Code blue, p.4
Code Blue, page 4
She looked pained for a second. “Can you not do that?”
“Do what?”
“Treat me like a patient. I know that’s technically what I am, but I am very confused and tired and, for some reason, my brain held onto you. I know who you are. And you’re not my doctor,” she said, her eyes pleading. “Are you?”
“No,” he said. “Dr. Davies is your doctor.”
“So, you can talk to me freely, right?” she asked.
He blinked, suddenly feeling stung. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Please,” she said. “You know exactly what I mean. Just think about it. Everyone I meet wants something from me. My family and my friends are so happy to see me, but I just look at them and they look like memories. And they don’t even make me happy or sad, I just can’t connect with it. I feel like I’m looking at them through glass and it’s all distorted. And then there are the doctors and everyone around them, who are so interested in me. Just want me to get better. And I can’t even make sense of it, because as far as I know, I’m fine. I have been fine for a long time. You are the only person I’ve met since waking up who doesn’t seem to have an agenda.”
He shook his head. “You are greatly mistaken, Marie. I definitely have an agenda. First of all, this clinic belongs to me. We provide the best care for our patients that we can, but it’s not as simple as that. You are a difficult and interesting case. Some people would look at you and say that the fact that you are alive is a miracle. And I don’t know if I believe in miracles, but I think I would be inclined to agree with them.”
She laughed, a little sadly. “Please, don’t misunderstand. It’s not that I thought you didn’t want something from me. I just remember when you didn’t. And that’s enough; that’s enough for now.”
He swallowed. He couldn’t help but feel horribly sad for her, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it.
“You don’t have to do anything,” she said, as if she could read his mind. “Just sit there and talk to me. Just for fifteen minutes. I would love to feel normal again, if only for a bit.”
He looked at his watch. It was the end of his shift, and he had some time. He met her pleading gaze and tried to think of any excuse to say that he couldn’t do it, that he was busy, but ended up simply nodding instead. “Yes,” he said. “Okay. I can stay, but only for a bit.”
“Ten minutes and you’d be making my day.”
“Okay,” he said. “Ten minutes it is.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
MARIE
“Nobody has asked me what it was like,” she said, looking up at him. She was sitting up on the bed, a blanket over her legs.
She didn’t wear a hospital gown, and she hadn’t for a while. Instead, her parents had brought her sweatpants that were too big on her, and shirts that hung off her shoulders. She had gotten far too thin when she was still under, which made sense. In a way, she was getting to know her body again. She could walk and go short distances now, and her voice was slowly coming back, but she could remember the way her body had changed through her life too. She could remember her body getting slightly larger as she grew older, the way her clothes fit changing after she had the baby and managed to lose the baby weight. When she thought about that, she felt a stab in her chest. She tried not to think about Daniela.
Everything had been so real, including her love for her daughter. But her daughter didn’t exist. If these people were to be believed, her daughter had never existed. And the idea of that was far more painful than anything else, even anything to do with the coma, itself. She hadn’t told anyone about her yet. She hadn’t really told anyone about anything. She had been so caught up in trying so hard to adjust to the world around her, that she had not had time to think about what her world had been like.
But now that she did think about Daniela, she felt like sobbing. She tried to focus her gaze on Landon Parker, who was sitting next to her, dutifully visiting her every other day, as she had requested.
Because he was a doctor, and he was tangentially in charge of her, and he was not her friend. She had to remind herself of that, because it was easy to cling onto him, even though there should have been nothing to cling to.
“They’re giving you time,” he said. “They can see that you’re getting better, but that you don’t want to talk about it.”
She swallowed. “It’s not that. It’s just…”
He looked away from her. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Before I tell you, I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Is your interest academic or the actual care?”
“Both,” he said, quickly. “But if you tell me that you just want to tell me as my friend, then I won’t discuss it with anyone else. Not even members of your team.”
“You can do that?”
“Unless I think there’s something wrong, and you need immediate help, I don’t see why would. But I might encourage you to tell your doctor, all things considered. You’re not free from that.”
“Because you are a doctor,” she said. “Before you’re my friend.”
“I wouldn’t quite put it like that,” he replied, leaning forward a little bit. “But yes. Even when I am your friend, Marie, I am still a doctor. As you know, I am the doctor in charge of this clinic, so I can’t just put on my friend hat when I come in here to talk to you.”
“You should.”
He smiled, looking sincerely amused. “I wish I could. But I can’t. So, you don’t have to tell me, not if you’re not comfortable.”
She took a sip of her orange juice through a straw that she had bitten, making a loud sound when she did so. “I will tell you. But I’m not going to tell anyone else.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think they’re going to believe me.”
He waited. “Well, I’m here to listen.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re going to believe me either, but I need to get it off my chest.”
