Chapter Text
“So… Robby’s back on the schedule tomorrow.”
The question hung between them, hovering in the air just above the centre console where Dennis’s hand was frozen on the hand break. For a split second, his grip tightened. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see how Trinity was staring at him. Expectant. Of what, he could only guess.
Dennis cleared his throat, took off the hand-break, and pulled out of their parking spot. “I saw.”
She waited a beat, perhaps expecting something more of him, before she realised nothing else was coming. She scoffed. “Is that all you’ve got to say?”
Dennis swallowed, his fingers on the steering wheel tensing. Cool air from the vents blasted against them. It would be a few minutes more before it turned hot enough to burn away the November chill that had fixed itself in place over the course of thirteen hours in the staff parking lot.
“What else is there to say?”
She laughed now. Disbelieving and surprised. He could see her shaking her head in his peripheral vision. “Wow.” She turned to look from his face to the view outside the passenger side window. She didn’t last long, turning back to him. He refused to look at the smirk on her face. “You house-sit for the man. Text him almost every day-.”
“Not every day,” Dennis couldn’t help but interrupt quietly.
“-every day,” she paused for emphasis, “and that’s your reaction to seeing him again?”
Dennis resisted the urge to bite his lip. He offered her an uncertain shrug. “We just talked,” he mumbled.
“He sent you selfies,” Trinity pointed out, “and you kicked your feet and giggled like a schoolgirl.”
Dennis instantly knew which photo she meant. A thumb half obscuring the lens and Robby’s smiling face right next to it. Dennis couldn’t even remember what state the photo had been taken in, never mind the name of the valley Robby had been memorialising. He did remember the warmth that had flooded his chest the moment the picture had downloaded properly onto the screen of his phone though.
“He sent the same pictures to Abbot,” Dennis countered; he glanced briefly at her before refocussing on the road ahead of them, “and who knows how many other people. It’s not hard to send a message en mass.”
“And you think Dr Robby knows how to do that?” Her tone dripped with sarcasm. “The man’s a fossil. When he was our age, they were probably still sending messages via passenger pigeon.”
“Can you just drop it?” Dennis said sharply, more bite in his voice than he had intended.
She sighed heavily, crossing her arms over her chest and turning towards him, and Dennis knew he’d managed to make this into a thing despite his best efforts not to.
“No. No, I don’t think I will.”
And that was the last bit of the conversation that Dennis could remember. They'd arrived home and had likely had dinner, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what they had made or who had cooked, and he knew that at some point he must have gone to bed.
The next thing he could remember with any certainty, was the crack of his head hitting the floor, and the shock of his teeth snapping together.
His head hurt.
It was an understatement, but right now it was the only thought that occupied Dennis’s mind. It was all encompassing. The kind of pain that made him freeze in place and tense, bracing against it, holding himself together until the worst of it waned and he could finally breathe again. He couldn’t help the pathetic little moan that escaped him.
“Come on - wake up, Whit.” A voice, steady and calm. A voice Dennis recognised if not for its timbre, then for its tone. Casual but controlled. Even. “I’ve barely clocked in, and you’ve already got me rushing about. And got blood on my scrubs too. Come on, man. That’s just rude.”
Dennis could only groan.
“Hey. Hey, stay with me.”
Knuckles rubbing harshly at his sternum briefly shocked Dennis back into the moment. He cringed away, arching his back to escape the sensation and glaring blearily through squinting eyes. The light didn’t make his thundering headache worse, but it certainly didn’t make it any better either.
He found himself face to face with Jack Abbot. He was on his side, the recovery position, and Abbot was carefully holding his face with gloved hands.
Abbot offered him a half smile. “There he is.”
“You want me to get Robby?”
Abbot looked up, above and over him, and snorted. “What? You think we can’t deal with a head injury and tongue lac on our own?”
And as if Abbot had summoned it into existence, Dennis was suddenly aware of the metallic taste in his mouth and the blood dribbling down his cheek onto the floor beneath him. He touched his tongue delicately to his hard palate and was distantly aware of a dull throb in the muscle, but still it was nothing in comparison to the urgent aching of his head.
God this was so embarrassing.
While the thought, errant and unwanted, filled his chest with heavy humiliation, it also soothed him. He couldn’t be that badly hurt if he’d got time to think about the damage to his reputation.
“Well, no, but… you know. It’s Whit.” Dennis closed his eyes and imagined a sheepish shrug. (It was Shen, he realised suddenly, and the picture in his head gained a half-empty Dunkin’ Donuts iced latte.) “He’ll wanna’ know.”
“And he will know,” the shadow above Dennis briefly receded, and Abbot’s voice came from further away, “but do you wanna’ tell him while Huck here’s still covered in blood, or after we’ve cleaned him up? Thank you, Vivi. Would you grab us a chair as well?”
“After. Definitely after. Hey Lena!” Dennis couldn’t help but cringe back against the sudden shout. “What you got that’s free?”
It wasn’t Lena that answered, but Dana, her voice distant and rapidly approaching. “North five’s just getting cleaned up and then it’ll be available. Why? What you got- oh shit! What the hell happened?!”
Dennis curled into himself, his hands twitching useless in front of him. He wanted to cover his head. To use his arms in defence against the onslaught of noise and light that were intrinsic to the Pitt. But he couldn’t quite make them do what he wanted them too. It was less that they didn’t work, and more that the thought to move them never quite took root the way it should have done, overridden and shouted down by the pain signals that were currently firing on all cylinders.
The shadow was back, and so was Abbot’s voice. “Hey kid, you still with me?”
“He slipped.” The statement was punctuated by the sound of a slurping straw. “Went flying. Cracked his head. Not much more to it. Considering the amount of rainwater being tracked in from the ambulance bay, I’m surprised he’s the first.”
Dana made a sound of outrage, but Dennis missed what she said in response, distracted by the sensation of someone dabbing at his face. He peeled his eyes open and felt a jolt of surprise at finding Abbot so close to him. And then he remembered and relaxed again. Right. Head injury. Tongue lac. Abbot. Shen. Now Dana too. Right.
Oh God this was just the worst.
The gauze Abbot was using to dab his face came away saturated with red and was quickly replaced with fresh white.
“Dennis?”
He flinched back against the sudden loud calling of his name. He attempted a mumbled garbled acknowledgement.
