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wingsaway · 5 years ago

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epiphany pt two

part one // lboh masterlist // masterlist // acotar x tog // 1726 words

if you haven’t read part one, READ IT FIRST. like absolutely mandatory for this piece. TW: death, blood, surgery. i think that’s like the major shit. let the horrors commence. (this is big angst)

Something that med school and textbooks weren’t really able to cover: the sheer panic you feel inside while your patient is seconds from crashing on the table.

The OR, at times, was completely chaotic. There were surgeries when blood would literally spray out of a nicked artery, or when a patient’s body cavity was filling with blood so quickly no one could find the source of the bleeding until it was too late. There were the surgeries that the doctor shouted order after order to their staff over the machines that didn’t stop the relentless bleating. Days when the floor of the room was covered in blood-soaked towels and blue scrubs were painted red. Today was one of those days.

The monitors were screaming in panicked beeps to alert everyone that the patient on the table was crashing, when moments before the woman on the table had been talking and trying to make jokes with the surgical intern assisting on the surgery. Seconds before, everyone had let out quiet laughter in the middle of her question, something about making sure the baby had all of her fingers and toes, when her words began to slur together almost like her batteries were dying. Nesta had calmly said her name, not taking her eyes away from the baby she was maneuvering out of the womb, and then the chaos began.

There were some situations when, as a doctor, you had the gut feeling that you weren’t quite sure your patient was going to make it out alive. There were scenarios when walking into an operating room where that nagging feeling you’d had all day just got worse. When possible, when those nagging feelings were so overwhelming she couldn’t shake them, Nesta would reschedule her non-emergent surgeries. Kind of like shutting off the computer and turning it back on again, only Nesta was trying to hassle with the fates and what they had planned.

Today hadn’t been one of those days. Her patient had been in good spirits, excited to meet her baby after being in labor for several hours. When Nesta had first checked in on mom and baby, the baby had flipped and wasn’t head down anymore. The patient made jokes that she was just too comfortable and didn’t want to come out, but mama really wanted her out, and really wanted a milkshake. Nesta had smiled, booked an OR, and now two hours later that laughing woman was crashing on her table.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” Nesta mumbled to herself, working as quickly as she could to extract the baby. It took a moment, but she finally pulled her from her mother’s womb and hurriedly passed her off to a nurse and got back to work on the mother. The feeling hadn’t been there this morning, but it was certainly settling in her gut now. There was too much blood, she had no idea where it was coming from, and the mother wasn’t going to make it. Nesta knew that. She could feel it in the pits of her stomach, knew from all of her medical training that this was too much. Still, she worked to find the source of the bleeding, worked to save the woman’s life until the frantic beeping turned into a single monotonous tone. With a heavy heart and a heavy sigh, Nesta took a step back from the body and squeezed her shaking hands into fists. Losing a mother in childbirth was never easy. It didn’t happen often, but knowing Nesta had just brought a child into the world while simultaneously feeling like she’d killed the mother was the worst, sinking feeling.

Nesta lifted her eyes to the digital clock on the wall, the time glaring at her as red as the blood on her hands and said, “Time of death, 16:21. O’Malley, can you close?”

The young doctor didn’t wait for an answer, ripping her gloves off as she pushed out of the OR and into the scrub room. She scrubbed out, washing her hands until they were red and raw. Nesta wasn’t entirely sure that some of the water dripping onto her hands weren’t tears. They tried to tell you in med school not to get too attached to patients, not to let your emotions get the best of you. But when you lost a young mother on the table all bets seemed to be off. Nesta hadn’t cried over a patient in years, and this one was striking a chord deep in her gut that she couldn’t shake.

Her body went into complete and total autopilot as she walked down the halls. She waved limply to a handful of nurses and surgeons that greeted her, yet found herself unable to force her lips into a smile. The family waiting rooms were just around the corner and she had about 36 steps until she had to put on a brave face and apologize to the family.