“Okay…”
“I had a whole life,” she said, shivers going down her spine. “Had a career. I had a dog; his name was Cookie. And a cat; her name was Eva. I had a house. Landon, I don’t know if you’re going to believe this, but I had a mortgage. And I worried about it.”
“Wow,” he said. “And were you always having those sort of dreams?”
She scoffed, her eyes widening. “No, you don’t understand. They weren’t dreams. You might think that they were, but I know for a fact that they weren’t. They were my life.”
“Okay,” he said, after what seemed to her like a very long pause. “Let’s say that what you’re saying is true. Do you remember what your latest or, I don’t know, I guess vision was before you woke up?”
“Yes, I remember it very clearly,” Marie said, choking up slightly. She wanted to make it clear that this was a very important and real thing, and she hated that she was getting emotional. The same time, every time she thought about her death bed, about her death, she couldn’t help but be filled with warmth. “I was an old woman; I was surrounded by my family, and it was actually really nice. I was ready to die.”
“What happened when you died?” he asked, and she could hear the hesitation in his voice as he spoke.
“I woke up in a hospital room, all these tubes and stuff coming out of me. I didn’t know where I was or how I got there, only that I was thoroughly confused. And I was so thirsty.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense,” he said. “You would have been transferred after a couple of weeks in a coma, after you weren’t showing any signs of getting better, to a long-term facility. It makes sense to me that you wouldn’t be aware of your surroundings. And as far as the thirst goes, well, you hadn’t had a drink in about a year. The saline drip kept you hydrated but your mouth was probably extremely dry.”
She stared at him.
He swallowed, as if she had just caught him doing something wrong. “I don’t know about anything else,” he said. “We don’t really know what the brain is doing when it’s in a coma.”
“Well, I don’t know what my brain is doing right now, so that works out,” she said.
He laughed. “At least your sense of humor seems to be coming back.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Dr. Davies says it all will,” she said. “But I don’t know how much I believe it.”
He nodded. “Are you seeing a psychiatrist?”
“Do I need a psychiatrist?”
“Massive trauma to the brain, living a different life? I don’t know,” he said. “If I were you, I would need a psychiatrist.”
She looked him up and down. “You were going to bring up a psychiatrist at some point anyway, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “It can be a hard adjustment to get back to your normal life, and there is no one better to assess it than a psychiatrist.”
She thought for a few seconds, then nodded. “What if they think I’m crazy?”
He smiled at her. “They are there to help.”
“That was a cop-out,” she said. “But yeah. Get a psychiatrist, I guess. And don’t pretend I have a choice, because I know I don’t. And I swear to God, Landon, if you make a joke about my cognitive function…”
He held his hands up. “I totally wasn’t,” he said, a glint in his eyes. And regardless of what he said right then, she could definitely tell that he was.
LANDON
Landon was sitting at the café next to his clinic, sipping on his second Americano, trying to make sense of all the coma accounts he was reading. He hadn’t just found peer reviewed papers. He was trying to read all accounts, personal ones, from social media sites, which he knew he had to take with a grain of salt, and those that had been compiled by other doctors and researchers. Most people who had been in comas, whether they were medically induced or not, rarely reported being able to remember anything.
In a lot of ways, Marie Parker continued to be the exception. Her prognosis hadn’t been favorable, but she had beaten the odds. For now. There was always a risk that something could go wrong, and there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Medical science was better when it came to prevention than to curing, but with a special case, like Marie’s, everything felt like it was up in the air.
And he had never, ever heard a story like hers.
He had cared for comatose patients before, certainly, but it wasn’t really part of his specialty. As a physiatrist, he was used to seeing all sorts of patients, including those who had traumatic brain injuries. But patients who had been comatose for weeks, never mind months, weren’t something that most rehabilitation doctors encountered through their tenure.
At least Landon didn’t think so.
He was still young, and he didn’t know if another case like hers was going to come to his clinic. He tried his best not to think about her as a case, because it felt like she had implored him to be her friend, and if he had said no, he would’ve felt like he was failing her.
Of course, they weren’t actually friends.
Tangentially or not, he was still the physician in charge of her recovery.
He sighed and closed his laptop. He needed to speak to Jade, but he didn’t want to break Marie’s trust. He just needed to convince Marie to let him talk to the rest of her care team and then maybe, just maybe, they would be able to provide her with the care that she deserved.
Maybe they could actually help her heal.
CHAPTER NINE
MARIE
Marie looked around the hospital room that had been her home for the last few weeks. She didn’t know exactly how long, but it felt like forever. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, and her concept of time had turned into flaming nothingness ever since she had woken up from her coma.
Her coma, she thought with a scoff. She still couldn’t help but think of it as her life. While she did remember things about her life before the coma, they felt like a dream. Every scent, every object that she owned that was supposed to bring back a sweet memory, it was all tied back to her real life.