Abbot watched him with what Dennis would almost call concern now. “You with me?”
The hand on his face returned, and any intention Dennis had had of answering was instantly burnt out of his head by the bright lights that were being shone in his eyes. The grip tightened, and Dennis thought he heard a distracted, “Sorry,” but Abbot didn’t pause in his examination or relax his hold. His brow was furrowed in either concentration or worry. Dennis couldn’t quite tell which. Maybe both? Hell, he could barely see at all with the light and his pounding head.
“Did he lose consciousness?” Dana’s anxious question just about penetrated the haze of pain and muddled confusion, and Dennis found himself listening, equally interested in the answer.
“Yeah,” Shen said casually. Another slurp. “‘Bout a minute. Some of the blood is from his mouth though. Think he took a chunk out of his tongue on the way down.”
Dennis wondered vaguely if he should have been offended by how unbothered Shen sounded, but then he remembered that it was Shen, and the man approached major traumas like they were mild inconveniences. If he’d been less relaxed, Dennis might have had to start worrying.
“Good pupillary response,” Abbot called over him, finally dropping the light in his hand. Dennis should have known better than to be relieved; Abbot gave him a single firm shake. “Dennis,” he barked. “You gotta’ answer me man. Starting to make me a little worried here. Not cool. Can you hear me?”
Dennis took a deep breath and fought to ground himself. “Yeah,” he forced out through gritted teeth.
Probing fingers at the back of his head undid all his hard work. He managed a garbled shout and flinched away.
“Boggy head wound,” Abbot called out again for the benefit of what Dennis was beginning to realise was a larger audience than he’d first thought. Probing fingers headed south, poking firmly at the back of Dennis’s neck, no doubt attempting to illicit a similar pain response. “C-spine seems fine but we’ll re-check it when Whit’s more with it. Someone put in an order for a non-con head and then get on the phone to CT. The sooner the better, please and thank you!”
“I got it!”
Humiliation tried to bubble its way up his throat, but its path was blocked by how increasingly miserable Dennis was beginning to feel.
Not good. Not good at all.
“I’ll go and find Trin,” someone volunteered, but Dennis struggled to pick out who. “She’s his emergency contact.” Probably Mel. It was the sort of random, yet important bit of personal information she’d have latched onto.
Abbot sighed. “John, Crus, Nazely, go start taking hand-over from the day team. I got Whit.”
There came the grating slide of a plastic straw in a plastic lid. “Want me to run interference with Robby?”
A scoff. “You think you can?”
“Yeah. I can probably manage a good ten minutes. That enough?”
Abbot snorted. “I’ll take what I can get.” His voice became suddenly louder. “You with me, Whit?”
Dennis peeled his eyes open once again and tried his best to throw a thoroughly dirty look in the attending’s direction. “Yeah?” The irritation didn’t land. Hell, it didn’t even get out passed the gate as Dennis managed little more than a strained grunt.
“You know your name?” Abbot spoke clearly and steadily. His ‘patient’ voice. It was one Dennis had heard many times before, but never directed at him.
“Dennis,” he forced out.
“You know my name?”
“Abbot.”
“You remember what happened?”
Dennis hesitated. “I fell?” The words came out slow and thick around his increasingly swollen tongue.
Abbot’s eyebrows twitched. “And you remember that happening?”
Ah. Caught. “No?”
“Robby’s looking this way,” someone said nervously from above them, the voice managing to break through the wash of white noise that was buzzing in Dennis’s ears. He tried to look up, and just about managed to register the silhouettes of at least six different members of nervously hovering staff before his waning attention was pulled back to the attending crouched in front of him.
“Lena-,” started Dana.
“On it!”
“You know what day it is?” Abbot continued steadily as if they weren’t currently the centre of a scene in the middle of the ED, his hand resting on Dennis’s shoulder as he peered into his face.
Dennis resisted the impulse to flinch away. He’d never met a man so insanely comfortable with extended periods of eye-contact before. He hesitated again, wincing and panting against the pain and scrunching up his nose in his effort to remember. It was like wading through a tar pit, the pounding of his head causing his thoughts to catch and falter. He kept waiting for the moment it would begin to ease, when he could stop holding his breath and holding in the agony, but so far it hadn’t budged even a bit.
“No,” he admitted finally, the word little more than a punch of air that managed to break free.
“Oh, sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Dana muttered from above him, much closer than she had been before. Her hands were on him as well, he realised. Her palm, smaller than Abbot’s, was resting on his hip.
“The month and year?” Abbot tried again.
“November. Twenty-six.” Dennis swallowed on reflex, then grimaced at the feeling of his blood sliding down his throat and settling heavily in his belly. His stomach churned unhappily, and he forced himself to breathe through it.
He would not be sick in front of these people. He would not!
At his back, Dana let out a soft sigh of relief.
“Okay, good,” Abbot responded. “It’s the twelfth. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Dennis, still breathing carefully through his nose to stave off the building nausea, relaxed too. He hadn’t forgotten years of his life. That was good at least. Then his head pounded, and he tensed again. His back was beginning to ache, protesting either the fall itself, or the way Dennis had managed to involuntarily engage almost every muscle in his body.
“Driving home yesterday,” he muttered.
Abbot’s hand on his shoulder patted him reassuringly. “Your head hurt?”
“Yeah.” Dennis couldn’t find it in him to be embarrassed by the whimper that accompanied his answer. That couldn’t be good. “Really fuckin’ hurts.”
“Any dizziness?”
“Uh hu.”
“Okay. Headache. Dizziness. Boggy scalp. Retrograde amnesia. Could be w-.”
But suddenly, no amount of careful breathing was enough. The nausea that had been rapidly building in Dennis’s throat was there, insistent and unavoidable. Saliva filled his mouth and Dennis’s eyes flew open in his panic. “I’m gonna’ be sick,” he gasped out, struggling to sit up. “I’m gonna’ be-.”
He didn’t manage to finish his sentence. Hands on his shoulders wouldn’t let him sit up, but someone did very helpfully press an emesis bag to his face, saving him from lying in his own blood and vomit both. A gentle hand rubbed soothingly at his back, and a distant part of him felt a pang of longing at the motherly gesture.
Over the sound of him retching, he heard Abbot muttering to himself. “Well, I suppose I was asking for that…. There you go kid. Let it out. Will someone put in an order for ondansetron? And IV Tylenol?”
