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“Hey,” Stevie pushes the door open just far enough to make her presence known, knocking lightly on the frame, “can I come in?”
Nicole blinks up at her in weary confusion for a moment, like she can’t quite put together the pieces of why Stevie is stood in front of her, but then she shakes herself, flicking strands of hair out of her eyes. “Oh uh, yes. Of course, yes.”
She doesn’t move from her chair, facing the bed filling most of the room, but Stevie hadn’t expected her to as she steps into the room and perches on the second, even less comfortable, chair, set back slightly from the first.
It’s familiar for her to consider the third person in the room, unconscious though she is, greeting lightly, “Hi Ngozi, it’s Stevie. Just here to say hello and to check on your Doctor Piper.”
Automatically, her eyes fly over the ventilator and up to the numbers flickering across the monitor. Everything is stable, still. Maybe too still. The only noise in the room is the ventilator; the soundtrack of a person who shows no sign of waking any time soon.
Assessment of Ngozi complete (as she’d expected, no change), her focus flicks to the person she’s truly here to visit. The person who, in many ways, they’re all just as worried about as they are Ngozi.
She doesn’t ask Nicole how she is (not brilliant), or when the last time she slept properly is (because then they would get into a debate about what counts as proper sleep even though it’s certainly not naps in this chair), or if she’s eaten today (Siobhan is keeping on top of that).
Besides, why would she, when it’s obvious? Obvious from the many strands of hair escaping from the bun her hair is piled haphazardly into, obvious from the bags under her eyes that are big enough to be charged as extra luggage on a cheap airline, obvious from the way she winces as she stretches out her back.
So, instead of pointing out the obvious, Stevie lets the silence linger for a while.
She observes the way Nicole doesn’t seem to want to take her eyes off Ngozi unless they’re flicking across the numbers on the monitor, notices the way that – despite never having demonstrated a particular affiliation for being physically affectionate – she doesn’t let go of Ngozi’s hand.
It paints a picture of vigilance wound so tight it’s bound to snap, of weariness, maybe even of desperation.
And – as much as she might not want to – she has to admit that Dylan had been right in his assessment that she be the person to come.
Because it’s a familiar picture, painfully familiar.
She’d been reluctant, it’s not exactly something that she finds easy to talk about, but everything about Nicole has her taking a breath and gently shattering the fragile quiet. “You know, my sister was in a permanent vegetative state.”
Nicole’s gaze snaps back to her for the first time since she’d entered the room, surprise turning into an expression that’s almost searching as the silence grows, only underlaid with that same haunting ventilator soundtrack.
Eventually, she asks, “How long?”
Stevie’s not sure if that’s the first question she’d expected but she still replies evenly, “Five years.”
Swallowing, Nicole turns back to Ngozi. And, only when her pained gaze is fixed on her unmoving face does she ask faintly, “You looked after her?”
“Partly,” she tilts her head in a sort of shrug, “she was in a care facility. I nearly left work to care for her but I decided to keep working so I could afford somewhere better for her.”
Patiently, she waits to see if Nicole is forthcoming with any sort of acknowledgment or reply but when nothing comes, she sighs softly, leaning forward on her knees.
“Look, Nicole… I’m not trying to say that I understand, okay?-“ because she doesn’t, she doesn’t know what Nicole and Ngozi had, and she knows there is a chance Ngozi will recover- “we work in an ED, it’s rare someone is with us for longer a shift. Critical patients, they either don’t make it or we get them to the team who can best help them.”
Nicole isn’t acknowledging her words but Stevie just keeps talking because she knows she’s listening from the way her shoulders are tensed, unmoving.
“We don’t always let ourselves think about the lives people live when they leave us, patients who move onto theatre or ICU or CCU and how long it is before their lives look anything close to normal again. About the consequences of our actions, about the procedures that we do as last resorts to save people despite the difficult recoveries we know we’re putting them through if we succeed.”
Rarely, they think about it. They all have patients they follow up with, occasionally even patients they go to visit on the wards. But that’s always to check they’re through the worst not… fixed. Always ‘as well as can be expected,’ never one hundred percent.
