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thetomorrowshow · 18 days ago

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Whumptober 24 - Radiation Posioning

title: all days come down to one clear pane

fandom: hermitcraft

cw: hospital setting, possibly terminal illness

“Well, hey there, Bdubs,” Beef greets cheerfully, tightening the ties on his apron. “Here for another round of TCG?”

Bdubs doesn’t respond right away. He stares at Beef for a long moment, standing several feet away, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“Hey, Beef?” he says eventually.

There’s something . . . something not quite right about the look in Bdubs’s big eyes. A dull, unfocused quality, like he isn’t all there.

“Yeah?”

“Did we eat something funny, last night?” asks Bdubs. “Because I’ve been feeling . . . not good.”

The NHO had grabbed dinner together the night before, and while it had been fairly cheap, greasy food, Beef’s been feeling all right. Out of all of them, Bdubs has one of the strongest stomachs. It would be weird for him to have a reaction, out of all of them.

“How so?”

Bdubs’s dull eyes dart from right to left. “I threw up,” he says. “Twice.”

Beef hums. “Well, I’ve been feeling fine. Did you ask Etho and Doc?”

“No.”

“Are you feeling sick any other way?”

Bdubs considers that question, his head tilting slightly to the side. “I’m . . . my body hurts,” he says, after a moment of consideration. “Like, aches. Is that normal?”

“It sounds like it could be a flu,” Beef says, taking a subtle step back. “Maybe you should go lie down.”

“I just had the flu a couple weeks ago,” Bdubs argues. “I feel . . . I dunno. I haven’t been feeling great all day, I’ve been kind of sick, but I was okay last night—”

His words speed up, voice louder and louder as he speaks, and one hand snakes out of his pocket and up to his hair, where it starts pulling. Beef grimaces—they’ve been trying to break Bdubs of his hair-pulling habit for years, but it always creeps back. Before he can mention it, though, his hand comes away.

With a tuft of hair.

Bdubs—

He wasn’t pulling too hard, was he? He just kind of pulled a little bit. He shouldn’t have been able to pull out a whole tuft of his own hair, like a dog blowing out its coat.

Bdubs doesn’t seem to notice. He lets the hair fall to the ground, runs his hand over his head. There’s some other thin patches, Beef notices, and that worries him just as much as the bandage wrapped around Bdubs’s hand.

Why is it bandaged?

“—been weird,” Bdubs says, “and I don’t like it.”

“Why don’t you lie down,” Beef suggests again. He forces his voice to be as calm as possible. He doesn’t want to freak out Bdubs, as strangely as he’s acting. “You can use my bed. I’ll bring you something to drink, okay?”

Bdubs frowns, but nods his agreement. He heads off in the direction of Beef’s bed, his bandaged hand still buried in his hair.

Beef watches him go for a moment, then pulls out his communicator.

There’s something very, very wrong about Bdubs. He’s going to need some help.

“When did this start?” Doc asks, examining Bdubs’s hand.

It looks bad. It looks really bad, from Beef’s point of view.

His left hand, now bereft of wrappings, doesn’t quite look like a hand. Well, it’s the right shape and everything, but his skin is just . . . wrong. Peeled-away and reddened, the fresh skin under the peeled back of his hand bubbly with blisters. The skin around the patch is discolored, several shades lighter than Bdubs’s usual pigment.

Bdubs shrugs. “I dunno. Um, it’s been kinda getting worse all week.”

“And you didn’t say something?” Doc says, shocked.

“I thought it would get better!”

“Goodness, Bdubs,” Xisuma says. “You can’t dig into a radiation site and expect to just get better.”

“When did you first enter the site, again?”

Bdubs’s face scrunches up; his eyes still hold that glassy look to them. “Um . . . two weeks ago? I haven’t been back since, promise.”

Two weeks ago.

Beef doesn’t know much about radiation poisoning, but if Bdubs made contact with it two weeks ago, how is it that only now he’s realized something’s wrong?

“We’ll have to take him off-world,” Xisuma’s murmuring. “Get him a proper doctor.”

Doc, usually quite defensive of his doctorate, doesn’t argue. He just drags a suitcase out from under Bdubs’s bed and cracks it open, dumping out whatever he finds within. Then he takes it over to Bdubs’s wardrobe, starts throwing random articles of clothing into it.

“I’ll come with,” Beef volunteers, and Xisuma nods gratefully toward him.

Then, because Beef is not just going to come with for the day, he leaves as well, donning a pair of elytra and flying back to his own base.

By the way Doc was packing, he thought that this was going to be a long stay.

Beef will stay with him. And then he’ll bring Bdubs home, and everything will be okay.

Bdubs gets sick on day two of his hospital stay.

The staff hadn’t quite known what to do with him—they’d never had a patient with ARS, and they’d had to call in a specialist from another world. That specialist had taken one look at the hospital room—Bdubs on the bed, Beef sitting beside him, Doc pressed against the window and Xisuma taking the forefront—and had immediately ushered them all out.