“We need to get him off the floor,” Dana said quietly over him. Dennis felt her hand briefly brush over his hair, carefully avoiding the back of his head. “Unless you want Robby losin’ his goddamn mind over a member of staff collapsed and vomitin’ in front of the ambulance bay?”
Abbot made a dismissive sound. “It’s Whit. He’s gonna’ lose his mind anyway.”
Dennis should probably have felt some kind of way about Abbot and Dana talking over him like he couldn’t hear them, but it was difficult to care about anything much at all beyond the thundering headache pressing behind his eyes. It was enough that he could almost entirely forget the aching of his poor, bitten tongue, and the stinging of the open wound at the back of his head.
He tried to make a grateful sound when the emesis bag was removed, and he was no longer being forced to inhale the scent of his own acidic vomit and the re-heated tomato pasta he’d eaten only an hour earlier. It had tasted almost exactly the same coming back up and he knew, with a pang of mournful regret, that he’d never be able to eat it again.
A shame. It had been one of his favourite recipes.
“Still feeling sick, kid?”
Eyes closed, panting faintly, Dennis nodded shakily.
“Okay, I’ll rephrase: do you feel like you’re about to vomit imminently?”
“No,” Dennis groaned out, hoping it was true.
The heavy hand on his shoulder gave an approving pat. “Okay, good. Think you can stand? I'd rather not treat you down here; it’s murder on my knees.”
Eyes still shut, Dennis answered carefully. “Yeah. Yeah.”
He felt as if he was frozen in anticipation, waiting expectantly for either time or his careful breathing to interrupt the awful thudding in his head. No matter how long he waited, or how he held his breath, or how he breathed through it, the pain never abated though, constant and oppressive and inescapable. Was this the worst pain he’d ever experienced? It was hard to tell when the throbbing made it difficult to think about anything beyond it. If it wasn’t, it was surely a close second.
Minutes must have passed by now. Surely the pain should have started to draw back a little? Instead, it only seemed to thunder on and on, never giving him a moment to catch his breath. Adrenalin had his heart pounding and his palms sweating. If he was sick again, it would be impossible to tell if it was because of the head injury itself, or because of the pain.
He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.
“Okay then. Can you do that now?”
Dennis flinched at the loud question, squinting up at Abbot’s intense expression. “Wha’?”
“You said you could stand, but you’re not actually moving brother,” Abbot pointed out. “You need some help?”
Dennis found himself stuck on the question. Stand. Could he stand? Probably not, but the embarrassment of just lying there all helpless had his arms finally trying to gather themselves under him.
“Hmm. Okay. Hey Vivi! Could we upgrade that chair to a gurney?”
Dennis managed to lift his chest perhaps two inches before he gave up, slumping back to the floor. “I’m never gonna’ live this down, am I?” he muttered to the cold floor mushed up against his face.
Abbot’s hand on his shoulder offered him a comforting pat and light shake. “Oh, I dunno’ man. You might get away with it if we find something really wrong with you. A subarach maybe. I think that would probably get you a good six months’ worth of sympathy. Might even get you off working Christmas this year.”
A flash of fear deep in his stomach briefly distracted Dennis from his aching head. He turned his neck to meet Abbot’s gaze with a single squinting eye. “You think I might have a subarachnoid?”
The rolled eyes and disbelieving scoff he’d been hoping for never came.
Abbot’s expression tightened and he shrugged. “Let’s hope not.”
“You want a scoop, too?” Dana’s low worried voice cut between them.
Dennis groaned, memories of hard plastic pinching the skin on his back during his manual handling training flashing to the forefront of his mind. “Not the scoop.”
Now Abbot scoffed. “Scoop’s for strangers. Family and friends get the princess treatment. Whit can’t weigh much more than one fifty. We got this. Donnie, we good?”
“Yeah, man.” A new face loomed into view. Kind, familiar eyes and a reassuring half smirk. “Hey Whit - you ready to get up?”
Dennis let out a noncommittal hum. “Dunno’. Quite enjoyin’ the floor life.”
Donnie chuckled above him, his arm hooking under Dennis’s armpit on one side while Abbot took the other. “Oh, man’s got jokes now! You ready?”
Dennis grunted.
“Okay, on three!”
Dennis tried his best not to be a helpless deadweight, but he didn’t manage much more than uselessly scrambling his feet as Donnie and Abbot hauled him up. He’d been joking about enjoying his time on the floor, but now that he was upright and perched awkwardly on the edge of a gurney, Dennis instantly missed it.
Upright (barely) and leaning heavily against Dr Abbot’s bracing hands on his shoulders, the spinning and throbbing of Dennis’s head intensified, his stomach cramped threateningly, and the previously mostly inoffensive brightness in the Pitt suddenly felt like the sun itself was trying to burn out his retinas.
Wobbling threateningly, Dennis forced out, “I think I need a bag.”
Abbot answered quickly. “You gonna’ be sick again, Den?”
Den? Well, if Dennis wasn’t worried he was secretly dying before, he was now.
“Don’t think so.” Dennis rubbed a trembling hand down his face, grimacing at the blood that came away from his chin. “Jus’… nauseous. Really nauseous. Jus’ need a bag… jus’ in case. Emotional support bag.”
“Well. I’d say we don’t charge for ‘em,” Dana said, her sudden appearance making Dennis flinch as she pressed a fresh emesis bag into his hands, “but we definitely do.” Her fingers came up to cradle his head and she let out a low hiss. “Shit kid - the back of your head! That’s gonna’ need some serious stitches.”
“What the hell happened?!”
With the emesis bag clutched to his chest like a comfort blanket, Dennis looked up, through the small circle of concerned colleagues around him, and towards the central nurse’s station where a sheepish Shen was trailing behind a rapidly approaching Al-Hashimi and Robby. Robby’s eyes were wide with shock. Dennis had expected a slightly warmer expression from the man the first time they saw one another after three months.
“Dr Robby.” Dennis hadn’t meant to say his name, but it had escaped anyway. Dennis frowned, cataloguing the changes in his appearance that hadn’t quite translated through the selfies he’d received. “Your hair’s longer.”
Robby’s stride faltered. Dennis didn’t miss the look he shot in Abbot’s direction.