“This, this is the part that we’re not used to. The after. And the being a relative, rather than a doctor. The fraught sort of shock of the accident wears off as the reality sets in and it becomes a new normal, spending hours sat at someone’s bedside. Sitting with them, talking to them-“ hours she’d spent at Emma’s bedside, telling her all the things that she’d never been able to before, making sure she still heard about what was going on beyond the four walls she existed exclusively within- “it’s even harder when you don’t know if it’s ever going to change.”
She doesn’t know if it had been a blessing or a curse with Emma, the fact that she didn’t need to try and keep alive that hope.
Five years. Those had been the longest five years of her life. And yet they hadn’t been long enough – she would have spent her life like that if it meant Emma staying alive even if… even if it hadn’t been much of a life.
Still, it had nearly killed her too. She’d destroyed any slight personal relationships she’d had in that time, pulled away from absolutely everyone. And she’d very nearly destroyed the only other thing she’d ever truly cared about too, in the aftermath.
“You never let you guard down because you always have to be hypervigilant for that change. My sister…” she swallows around the emotion rising in her throat, forcing her voice to stay steady, if quiet, “I knew she was never going to change, that what had happened to her was permanent. I knew there was never going to be a sign of improvement but that doesn’t mean I didn’t spend every second I had looking for a sign she was getting worse.”
It had always been a fact that Emma was going to die in that bed one day.
And it will always be something that Stevie has to live with, the fact that she hadn’t been there.
Pushing down the complicated knot of emotions that always rises in her throat when she thinks about her sister for too long, she forces herself to focus back on the two people in front of her – one laying too still, the other sitting vigil at her side. “We all want her to get better. We just don’t know if there’s ever going to be any change and you can’t keep on like this forever.”
Nicole twists to face her at that, eyes almost wild like she’s panicked she’s going to be dragged from the room. “I can’t- I can’t leave her.”
“I know,” Stevie soothes plainly, almost matter of factly, “and none of us are asking or telling you to. But if this is your life now, then you can’t keep living it like this. It’s just not possible. And none of us want to see that either.”
She resolutely stares Nicole in the eye as she says it, silently daring her to try and pretend that she isn’t being deadly serious and possibly the most sincere she’s ever been with her colleague of two years.
Nicole seems to detect that sincerity and instead of point-blank rebuffing it as Stevie had almost expected her to (perhaps she senses that will only make her double-down and they’re both too stubborn to start that), she lifts an almost amused eyebrow. “Did Siobhan send you?”
There is a tiny amount of delight in her being able to correct, “Dylan, actually.”
The second eyebrow joins the first in a show of incredulous surprise. “Dylan?”
Yes, Dylan. The man who everyone assumes doesn’t see anything and so who’s emotional intelligence comes as a shock to most when fully utilised.
(Similar sentiments have been expressed about Stevie, she knows).
“Hmm,” she hums noncommittedly, “my sister, she died not long after I started working here. He was clinical lead at the time and had to… deal with the fallout,” internally, she winces, forcing her face into cooperation with a sardonic eyebrow raise, “must’ve thought I could get through to you or something.”
Gaze fixed on a point somewhere on the wall behind Stevie’s head, Nicole murmurs, “It can’t have been easy.”
“What, getting through to you?” she quips back, “nope, you’re as stubborn as they come.”
In quite a few ways (and not just the best ways) Nicole reminds her of herself. Mostly in their stubborn streak a mile long and their inability to accept that they can’t deal with absolutely everything by themselves.
“No, I mean…” Nicole shakes herself, looking back to Ngozi’s face for only a moment before shifting her focus down to their joined hands, attention carefully on lacing their fingers together, “losing your sister like that.”
It’s true that Stevie had imagined what she would be walking into – she knows enough about what her own experiences had been, the reactions of others she’s witnessed in similar situations and of Nicole herself to have an idea.
But it’s very different to the reality of seeing this person – this resilient, exhausted person – not breaking apart in front of her but already fractured.
A fragile tangle of denial, desperate vigilance and the very last dregs of hope the only things holding the pieces of herself still together.
Quietly, resolutely, she replies, “Losing anyone you’re close to is hard-” she’s preaching to the choir, she knows Nicole has lost at least one other person she was close to recently- “stuff like this, never really gets any easier. You just find ways to get through. And Piper, there are people around you who will help you get through. Ngozi has so many people looking out for her, let some look out for you too.”