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Frank finds Mel in the staircase, sitting elbow to knee and head to hands.
“Hey, I’ve been looking for you. We got the labs back on the Morrison girl. Antibody presence suggests celiac disease. They can admit her upstairs today.”
Mel lifts her head to look up at him and he stops cold. Her eyes are red and puffy. It looks like she’s been crying.
“Are you okay?”
Mel scrubs the back of a hand over her eyes. She’s holding a cold pack in the other. “I’m fine, I just need a little time.”
Frank takes a seat on the step below her so he won’t block the stairs, which has the convenient effect of putting him just below eye-level with Mel, and the less convenient effect of putting a hell of a twist through his back when he turns to look up at her.
He eyeballs her, tapping his fingers against the step, trying to walk back through the day. He knows Mel always worries when they have to involve CPS, but these results mean there’s a medical explanation other than negligence for the signs of malnutrition they spotted in their 14-month-old “stomach flu” patient this morning. And that means they don’t have to make a child protection report, so that can’t be it.
Can it?
Mel’s eyes are bright and bloodshot, and she’s blinking rapidly.
“You know, it’s okay,” he’s trying to recall the phrase Mel’s used for herself, “If you have an emotional reaction—”
“I’m not having an emotional reaction,” Mel insists, “I’m having an allergic reaction. There’s a completely different etiology, even if there might be certain similarities between bodily responses.”
Surprised, Frank laughs, although he can tell immediately that this was the wrong thing to do. Mel pulls her whole body backwards, forcing space between them.
“I’m sorry,” he says, quickly, “I’m just glad you’re okay. Although, um—”
Mel’s eyes widen impatiently, but they’re not as round as they can sometimes get, in full circles like clock faces. Probably because they’re too puffy. He checks her lips as well, but they look the same as they do usually. The redness and swelling starts and stops around her eyes. Her breathing is a little fast, but this close, in the empty stairwell, he would be able to hear if it was wheezing or laboured, and it isn’t.
This is not a crisis.
But laughing is the wrong thing to do, so Frank presses his lips together instead and squints in concentration as he tries to navigate his way to the end of his sentence.
“You do look a little frustrated?”
Mel takes a big breath in through her nose, pauses at the apex of the breath, and then lets the air out slowly through her mouth. Her shoulders visibly relax.
“I’ve had three people tell me to take a break in the last ten minutes.” Mel sighs. “So, I guess that’s frustrating. And now I’m having an emotional reaction anyway.”
She lifts her hand again to scrub at her face and Frank reaches out to stop her.
“Wait, wait, touching your face could make it worse,” he says. “Do you know what you’re reacting to?”
“Daniel’s cologne.”
Frank has no idea who Daniel is.
“The teenager in South 16,” Mel fills in. “I don’t think he meant to spray me in the face with it, but that’s what he did.”
“Ouch.” Frank winces. He managed to get hair spray in his eyes once and that was awful enough, even though he wasn’t allergic to it. “You should probably try to wash it off.”
“I did. And I washed my hands, and I flushed my eyes with saline. And I took some loratadine from the staff medicine cabinet. I even changed my shirt.”
“So," Frank summarizes, "What you’re saying is that you’ve got it under control, and you just need time.”
Which is exactly what Mel said in the first place.
“Exactly,” Mel huffs, and puts her cold pack back over one eye.
“You know, I react emotionally to things all the time?”
Mel quirks the eyebrow that isn’t covered, and waits.
This is not the kind of thing Frank would share with just anyone, but it’s something he’s had to work hard to figure out, and Mel’s always been open with him.
“That thing you just did, where you took a deep breath and just calmed down?”
“Oh. Yes. It’s a grounding technique.”
“That’s like a magic trick to me. I mean, I can explain how breathing exercises stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system and regulate oxygen levels and distract patients from anxious thought patterns. But when it’s me, I can hardly ever remember that I should just stop and take a deep breath. Never mind actually doing it.”
“It’s not always easy. It takes practice.”
“It means stopping what I’m doing and adding in another thing to do. And then doing everything in the right order. When there’s a lot going on, it just doesn’t – it doesn’t always work out.”
“That sounds frustrating.”
“Yeah,” and Frank thinks it’s okay for him to laugh at that, so he does. “I just wanted you to know it’s really cool, that you can do that.”
“Thank you.”
“I should go talk to the Morrisons. I’ll see you out there?”
“I'll see you.”
–
It’s just before 9pm that night when Frank’s phone chimes at him.
Mel’s sent him a link to an article comparing use cases for different kinds of grounding techniques.
Frank starts reading.