“Boggy head wound, dizziness, vomiting, a killer headache, and retrograde amnesia. Oh, and a tongue lac. Haven’t had chance to look at that yet though.”
As had apparently become his habit, Abbot patted his shoulder and gave him a gentle comforting shake. Dennis could practically hear him saying, ‘You can fit so many symptoms in this bad boy!’.
The faintly hysterical giggle that threatened in Dennis’s throat was forced back down by a sudden resurgence of nausea. He didn’t even have it in him to be embarrassed by the tears that were streaming out of the corner of his eyes, half from the strain of vomiting, half from the intensified throbbing of his head.
“Oh kid,” Dana muttered sympathetically beside him, rubbing his back while he retched and heaved, though there wasn’t much pasta left to come back up.
“Last thing Whit remembers is going home yesterday,” Abbot continued, readjusting his stance to support Dennis’s weight more securely.
“What happened?” Al-Hashimi said, serious and concerned. Another small hand joined Dana’s on his back.
“Man v puddle,” Shen quipped. “The puddle won,” he added helpfully.
“Fuck you,” Dennis groaned, his eyes screwed shut, his face still half buried in his emesis bag. He let out a protesting whimper when he felt someone trying to pull it from his hands.
Dana spoke softly in his ear. “I’m just giving you a fresh one, okay honey?” Reluctantly, he loosened his grip. “I knew something like this would happen,” she continued more heatedly, leaning back from him. “I counted at least seven people who’ve slipped in front of that ambulance bay today. We’re lucky that Whitaker’s the only one who’s gotten hurt!”
Fingers perched themselves on his head and, quite rudely in his opinion, delicately lifted his left eyelid to shine yet another light in his face.
Dennis recoiled. “For fucks sake!” he snapped, agitation creeping up on him. “Could you stop shining lights in my fucking eyes?!”
There was a brief moment of silence, then: “I think we can add irritability to our list of symptoms,” Abbot said flatly.
You’d be irritable too if you’d just smacked your head off the floor and near enough bitten your tongue off and people kept shining lights in your fucking eyes, Dennis thought furiously to himself as he reluctantly froze in place to let an insistent Robby peer at his pupils.
“I mean, yeah, I’d probably be pretty pissy,” Abbot agreed easily and unexpectedly; Dennis hadn’t realised he’d said anything out loud, “but this is you we’re talking about, man. You might be the most even tempered, patient guy I know. Hell, I’m surprised you’re not currently apologising for getting hurt and trying to persuade us all you’re totally fine. You’re both a consummate gentleman, and an enormous martyr. I’m not saying this reaction is unreasonable, but it sure as shit ain’t you.”
Dennis couldn’t think of a single thing to say in defence against that, and so he settled for rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes as if he could massage the pain away through his eyeballs. Hands on his wrists pressed his hands down. Dennis opened his eyes reluctantly and didn’t bother suppressing the glare he could feel threatening.
In front of him, their heads hovering close together and looking more unified than Dennis had ever seen them before, Al-Hashimi and Robby were peering intently into his face.
“I know it hurts, but please stay still Dennis,” Al-Hashimi said in her most soothing voice. Credit where it was due, she did have an especially calming bedside manner.
A smile flickered briefly in the corner of her mouth, while Abbot’s hand on the back of his neck stopped him from cringing away again as lights flashed in and out of his vision.
“What’s your pain looking like?” asked Robby, his tone carefully professional and level, but Dennis had spent long enough studying Robby’s body language that he could interpret it even while he was (maybe) in the middle of an intracranial haemorrhage. Robby was worried. “Out of ten? Or mild, moderate, severe will do,” he added when Dennis took too long to answer.
“Severe,” Dennis forced out, blinking rapidly to try and clear his vision and still the spinning of his head. “Definitely severe. Fuck,” he choked, “I- I’ve never been in this much pain before. I’ve broken bones, dislocated joints, h-had concussions. Nothing like this.”
Abbot let out a grunt. “You know, I think maybe you were right, Whit. I’m not sure you’re made for the vertical life right now.”
They didn’t bother asking him to try and lie down. Hands simply grabbed his feet and swept him up and onto the gurney properly. No one tried to take his sick bag away though, and for that Dennis was grateful. Someone did try and peer into his mouth. They were lucky not to lose a finger as Dennis wrenched his head back and smacked their hand away.
“North five’s free now!” someone called helpfully.
“What the shit?!”
Oh. Trinity.
The ball of anxiety and stress and fear and anger that had been gradually gathering in Dennis’s chest loosened the smallest amount. Trinity was there. He was hit by the sudden, overwhelming need to see her. And as if she had heard him, she was suddenly there, marching next to the gurney and staring down at him in horror.
“What the fuck happened to you?!” she cried, bewildered.
“Trin.” Dennis screwed his eyes shut tight to fight back against the sudden emotion he could hear in his own voice. The urge to cry was almost as strong as the urge to tell whoever was inspecting his scalp to fuck off. “Hit my head. Hurts. Everything hurts. Dizzy. Feel sick. Just wanna’ go home.”
“Just bear with us, Dennis.” Al-Hashimi. Voice clear and firm. He could imagine her curls bouncing as she marched next to the gurney. “We’re going to do something about all of that. Just bear with us. We’ve got you.” The sound around them turned dull and distant. Even with his eyes closed Dennis could recognise the moment they entered an examination room and left the rest of the Pitt behind. “Let’s get some monitoring on please.”
“I’m fine,” Dennis muttered under his breath, unresisting as a blood pressure cuff was wrapped around his upper arm and a pulse ox was clipped to his finger. “Don’t need monitoring. Just… just need this headache to stop. Please- please make it stop….” His eyes still shut, Dennis heard the disapproving click of a tongue.
“Come on now Whit, you know better than that.” Robby. Still teaching, even when Dennis himself was the patient. Classic. “Well, what’s the saying? Every day’s a school day. Head injuries are no joke. Patients can deteriorate quickly. We’ve gotta’ keep an eye on you.”
“He’s tachy - one twenty five.” Dana called out. “Blood pressure’s a little high as well, but nothing too concerning right now. Sats are ninety-six.”
“What do you think, Doctor Whitaker?”
Dennis forced himself to squint through his lashes. Robby was staring down at him, arms crossed over his chest, gnawing at his bottom lip while he waited for Dennis’s answer.