“His immune system is destroyed right now,” she’d scolded, sending them to the room next door to don protective gowns and masks and gloves. “We can’t risk him getting sick.”

Bdubs had watched them go, uncharacteristically quiet.

The doctor was right. His immune system was destroyed. He wakes up with a chest cough on the second day, and by that afternoon his temperature has climbed to feverish heights.

Beef doesn’t know what to do. He isn’t sick—he quarantined for twenty-four hours and tested negative for every illness in the book, just to be able to sit with Bdubs. He’d expected it to be pretty chill—maybe he could get some drawing done, talk with his friend about any remaining plans for what was left of the season.

Now he sits further away than he would have liked, over in the seat by the window, watching as Bdubs’s chest rises and falls weakly under his hospital gown.

They’re going to intubate him soon if he doesn’t start getting more oxygen. Whatever this bug is has ravaged his lungs in the brief time he’s been ill with it, making his body even weaker and more susceptible to the radiation devastating his cells from the inside.

He doesn’t even look like himself. Bdubs’s hair is more patchy than before, what remains limp and unbrushed. His face is scruffy, bags under his eyes oily, his closed eyes fluttering now and then. The hospital gown fits loosely around him, his entire collarbone showing in an unwelcome display of vulnerability. His right arm is hooked up to a pouch of fluids and pain medication, the occasional click from the IV stand breaking the silence.

He doesn’t look a thing like how Bdubs is supposed to look. It’s like the life has been drained out of him as steadily as the IV drips into his bloodstream.

“Zedaph’s going to be jealous,” Beef says after a long moment, trying anything to make the scene less wrong.

The only sign that Bdubs has heard him is a tiny cough.

“I think he was, like, looking for radiation. And you found it on accident. He’ll probably do a Zedvancement on you when you get back.”

That gets a huff of a laugh. Bdubs doesn’t open his eyes.

Beef bites his lip. “Doing any better than this morning?”

Bdubs’s throat works. “A bit,” he rasps, voice barely there. This triggers a couple more coughs, his frame shaking.

They’re probably going to intubate him. They don’t want to, afraid that he’ll struggle to get off oxygen if they put him on it, but this is only the first day of illness and they’re already discussing it. Unless he gets better overnight, Bdubs is going to end up with a tube down his throat.

He looks so weak.

They’ve determined that he came in contact with the radioactive material about twenty-five days ago. He’s moving out of what they called the ‘latent period’, and the loss of hair means that he’s had higher exposure than they would have liked.

They said that his chance of survival is around 50%.

That is way, way too low. Probably lower with the illness that he’s caught. Beef sat in the window seat for about an hour as Bdubs napped and calculated possible percentages—with a mean of 50, if one assumed that each illness was one standard deviation below the mean, and say the standard deviation was 12—maybe even bigger—

Well, with that model, Bdubs’s chance of survival is 38%.

And with each passing hour, Beef can’t help but think that Bdubs’s score gets lower and lower.

They do end up intubating him. It helps him get through the cold that’s ravaging his system, but he’s too weak to get off supplemental oxygen afterwards. Beef is the only Hermit allowed to visit, and only dressed to the nines in PPE.

“You’ll be back in business in no time,” Scar says over a video call. Scar in particular is banned from visiting, even just to drop something off. “You’ve been lotioning your nose? That cannula will give you nosebleeds like nothing before!”

“Yeah,” Bdubs manages. “And then they don’t stop bleeding.”

His blood isn’t clotting very well. He’s had three nosebleeds so far, and every one of them has been an emergency.

The specialist doesn’t say it, but if he keeps bleeding, Bdubs’s chances of survival will keep dropping.

“When are you coming back?” asks Scar. Bdubs shrugs. His arm is getting tired of holding up the communicator, Beef can tell.

“Dunno. When the radiation runs out. And then I have to do . . . more things.”

“Bone marrow transfusions, blood transfusions,” Beef calls. He hears Scar make a humming sound.

“Sounds fun.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you need anything, let us know, okay? I’ve still got some cookies around somewhere—”

“Not Elven Surprise—”

“Oh, no, no, no, that probably wouldn’t be very nice at all! But I’ll see what I can do.”

Bdubs nods, clearly worn out, and Beef stands, taking the communicator from him and leaving the room.

He glances back into the room as he closes the door. Bdubs’s eyes are already closed, his head slumped on his shoulder.

Once he’s in the hall, Beef looks down at the screen. Scar’s face is staring up at him, naked concern painted all over it.

“He doesn’t look so good,” Scar says.

Beef shrugs. “He’s right on track for recovery.”

It’s what he’s told everybody who tried to come visit, or called. He told Ren that the doctor said it’ll be a long time, but he should be okay. He told Etho that they put him on oxygen as a caution, not a necesity. He told Doc that Bdubs spent all afternoon chattering about his next build.

He smiled and lied through his teeth to everyone, and he can and will do it again.

But Scar sighs. “I can take the truth, Beef.”

And Beef breaks down.