“The baby is okay, being admitted to the NICU for treatment.” The man looked at her with wide, hopeful eyes and Nesta felt her resolve begin to crumble. “I am so sorry,” she said, the slight tremor to her voice unmistakable. “I did everything I could.” Those words were never enough. They never would be enough, and she knew that as she stood and looked into the brilliant blue eyes of the man in front of her, doing her best to detail the surgery and what went wrong. He was all too understanding and it broke her heart. Despite the tears that began to fall down his cheeks and how his voice shook when he spoke, he wove her a short tale of the woman that Nesta had taken back into surgery.

“Her husband died earlier this year in battle. He never even knew she was pregnant. It… killed her. I think when he died, the biggest part of her died, too. She was a ghost of who she was before, and I just don’t… I don’t think she could hold on without him anymore. I am going to miss her. So much. I don’t know what I’m going to do every day that I can’t call her anymore. This doesn’t even feel real… but I hope she’s with him, you know? I hope she is finally at peace. That they’re happy.” Nesta felt her heart crack open, though it had already been aching before. Aelin Whitethorn-Galathynius hadn’t always been Nesta’s patient. Nesta had simply been the on-call OBGYN at the time of her labor, and Aelin’s doctor was on vacation. Aelin wasn’t due for several more weeks, but her baby would be fine. Her baby would know unconditional love from the people in the waiting room that clutched each other and began to sob. A dark haired woman wrapped her arm around the man Nesta had been speaking to, pressing her face into his shoulder as she began to cry. Behind them, a man with dark skin and golden hair stared at the floor, tears slipping down his nose to drip on the carpet.

With one final apology, Nesta left the grieving family behind and made her way to the on-call room to try to decompress and unwind from the events of the day. She still had several hours left in her work day to get through, several hours that she knew would be consumed by the woman, her family, her lost husband, and their baby.

Everyone knew not to bother her while she was trying to sleep in the shitty little bed the hospital provided for on-call doctors dealing with long shifts. She didn’t bother locking the door and laid on her back, staring at the ceiling and trying to get herself to… not forget. Nesta didn’t want to forget. She just wanted a moment’s reprieve to breathe, to stuff her lungs with fresh air and keep the tears from falling down her temples and soaking the pillow, but it didn’t matter. So she laid in silence in a dim room on the fourth floor of the hospital and cried.

She wasn’t even sure how long she stayed like that. Before laying down, she hadn’t bothered to check her cell phone. She only had a vague idea of the time based on the Aelin’s time of death, which really told her nothing considering she wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Nesta would have continued to lay there like that, too, had her pager not startled her from an epiphany that her subconscious was doing it’s damn hardest to swallow down. A truth that she couldn’t keep ignoring and maybe didn’t want to ignore anymore, despite pretending it didn’t exist for the last two years.

It was a page from the emergency room, and Nesta shoved her feet back into her shoes and made down the hall toward the elevators. A short ride later, she was yanking her white coat on while she approached the nurses station.

“You paged?”

“Dr. Archeron, your family is in the waiting room.” The nurse barely had time to finish her sentence and Nesta was running for the doors and bursting into the ER’s waiting area, eyes frantic as they searched for her sisters. When they finally landed on Feyre and Elain, she sighed and allowed her eyes to close for a brief moment in thanks toward whatever gods might be listening before making her way toward them.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s Cassian,” Feyre said, but not at all calmly. No, in her voice, despite how hard she was clearly trying to keep it even, was worry. Fear, even.

“What about Cassian?”

Nesta felt like she couldn’t quite hear clearly when Rhys appeared at Feyre’s elbow and said: “He was in an accident.”

The world seemed to dim, all the voices and sounds of the hospital fading to almost nothing while she processed the sentence. Elain was crying, Feyre’s hands were shaking, and Rhys and Azriel looked the most disheveled she had ever seen them. Whatever had happened, Nesta knew it wasn’t good. Especially if they had hospital staff page Nesta when they couldn’t reach her any other way.

She stood frozen in the waiting room, feeling like the world was slipping out from beneath her feet, before she turned and rushed back through the doors and into the awaiting chaos.

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#well ouch #love to get hurt like this again

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