With her husband. With her daughter.
But her husband and her daughter weren’t real people, and it scared her. She didn’t like thinking about it. She sighed, bending down to grab her bag, and looked around again. She had asked her mom for a little time by herself, and her mom had been understanding, but Marie could still hear the racket behind the door.
Her family—her real family—was excited to have her home. They were speaking over each other, laughing, and waiting for her with anticipation. She took a deep breath, trying to steel herself for what was about to happen. She tried her best to plaster a smile on her face, though she didn’t feel much like smiling.
Before she reached out to put her hand on the door handle, someone knocked on the door. “It’s me,” she heard. “Dr. Cross. Can I come in?”
“Sure,” she called out.
The door cracked open and she saw a sliver of Landon’s body.
“Hey,” he said. “Can I come in?”
“Yes,” she replied.
She could hear her family behind him, but thankfully, he walked in quickly, closing the door immediately behind him.
“I thought you had already done everything you needed to do to discharge me,” she said.
“I signed all the papers,” he said. “I’m not here to discharge you. I’m here to say good-bye.”
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t expect you to do that.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Our visits have become the highlight of my day. I don’t see why I wouldn’t come to see you.”
She smiled. “I appreciate everything you’ve all done for me,” she said. “Your specialists are amazing. I know I have a long road ahead of me, but I have some idea of how to navigate this now.”
“Well, I’m really glad we were able to help,” he said.
“They were able to help,” she replied. “You were a friend to me, and you were more than just…I really appreciate it. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. All you have to do is go home and heal. That’s all I want for you.”
“Can I give you a hug?”
She could see the hesitation in his eyes. A second later, he bowed his head.
“Yes. You can.”
She walked over to where he was, wrapping her arms around him, hugging him close. She could smell the scent of his cologne, oakwood with a hint of orange zest. He pulled away from her after putting his arms around her quickly, just for a second, then flashing her a smile.
“I won’t miss this place,” she said, quietly, more to herself than to him. “But I will miss you.”
“Not for long,” he replied. “I promise you I’ll come visit.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant it, but she really hoped that he did.
LANDON
He wanted to keep his promise, but he didn’t think it was going to be that simple. While he had promised Marie that he had seen her in his capacity as her friend, she knew what the terms of their engagement actually were. Whether she liked it or not, he was still a clinician, one of her medical providers, and he didn’t know if he could just make an exception for her.
He couldn’t just…go visit her at her house, he didn’t think, unless it was to talk about her case. He was pondering that in the break room, looking down at the pedometer on his smartwatch, when he heard footsteps approaching him.
Jade smiled at him when he picked up his head. “Hey,” she said. “Are you busy?”
“No more than usual,” he replied, then tapped his watch. “And I haven’t even gotten enough steps in, yet, today.”
“That’s going to put a real dent on how in shape you are,” she said, sitting on the other end of the sofa. “What’s on your mind? You look like you are deep in thought, and since you didn’t laugh at my hilarious joke, I expect that you are thinking about something. So, spill it.”
“You know me too well,” he replied. “It’s kind of annoying.”
“That’s what you get for hiring your med school protégé-turned-bestie,” she said. “If you are worried about money, I can probably talk to Robbie.”
“I don’t need money,” he said, a little too quickly.
Jade raised her eyebrows.
“Okay, I need a little bit of money,” he said. “But I expect we’ll be breaking even in the next year or so. If I need more help, I’ll make sure to reach out to your husband myself. I don’t feel comfortable using you as our in-between.”
“If you want to ask Robbie by yourself, you are allowed to. But I can prime him for the conversation, if you need.”
He laughed. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“So, what’s going on with you, really?”
“A patient,” he said, leaning forward and staring into the distance.
“Did you get bad news?”
“No,” he said after a while. “No, it’s all good news.”
She didn’t say anything for a second, then leaned forward slightly. “This is about Marie Parker, isn’t it?”
He glared at her.
She waved her hands in front of her body. “I mean, if it’s not, all you have to do is tell me.”
“I’m just trying to decide if it is unethical to visit her. I promised her I would, and I don’t like breaking my promises, but at the same time, I don’t want her to come to rely on me.”
“She already relies on you.”
“Yes,” he said. “And is that okay?”
She thought about it for a second. “I think it’s important that she has a friend during this journey,” she said. “Especially someone that was an acquaintance before she got into her accident.”
He licked his lips. “I guess I don’t know if I’m supposed to be that person.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know, man,” she said. “As long as you don’t sleep with her, I don’t see why that would be a problem.”
He laughed. “Yeah,” he said, trying to ignore his heart doing a flip in his chest. “I suppose that you’re right.”
