable.”

A nanosecond was all I needed, before I carefully handed Renesmee over to her aunt. With my daughter out of my arms, I let myself sink back in my mind, let rationality take over. First, I needed the syringe. 

Yanking open a draw, I pulled out the steel thing I had used to store some venom, ready for this moment. It hadn’t been pleasant to prepare it, but I was glad of it now. 

“Move your hands, Jacob,” I commanded, ready to inject the thing into the most important part of Bella’s body for the transformation. 

He looked at me, dumbfounded. “What’s that?”

I hadn’t the time to answer his question before acting — Bella’s heart was already too weak as it was. I knocked his hands out of the way, barely noticing the snap as some of his fingers broke against my hand. Lining up the needle, I stabbed it into Bella’s chest. 

“My venom,” I explained, pushing the plunger down, forcing the thick liquid into the dying organ.

Beneath my hand and the needle, I felt her heart jolt. Her chest rose off the table a little, like she had been shocked in a hospital. 

“Keep it moving,” I instructed him, knowing my next step.

I moved to her throat, pushing her lank hair out of the way as I first kissed the skin there, then bit down, and ran my tongue over the wound. Sealing in the venom would keep her heart from beating it right back out again, and I knew I had to get as much into her system as possible, especially at a moment like this. I couldn’t let my panic and dread distract me now, not when this was so very vital. 

Moving from her throat, to her wrists, the crease at the inside of her elbow, I repeated the same motions. Kiss, bite, seal. I made my way around her body, forcing in more and more venom, praying this could make the process quicker. Or, at that moment, praying it would work at all. 

Jacob’s thoughts had changed. His desperate need to keep Bella alive, one I held as well, had died away. His hopeless mind was annoying me — if he would not, or could not help, then what good was he? Once I had heard his connection was lost, gone out of the room, I couldn’t help but push him out of the way. I was done with my previous task anyway.

“Go then,” I snapped at him, taking his place and keeping Bella’s heart beating for her until the venom began to take effect. His compressions had slowed, and I picked up the pace again, watching her face for any sign of life returning. 

He’s pushing her head heart faster than I did.

“She’s not dead,” I growled, responding to his mistaken thought. “She’s going to be fine.”

She couldn’t not be. Esme had fallen from a cliff and been saved. Rosalie had carried Emmett over a hundred miles to get him help and he was fine. I had been about to take my last breaths and was here. But Bella may have already breathed her last, a traitorous voice in my mind sang. Not if I can help it, I replied. 

“She’s fine,” I growled again, half to myself, and half to the world at large. I locked my eyes on Bella’s face, my hands cracking even more ribs than our daughter had. The venom would soon heal them, and she would be fine. Alive, healthy, happy. She had planned it all out so well. I just had to help her achieve that vision. From the start, Alice had seen her as one of us. I would make it happen. I could do it. 

“Can you hear me, love?” I asked her, climbing up atop the table, over her the way I had seen in too many emergency departments. My knees bracketed her broken spine, the bump that no longer held our precious child. My hands continued to pump her heart for her. “You’ll be just fine. You just have to help me here. Keep breathing, Bella, do you understand? Come back to me. We need you.” Let out a sound of frustration, half strangled in my throat from emotion. “I need you. Come back to me.”

Downstairs, Rosalie was cleaning up our child. Through her eyes, I watched the process for a second, before returning to my own mind. For lack of anything better to say, and to keep myself from breaking down altogether, I chattered on about the baby I had held for all of two minutes, the beautiful creature that was ours. I described her face, her hair, her heart. The warmth, the heat, of her, which I had initially assumed to being from her mother, but now I realised was just a part of her nature. I told her of the tiny smile that played on her lips as Rosalie washed away of the evidence of her birth, and wrapped her up in a blanket. A few times I caught my own face in Renesmee’s mind, or Bella’s. She was wanting us. Yet more reason for Bella to live, to know that our child needed her mother. 

I had no clue how long I knelt up over my wife, my hands interlocked over her heart, when finally I felt something beneath the heels of my palms. 

“Yes, that’s right,” I breathed, forcing the venom through her system for her, as her heart grew ever stronger. “C’mon, Bella, you can do this. I love you.”