“He couldn’t afford to get sick,” he chokes out, his throat suddenly thick, tears already spilling from his eyes. “I—sorry, man, I don’t usually—but—before he got sick, he only had, like, a fifty percent chance—and now it’s worse—”

“Hey, hey. It’s okay.”

“He might not make it,” Beef says, ugly and raw and heartbreaking. “I don’t know what—I don’t know what to tell everyone, it shouldn’t be me here, it should be Etho or Pungence or—”

“Nobody could do it better than you,” Scar tells him. “You’ve got this, dude. We’re all here for you.”

Logically, Beef knows that’s true.

But he’s the only one here. He only sees the others briefly, when they stop by to drop off food or clothes—and even then, he doesn’t talk to them. He sees them from the opposite end of the hallway (he sometimes helps Bdubs into a wheelchair and pushes him to the door of his room just to wave at their friends, at Ren and Pearl and Xisuma or whoever else stopped by) or waves to them from the window, and that’s it.

“What do I do?” he whispers after a long moment. He grabs a tissue from the nearby nurse’s station (and the nurse gives him a sympathetic half-smile), uses it to dab at his eyes.

“Just keep trying, man. I know Bdubs appreciates it. We all do.” Scar sighs, an edge of laughter to the sound. “If I could hug you right now, I would.”

Beef chuckles wetly. “Then I’d have to put on all new plastic. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Scar smiles. “Yeah. An imaginary one, then.”

Even imaginary, Beef supposes, Scar hugs are the best.

“You’ll pull through,” Beef whispers, Bdubs’s limp hand held in his own.

He doesn’t know if he’s talking to his friend or to himself.

Bdubs has barely been conscious for the past three days. Beef has ignored every buzz of his communicator since he first took a turn for the worse, ever since he came down with another fever.

“We’ve already done two months. We can’t just give up now.”

He’s been awake for going on forty-eight hours now, but he can’t sleep.

He can’t leave Bdubs.

He doesn’t get that choice, though, as just a half hour later, Bdubs’s heart monitor starts beeping incessantly, and then there’s people flooding the room and Beef is escorted out.

Then he sits on the tile floor of the hallway and sobs into his knees.

Intubation doesn’t look good on Bdubs a second time.

Every single day is a fight.

Beef starts being honest with Xisuma, trusting him to spread the word around Hermitcraft. Bdubs isn’t doing well, but the doctors are hopeful. He got sick again. They have to take treatment slower. He’s off oxygen during the day. He’s back on it. He can’t keep food down. He was able to take a short walk today. He loves the potted plant. His scans aren’t looking good. They’re adjusting the treatment plan. He wants pictures of everyone’s builds. He slept all day. He still can’t keep food down. They’re bringing in a therapist to talk to them both.

It’s after the last message that Xisuma again suggests they take turns staying with Bdubs. Beef is resistant to the idea at first, but Bdubs’s doctor says it would be fine with proper PPE, so he relents.

He doesn’t really sleep, the nights he spends away. It isn’t right to be on Hermitcraft, his bedroom devoid of the clicking of the IV and the clunking of the heart monitor.

“We’ve got it,” Xisuma reassures him. “Rest.”

But Beef can’t do anything without thinking of Bdubs and how he isn’t here, so he continues to assume the main responsibility of being there for him, through the ups and downs and fights that follow.

Right up to the end.

“That’s the last one?”

Those are the first words out of Bdubs’s mouth when he wakes up, mumbled and half-formed, his eyes not even quite open.

“The last round of conditioning,” Beef reassures him, squeezing his arm. “Then you have the transplant next week.”

“Then we go home.”

“Then we stay a couple more weeks to make sure it works.”

“And then.” “And then we go home, yep.”

A smile quirks Bdubs’s lips. “I miss it.”

“I know, bud.”

It’s been eight months.

Eight of the most touch-and-go, harrowing months that Beef has ever endured.

“You can keep sleeping,” Beef says, releasing his grip to just pat Bdubs’s arm. “Etho’s not taking my place for another couple hours.”

It’s almost over. Just the bone marrow transplant, then an observation period, then home. Six months of recovery from the radiation poisoning, then two months of conditioning to prepare his body to receive the bone marrow transplant.

Then now.

Then home.

The doctor had been nothing short of jubilant when it became clear that Bdubs was going to pull through. She had repeatedly told Bdubs how proud she was, how he withstood the odds and came out on the other side.

It was a 25% chance of survival, in the most dire moments. Despite a couple of scares early on, everything went as well as could be hoped for—the medication, the skin graft, the conditioning. It was terrifying, and still is (there are still far too many things that can go wrong), but Beef doesn’t shoulder the weight of it alone anymore. Over the past months, every other Hermit (bar Scar) has sat with Bdubs for at least a day. When no one could take his place, they brought him food and games and called to share stories.

Beef just sat with his friend whenever he could, as he had from day one.

Just as he is now, his hand still resting on Bdubs’s arm.

Beef smiles.

Bdubs, already asleep, snores.

Just a few more weeks. Then home.

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