Dennis swallowed back a wave of nausea and struggled to form a coherent sentence. “Tachy and blood pressure are probably from the pain,” he forced out. “Should keep an eye on… on the sats though. Low for me. Could be… be because of a bleed or somethin’. Or aspiration. I did vomit,” Dennis found himself admitting, feeling almost guilty. “And the blood too.”
Robby gave a single deep nod and pulled his stethoscope from his neck, slotting it into his ears. “I concur.” He didn’t look overly pleased though. “I mean, you’re currently bleeding in my ED, Whit.” He shrugged and managed a tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes as he leant closer; Dana helpfully pulled Dennis’s scrub top up and out the way. “What did you expect?”
Dennis almost laughed. Almost. He was interrupted by the gag that arrived suddenly at his throat. Thank God for sick bags. Someone very kindly dabbed his chin clean when he finally collapsed back against the gurney and caught his breath, his eyes closed, and his head tipped back.
Apparently satisfied that he wasn’t about to be sick again, Robby was back, pressing the cold bell of the stethoscope to either side of Dennis’s chest. “Good breath sounds bilaterally.” He dropped his stethoscope and helpfully pulled Dennis’s scrub top back down again. “Nothing of any concern.”
“Let’s get the Neuro attending on-call on the phone please,” Al-Hashimi called out. “Donnie, if you would. Then finish up and head home. And see if you can’t persuade your day shift colleagues to leave as well, especially the ones working tomorrow. We’ve got this.”
“Are you sure-?”
“I’m sure.” Her voice turned soft, but Dennis heard her anyway. “I think it’s likely that Dennis will still be here with us come tomorrow morning, and I’d like for the people looking after him to be at their best; wouldn’t you?”
Dennis felt Trinity’s hand work its way around his, first just one, and then the other until his right hand was clasped tightly between her own pair. Dennis never thought he’d be the sort of person who’d want his hand held in the middle of a medical emergency. Not when his father had gone to such pains to beat such things out of him.
“Hey,” Trinity said sharply, her hands squeezing around his. “Enough. Who gives a shit what that old fart thinks about anything? He’s gonna’ die miserable and alone in some shitty state-run nursing home while you’re busy living your best life working fifteen-hour shifts in the ED being vomited and bled on.”
“I’m doin’ the bleedin’ and vomitin’ this time,” Dennis muttered, letting out a shuddering breath at a particularly sharp throb.
“Yeah, well, I suppose it’s about time someone changed their scrubs because of you for a change.”
A distant part of him thought he should probably let someone know how his awareness of the situation was starting to slip away. His therapist had said it was his body’s way of protecting him from the things he couldn’t cope with, and this? This inescapable thundering in his head? This didn’t feel like something he could cope with, not for much longer.
Trinity squeezed his hand as if she was trying to get his attention, but rather than a brief polite increase in pressure, her grip tightened and tightened, more and more, until it was bordering on painful. Until the bones of his hands were grinding together and the edges of her short nails were digging into him. And then a soft palm slid up to hold his wrist just as firmly, pinning him in place.
“What the fuck?” Dennis murmured in confusion, his eyes still shut. He tried to tug himself away experimentally, but she fought against him, holding him firmly. “What… what are you doing?”
“You need to stay still, Huck,” Trinity said, her voice thick. “If we’re gonna’ help you, we need to get some IV’s in you. For pain relief. Anti-nausea. Stuff to make you feel better. But we can’t do that if you keep fighting us. We just want to help.”
“What? I’m not….” Dennis pulled on his arm again. “I don’t… I don’t… what…. Stop. Stop! You’re- you’re hurting me!”
“Dennis.” A voice, older and rougher, made him flinch at its sudden volume. “Dennis, you need to stay still. I know it hurts. I know. I’m sorry. But I promise you, we are trying to help you.”
Robby, Dennis realised. The sound of his voice was enough to startle Dennis into opening his eyes. At some point, while Dennis had been lost in his own misery and pain, he had been surrounded. Al-Hashimi was at his feet pacing back and forth while she spoke quietly but urgently into a phone. Robby and Trinity were on his right, and on his left, Abbot was pinning his wrist to the gurney while Dana, her expression intense and serious, secured a cannula at his inner elbow.
Abbot spotted him looking and flashed him a grim smile. “There he is again. Back with us?” Dennis didn’t know how to answer that. He didn’t realise he’d been gone. “Yeah, brother. We lost you to the inside of you head for a little bit there. Thought we were trying to hurt you. You’re okay though. We’ve got you.” Abbot didn’t relax his grip. Dennis didn’t blame him. Part of him still wanted to snatch his arm back. “Thanks for the heads up, brother.”
Dennis turned sluggishly to look at his opposite side. A red eyed but carefully tear free Trinity was holding his other hand firmly in place while Robby hunched over him, his glasses perched on the end of his nose as he taped down the cannula he’d placed in Dennis’s forearm. He was going to hurt his back standing like that, especially at his age.
Trinity let out a wet, startled laugh, while Robby rolled his eyes and, with a flourish, freed Dennis’s upper arm from the blue tourniquet that had been cutting off his circulation. He offered Dennis a tired, forced smile. “You’re doing terrible things to my ego today, Den,” he said mildly. He leant closer and reached for Dennis’s temples. Dennis couldn’t help but close his eyes while Robby manipulated him, tipping his chin down to inspect the back of his head. He let out a low hiss. “Can’t half-ass anything, can you?”
Dennis hummed vaguely, preoccupied by the soothing weight of Robby’s fingertips against his skull. He’d heard migraine sufferers say that pressure on their heads sometimes helped. Maybe this was the same thing?
The light grip on his head became gradually firmer.
“That better?” Robby said from above him.
Dennis let out a small sigh. “Yeah.”
Abbot chuckled softy. “Yeah, well, I know something that will help even more.” Dennis felt the cold whoosh of his cannula being flushed. “Drugs. Good ones.”
Trinity hummed sceptically. “Not that good. He’s got a head injury but he’s still a doctor. No one’s ever come into the ED drug seeking for Tylenol.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure that Dennis would prefer we didn’t risk respiratory depression unless we absolutely have to. Especially with those sats.”
“Give me the pain meds,” Dennis bit out through clenched teeth, the minute relief that he’d gained from the press of Robby’s fingers burning out faster than he’d anticipated. “I’ll take the respiratory depression. Hell, I’ll take an ET tube if it means this pain goes the fuck away.”