Under my fingers, her heart picked up pace. It was still weak, but it was there, and the smile that stretched across my face was probably better suited to a mad man. Perhaps I was — a mad man working against the impossible. But we were impossible, Bella and I. From our love, to our marriage, to our child, we were impossible. If there was anyone in the world, in all of time, who could do this, it was us. 

Beneath me, her heart grew stronger, faster, and I could almost weep for relief. I lifted my hands away for a moment, before I slipped off the table, and took up her hand. Even without my assistance, her heart continued on, pushing my venom through her body. As it went, it would fix bruise and bone. I needn’t worry now — the hard part was over. Now all I need do was wait. 

Wait for her to change, wait for her to wake. 

Wait for our forever to begin.

[hospitaldirectory]

What happens during an ECHO Colour Doppler test?

An ECHO Colour Doppler test is a check to see how gore moves through your arteries and veins. The examination syndicates customary ultrasound with Doppler ultrasonography. Steady Ultrasound usages sound surfs that recoil off from blood vessels to generate images. The Doppler machine made by Echo Colour Doppler Manufacturers airs at how sound surfs are imitated off from shifting objects, such as gore. Occasionally, medics find a way to use skill that hits all the correct notes -- it’s easy on your form, gives firm outcomes, and doesn’t source any side effects. That’s just the case with these tests done on equipment supplied by Echo Colour Doppler Suppliers in India, which gives medics a way to see what’s going on inside your form without X-rays or inoculations. In its place, it turns sound surfs into imageries. Your medic can practice it to check for concerns with blood flow, such as lumps in your veins or obstructions in your arteries.

The ECHO Colour Doppler test of the chief ways to check for deep vein thrombosis (DVT) -- a disorder where blood masses form in veins deep in your form, typically in your limbs. DVT can tip to more grave glitches, such as a mass in your lungs. It can be life-threatening. So it’s significant to get established if you have indications. If you have indications of DVT, such as puffiness or discomfort in your leg, your medic may use an ECHO Colour Doppler test to see what’s going on. The imageries created by the equipment made Echo Colour Doppler Manufacturers show where blood decelerates down or halts, which could mean you have a lump. It is very actual in a lot of circumstances, but it’s not good at finding masses in your pelvis or the small blood vessels in your calf.

Usually, it helps to attire loose-fitting garments to the examination, though your medic may ask you to change into a robe. Also, you may want to leave jewels at home, since you’ll have to eliminate it from any area to be verified. If you’re receiving the examination for DVT or other questions in your legs, you won’t need to do whatever else. For a test on your stomach on the equipment supplied by Echo Colour Doppler Providers in India, your medic may tell you to diet for 6 to 12 hours before the examination. That means you won’t be capable to eat or drink anything throughout that time. You’ll only be able to swill a small amount of water to take your fixed drugs. For females getting a pelvic ECHO Colour Doppler test, you’ll have to swill 32 ounces of water 1 hour before the examination. You need to have a full bladder for the examination to be actual.

You will lie on a bench, typically on your back. Your medic or a specialist will rub a cream on the area to be verified. This helps the sound surfs travel and gives you better consequences. Next, they will press a small expedient against your skin. It looks like a microphone or a pointer. As they move the expedient about, it sends sound surfs into your form. The surfs recoil off your blood cells, organs, and other form parts, then back to the expedient. You’ll feel some burden from the expedient, but unless you have sensitivity, it won’t injure.

A computer takes all the sound surfs and turns those into stirring imageries that you can see sentient on a monitor. Once the examination is completed, you wipe the cream from your frame, and you’re all set. It typically takes about 30 to 60 minutes. You can get consequences from an ECHO Colour Doppler test very rapidly. Occasionally, the individual who runs the examination is skilled to do ultrasounds but isn’t a medic. Even then, the imageries are obtainable right away for your medic to check. This examination is very harmless, effortless, and doesn’t use radioactivity.

Your medic will let you know what all the imageries mean. If you had the examination done to examine for DVT, they will tell you what the imageries show about your blood movement and tell you the subsequent paces to take. If you do have a mass, you may have more than one ECHO Colour Doppler test over a few days to see whether the mass grows or any new ones show up.

If you are looking for Echo Colour Doppler Suppliers, please log into Ozahub.