“Let’s see where the Tylenol gets us,” Abbot said soothingly. “Okay Dennis? I’m sorry it hurts, I am, but you know we’ve gotta’ be careful with this. The moment we rule out a bleed, I promise we’ll give you all the good stuff. That sound okay? Dennis?” Dennis. He wasn’t sure he’d heard anyone in this hospital say his name quite as much as this before. “Well. Like you said: it is your name. We should get to use it at some point, don’t you think?”
Robby released his head, and Dennis looked up at him through hooded eyes. Huh. His hair was longer than Dennis remembered it being.
Robby gave him a peculiar look. “Yes, you’ve said. Does it really look that bad?”
“No,” Dennis said at the same moment that Abbot and Trinity said, “Yes.”
It wasn’t bad, but it did disguise Robby’s true hairline in a way that Dennis wasn’t overly fond of.
Robby threw his hands up in disbelief and then shook a threatening finger in Dennis’s direction. “Let’s see what happens to those curls when you’re pushing fifty.”
There were soft chuckles all around him, but Dennis didn’t quite believe them. He’d worked at PTMC long enough to know when humour was being used to obscure fear.
Their brief moment of shared levity was interrupted by Al-Hashimi clapping her hands together. “Right,” she began firmly, “CT say they’ll have a slot of us in half an hour, and Neuro are prepared to consult the moment the scan is done. In the meantime, I suggest we stitch up that scalp and, if we have time, assess the tongue lac.”
Robby nodded tersely, his hands on his hips. “Sounds like a plan.”
Huh. Strange. It wasn’t like Robby to let someone else take the lead so easily.
Robby sighed and dropped his head back, murmuring, “Lord give me strength,” before addressing Dennis with a false ease in his voice. “Well, as Doctor Al-Hashimi has quite rightly assessed, I’m somewhat lacking in objectivity when it comes to you. And so, she’s taking charge on this one.” Robby got wordy when he was worried. “Sweet Jesus but I hope your filter comes back online soon. I’m not sure I can take many more home truths tonight.” Yeah. He’d had a reputation for being too honest when he was a kid too. His father had tried to beat that out of him as well. “Okay, right. I think I might be about to cross some state lines to commit crime.”
“I’ll come with you,” Trinity volunteered fiercely.
“At this point, we might as well make it a departmental field trip,” Al-Hashimi said lightly, her easy smile turning tight and unhappy. “But in the meantime, let’s get some sutures on board, shall we?”
“Staples should get the job done,” Abbot murmured. “It’s straight enough.”
“It won’t interfere with the CT too much will it?” Trinity asked anxiously.
“It will be fine,” Al-Hashimi answered soothingly.
“When it comes to density, thick skull beats tiny metal staple,” Robby said with a light joke in his voice.
Was Robby saying he had a thick skull?
Robby snorted. “Of course that’s what you took away from that. Come on. Let’s get you comfortable. On your side will probably be best.”
Dennis tried to help, lying back with the gurney as it was flattened out and turning over to face Trinity so that Abbot could see the back of his head, but in reality, he managed little more than going just limp enough that they could manipulate him with minimal effort. Trinity kept a hold of his hands, clutching them tightly in front of his face as if she was worried he might try and lash out.
“From what’s been said already, I can infer this is a touchy subject,” Al-Hashimi started slowly, “but do we need to consider contacting his next of kin?”
“No,” Trinity said fiercely at once. “Absolutely not.”
Dennis jumped and hissed at a sudden sharp sting in the back of his head. The local. Dennis was sure someone would have warned him it was coming. He must not have heard them. Or maybe he’d… what was it Abbot had said? Gotten lost inside his own head. It made Dennis wonder where he sat on the scale of a physiological consequence of whatever was going on in his brain, and a psychological reaction to the pain. He hadn’t had need to dissociate in a long time. It worried him a little how easily it had come back to him.
Robby sighed. “We don’t know what we’re going to find when we scan him, Santos. He could have an enormous epidural haematoma. Lifesaving surgery we can perform on a basis of implied consent, but beyond that-.” Robby suddenly stopped talking, his voice sticking in his throat.
“No,” Trinity repeated harshly. “I have medical power of attorney for him. Do not contact his family.”
Feeling the thin mattress moving under him, he forced himself to focus. In front of him, her chin resting on their joined hands and the tip of her nose inches from his own, Trinity tried to smooth her expression into a reassuring smile. He tried to smile back. He doubted either of them had convinced the other.
“You do?”
Dennis was lucid enough still to recognise Robby’s palpable relief. He was also lucid enough to know that this lucidity wouldn’t last.
In between the stinging and the tugging and the sharp snap of the stapler against his head, Dennis drifted. Or he tried to. He never managed more than a minute or two before someone was shaking his shoulder or calling his name. He could feel agitation seeping in again. He tried to reason with himself. They were just helping him. They had to reassess him at regular intervals, especially as they didn’t quite know exactly what was wrong with him. Rationality mattered less and less though with every tug of his scalp and clack of the stapler against his head.
He- he couldn’t do this. It was torture. It was more than pain now. It was the panic that it wasn’t getting any better. That this was it. Seconds felt like dragging hours of aching, throbbing, misery. Every snap of the stapler was like a pickaxe to the back of his head, chip chip chipping away at his barriers.
“Heart rate spiking!” Dana interrupted them sharply.
“Dennis?” Trinity’s nose was suddenly right next to his once more. “Huckleberry? What’s wrong?”
“Hurts. It fucking hurts!! Fu-fuck. Fuck. Make it stop- please just make it stop!!”
“Hey, hey, calm down. Breathe, just breathe. In and out with me, come on.” Hands were on his wrists again, tight and incessant. “We’ve got you. We’ve all got you. I know you’re scared right now. I know you just want the pain to go away. I know you just want to go home. But for any of that happen, we have to get this scan Den.” Scan? “They won’t scan you if you keep moving.” What scan? “Something stupid about not wanting to over irradiate your brain, which is a valid concern, I guess. It’s not like you have many brain cells to spare.” There was a wet laugh and an even wetter sniff. “And nobody wants to sedate you; you could end up on a ventilator if they push you too far. So please - please - please stay still Huckleberry.”
It took a long moment for Trinity’s words to penetrate the fog in his mind, the one that was mostly of his own making, because the throbbing bruise at the back of his head hadn’t been kind enough to grant him a more lasting unconsciousness. What… what was she talking about?
As awareness returned to him though, Dennis realised that the gurney beneath him didn’t feel quite the same. It was harder and colder, making his shoulder and arm ache beneath him. And the room sounded different. The echo of a large open space and the humming and whirring of what must have been an enormous air conditioning unit. Except that it was right beside his head, right in his ear, as if someone had parked his entire head inside it.
And his head- oh, his head. Relief crashed through him. The pain was still there, but it was as if someone had thrown a heavy blanket over it, muting it just enough that the rest of him could function despite it. That blanket didn’t just numb the pain though. It left him feeling weighed down. Lethargic. Slow. He knew what this was.
“You gave me morphine?” The words came out thick and slow and, finally, Dennis could open his eyes.
He recognised this room, though he’d never experienced it in this orientation before. The emergency CT scanning room was frighteningly open and bare from the perspective of the scanning table itself. Dennis was still on his side, a moulded pillow under his head, and Trinity was still in front of him, crouched down low with his hands held tightly in hers. Standing a little distance away from them was a short, blonde CT tech that Dennis vaguely recognised, and next to her was Robby and Abbot.
Robby was staring intently at something at the foot end of the scanning couch, his arms crossed tightly across his chest in a posture that screamed of a man who was seconds away from shouting at anyone and everyone. Next to him, Abbot was visibly calmer. There was something self-assured and confident about the line of his mouth. As if everything was going according to a plan that only he was aware of.
“What happened… to being worried about respiratory depression?” Dennis muttered, his gaze falling back on Trinity. He wrinkled his nose against the discomfort of the nasal cannula that was blasting cold oxygen directly up his nostrils. He’d take it over the pounding of his head any day though.
Trinity, whose hair never looked great at the end of a shift, looked positively wild right now. The flash of relief in her eyes turned conspiratorial. They flicked to her left, as if she was checking that no one was standing too closely to them, before they returned to Dennis. She leant closer and spoke in a quiet murmur that was all but completely masked by the whirring of the CT scanner right next to them.
“It was Abbot’s idea. He thought that maybe you… you know… freaking out and getting combative was because of the pain. Said about the physiological and psychological impact of extreme pain on the body.” Here she hesitated, before rushing onwards very quickly. “Said some stuff about you obviously having a past and that maybe this was dredging it all back up for you. He wanted to try you out on some morphine and see what happened, but Robby was fully against it; didn’t want to risk you stopping breathing. And then Abbot pointed out that if it came to that we could intubate you. I honestly thought Robby was about to punch him in the face. Al-Hashimi had the deciding vote; she agreed with Abbot.”
Dennis hummed under his breath, closing his eyes sleepily. He gave into it for just a moment before forcing them open again. “Is that why Dr Abbot looks so smug?”
She flashed him a shaky smirk. “Yeah, probably.”
“Where’s Al-Hashimi?”
Trinity glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the enormous lead glass window that shielded the control room. Following her gaze, Dennis easily spotted Al-Hashimi where she was rocking lightly from side to side with her arms crossed over her chest while she conversed with the other occupants of the room.
“She said she didn’t want to crowd you,” Trinity said quietly, turning back to him. “We’ve been hoping that you would… calm down. You’ve been moving too much for them to scan.”
“Oh,” Dennis said stupidly. A large yawn split his mouth open wide and he tried to speak through it. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. It’s okay.” Trinity stroked his head, the movement awkward and unnatural. Like petting a dog. “Hey!” she scoffed. “I’m trying to be comforting here! Give me a break…. Do you uh… think maybe we could try and scan you now? So we can figure out what’s going on inside that head of yours? Now that your pain’s a bit better? How is your pain?”
“I dunno’… like… like a seven maybe?”
“A seven?” Trinity said anxiously.
“You need more pain relief, brother?” Abbot interrupted, Trinity’s concerned bark apparently carrying over the sound of the whirring scanner.
Dennis waved him away. “No… no it’s fine. I can cope with a seven. Do the scan. I’ll stay still.”
Trinity squeezed his fingers. “Okay… okay, if you’re sure. You gotta’ stay still though, okay? Do you need him to roll onto his back?” she said, addressing the CT tech.
“Oh no,” the tech said quickly, a reassuring smile on her face. “We can scan him on his side.”
As eager as she had been only moments ago to scan him, Trinity seemed to struggle with actually letting him go. She petted him twice more awkwardly on the top of his head before finally being steered away by a patient Abbot, following after Robby who had marched away the moment it was clear they were actually going to scan him. Dennis watched as he came to stop at Al-Hashimi’s side where he returned to standing with his arms crossed. Dennis could see the anxiety rippling off him even through the lead screen.
They briefly locked eyes on one another, before their line of sight was interrupted by the sweetly smiling tech.
“Just stay still, okay Dr Whitaker? It’s going to sound a bit like a plane taking off, but that’s it. We’ll be done in just a few minutes.”
The last thing he saw before his field of vision was completely taken up by the inside of the CT scanner gantry was her gentle, reassuring smile.
Now alone, with only the whirring machine for company, Dennis tried to take stock of himself. Where before that task had been made difficult by the sharp, piercing, inescapable agony of the inside of his own head shouting over the top of every other thought and feeling, now he had to contend with the morphine.
He doubted they’d given him much at all. Just enough to dull the blade scraping along the inside of his skull. It was enough to dull him as well though. Thoughts came thick and stupid, boiled down to their base components and losing any nuance on their journey to becoming something for him to consciously digest. In the end, they gathered themselves all together into one, simple thought.
This was weird.
Being on the other side of things. Having his colleagues fussing over him. Having a nasal cannula up his nose, a blood pressure cuff on his arm, a pulse ox on his finger. Being on the CT scanner, in the scanning room, rather than watching through the window of the control room. It was weird. He didn’t like it.
The thought came with a brief thrill of adrenalin. It was there and then gone again in a moment, just long enough to make his heart pound in his chest before he calmed himself down.
“You okay there Huck?”
For a split second, Dennis was perplexed by the way Trinity’s voice seemed to boom out from the room’s very walls. And then he remembered that the scanner had a microphone and a speaker in it.
He let out a sigh of relief and answered her tiredly. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m good.”
“You sure? Your heart rate spiked for a second.”
Heart rate? Did he- oh. He did have EKG monitoring on. Suddenly the only thing he could feel was the electrodes attached to him. Made sense. What with the morphine and all. Dennis wondered if Robby had had to be talked down from twelves leads to five.
“Oh,” Dennis said stupidly. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just feelin’ sorry for myself.”
“I think you might be entitled to, just this once though.”
Dennis chuckled softly to himself at her attempt at light teasing.
“We’re nearly done. They’re just planning your scan. Only a minute or two more.”
Dennis hummed. A yawn cracked his jaw wide open and made his head throb for a second before the pain retreated back to a nice, manageable seven. “Hey Trin?”
“Yeah?”
“You know, you sound a bit like God like this.”
He could hear the laugh in her voice. “You think God sounds like a Filipino lesbian?”
“I’m not sure. God and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms right now,” Dennis mused, “but if it turned out God was a Filipino lesbian, I think I might just have to go back to church.”
The end of her laugh echoed around Dennis’s head as she turned the microphone back on. “Okay buddy. You let me know. I might have to come too. Now stay nice and still, okay? They’re doing the actual scan now.”
“Mm… kay.”
He’d been so lost inside his own head, that it was only as the loud white noise of the whirring scanner began to slow down that Dennis realised it had ever been ramped up at all. They were done. He kept waiting for someone to come back into the room, for the sound of the door opening and for someone to come and pull him out from the middle of the scanner. But no one ever did.
That… that couldn’t be good.
Finally, he didn’t know how many seconds or minutes later, he heard the door open and felt the tabletop begin to move. He found himself face to face with the petit CT tech and her kind smile, and at her shoulder he saw Trinity. She was smiling too. Dennis didn’t believe it for a second.
“You did great,” the tech said soothingly, stepping back to let Trinity get closer. “We got some beautiful pictures.”
Trinity took his hands again and crouched low once more, so they were nose to nose. She didn’t say anything though, just gave him a shaky smile and patted the top of his head.
He swallowed. “It’s not good, is it?”
She took a careful, shuddering breath. “Well, the good news is that Abbot said you probably don’t need to worry about working Christmas or New Year. The bad news is that you have a very, very small intraparenchymal haemorrhage. A very small one,” she stressed. “The Radiologist was,” she wiggled her fingers, “doing some math or something. He thinks less than ten millilitres of volume. They’re currently debating the value of doing a CTA, versus monitoring you and rescanning you in a few hours.”
Dennis’s eyes flicked past her to the lead window at her back. Abbot and Al-Hashimi were in deep focussed conversation with the Radiologist, nodding seriously and gesturing occasionally to the screens in front of them. Robby was… Robby looked so tired. He had his fingers interlocked on top his head as he stared down at Dennis’s scan. Dennis knew the expression on his face. It was the face Robby pulled when he was trying very hard not to cry. Focussed and tight.
Dennis watched as Abbot caught Robby’s attention with a gentle hand on his shoulder. Abbot said something and gestured behind him with a jabbed thumb. Robby nodded, his hands falling to his sides, and he turned, glancing at Dennis one last time before he left through the control room door.
On the way to turning back to Trinity, Dennis’s eyes caught briefly on the Radiologist attending, and the resident behind him. His mouth was moving before he realised it.
“Do you think you have to be a certain level of hot before they let you become a Radiologist?”
For a moment, Dennis worried that Trinity had been shot. But when her choked exclamation dissolved into breathless, cackling giggles, he realised she was simply laughing. Behind her, the tech was chuckling too.
“Oh, trust me,” the tech said with a knowing look in her eye, “they get less hot the more time you spend with them. They’re not known for their people skills.”
“That tracks,” Dennis murmured to himself. “Think it’s the computers and lack of sunlight?”
They were interrupted by the door to the control room opening.
“Well, it sounds like we’re having fun.” Abbot appeared with Al-Hashimi. “Care to share the joke?”
“No,” Dennis said before Trinity could choke out an answer. “Non-attendings only.”
Abbot hissed and mimed being shot in the chest. “Ouch, Whit. Just when I thought we were friends.”
“Dennis thinks the Radiologists are hot,” Trinity said tauntingly, leering closer to him and lightly pinching his cheek.
“Fuckin’ traitor,” Dennis muttered unhappily. “I’m injured. Be nice to me.”
“Which one?” Al-Hashimi said curiously, looking over her shoulder.
“Both,” Dennis answered honestly. Maybe Robby had point about the filter thing.
Abbot snorted. “It’s a good job Robby went to get some air. Now: has Dr Santos given you the low down?”
Dennis’s lips twisted unhappily. “Intraparenchymal haemorrhage.”
“A small one,” Trinity stressed, holding her forefinger and thumb very close together.
“A small one now,” Abbot stressed in turn, “and we’re going to do everything we can to keep it that way. Neuro are gonna’ meet us back in the ED but I can probably guess what they’ll say. Right now, it’s small enough that any sort of surgical intervention would likely do more harm than good. So,” Abbot started listing off his fingers, “we need to control your pain, control your blood pressure, stop you from falling and hitting your head again, and monitoring. Lots of monitoring. You’re going to be very popular overnight. Really, you need a bed on neurology, but I think you’ll probably end up staying down in the ED for a little while.” A little while. “Yeah, yeah, you know how it goes. Beds are a rare commodity, member of staff or not. And we might consider prophylactic levetiracetam as well, but I’ll leave that up to Neuro to decide, I think. Apparently Baran knows a guy.”
“A very good guy,” Dr Al-Hashimi said lightly. She leant closer to him. “I’m going to come back with you to the ED, but then I’m going to head home Dennis. I’ll be leaving you in Jack’s more than capable hands, and then I’ll see you again in the morning, alright?”
Dennis nodded sleepily, then paused. “Wait, what time is it?”
“A little after ten,” Al-Hashimi answered, stepping aside so that Dennis’s gurney could be lined up next to the scanning table.
Dennis groaned. “I- that’s so late! You finished hours ago. I’m so sorry!”
“And there it is!” Abbot said with a snort, standing side by side with Al-Hashimi and Trinity as they prepared to slide him back onto the gurney. “You must be feeling better if you’re apologising.”
Al-Hashimi winked at him. “Only the best for one of our own, Dr Whitaker.”