Waters of Lethe, Book 2

65. Low

I sat by her hospital bed, staring at all of the gizmos and gadgets over her head monitoring her low oxygen saturation, her fast heart rate, her bottomed out blood pressure. They had allowed me to stay in her ICU room, a small glass box, after the hell I'd given them, and after I broke down begging in a small voice I didn't recognize as my own.

It was early in the morning, around the time other patients who were actually awake would be getting their meals, I assumed. It was also almost time for visitors, which I wasn't looking forward to. I knew that the only visitors El would have would be Audi and Ryan, who was apart of the team that came in to rescue us. It would only be for thirty minutes, though, then I could go back to having her to myself, able to watch her without people, other than the nurses, watching.

Like I was doing now.

The ventilator she was on scared me. I made a mental note to tell her that when she woke up, how much it scared me to see it hooked to a large machine and taped around her mouth, how unnatural it was. The puffiness of her face and her hands and her arms scared me. The way the doctors and nurses hovered around the glass doorway scared me, as if they were waiting for something to happen. I wanted to tell them to go away, but couldn't tear my eyes away from the fragile person in front of me even for a second. A few doctors came in to give me a run down of what was going on: her hemoglobin and hematocrit were both at dangerously low levels from the blood loss. Her creatinine was too high, which had something to do with her kidneys. I had no idea what any of it meant, but she would when she woke up. All I knew for sure was that they were giving her blood, and lots of it.

"Hello, hello," her ICU nurse, Lee, greeted us quietly as he came in with an arm full of fluids in bags that he would attach to her IV. 

I liked Lee. He wasn't much older than me. In the few hours I'd known him, I found out that he was an American nurse who traveled. His dream was to work in a foreign country, so he landed in Egypt. I was just thankful to have a nurse who spoke English. I  didn't have the energy to play charades. He had short reddish hair, much brighter than El's darker hair. Lee had a scruffy beard to match.

He pulled out a syringe from his light blue scrubs and went to work on testing her IV, then hooked all of the lines up. "This is propofol," he informed me, pointing to a bottle of white liquid that hung on the IV pole. "It's keeping her sedated while the ventilator is in. And this," he said, his hand wrapping around a larger bag of clear fluids, "is basically sugary saline. It's keeping her hydrated." I looked harder. The bag was labeled as D5NS, but, again, I didn't understand what it meant. Plus, I trusted Lee. Maybe it was the familiar hair.

"I know all of these lines and wires might seem overwhelming, but, I assure you, Ellie is doing... good. We're trying to stabilize her a bit more right now, but don't let that scare you." He looked up at the heart monitor, where, apparently, he didn't like something. My back straightened up, but I relaxed once he started talking in his easy tone again.

He began to lift her gown up but paused, looking at me. "You are the boyfriend, right?" he asked me. smiling.

It took me by surprise, the word boyfriend. I'd only been called her boyfriend a few times before, and I guess it never really sunk in. I just knew that I was hers. I nodded my head. "Yes."

Lee smiled and pulled her thick blankets back so that they were at her waist, then he tugged her white and blue hospital gown up to expose her sunken stomach and all of the thick white bandages there. I could count her ribs, could see the faint movement there as her heart tried its best to keep her going.

"Sometimes these wires come off," Lee said, reattaching some wires that were stuck to various parts of her chest and stomach: one on the right side of her stomach, one on the left, one below her right breast, one below her diaphragm, and one through her gown, at the top of her chest where her two bruised collar bones met. "If they come off, they give false readings. Nothing to worry about. Can I get you anything?" he asked as he walked out. It took me a few minutes, but I registered his voice when he asked again. 

"No, sir, thank you."

I pulled my chair closer to her bed so that I was facing her, and took her hand, lightly rubbing over the swollen top and over each pale knuckle. I'd heard the nurses outside earlier, talking about how she was in a medically induced coma. Lee told me not to worry, because all it meant was that they were keeping her sedated for her own safety, and that I should talk to her. I'd heard stories before of how, even though comatose, people who were unconscious could still hear those around them, still hear noises and remember them when they woke up. So I tried, over the two hours that I'd been in here with her, to think of what to say. Anything at all, but nothing came to me except for a nasty lump in my throat that got harder to push down every time I thought of something that would work.

Finally, when we were alone, after hours of trying and interruptions from the nurses and doctors, I spoke. "Hey," I squeezed her hand tighter. "Hey, sweetheart. It's... It's me." The lump reappeared in my throat, but I was tired of it hijacking my voice to the point I wanted to throw up. I pushed it back down. "I know you don't feel great right now and, well..." I swallowed again,my eyes burning. I bit my lip, a nervous habit. "You're beautiful. Please keep fighting. I know you, and I know you won't give up. You can't give up. You know why?" I asked, knowing what I was going to say. A fire sparked inside of me that somehow made me angry and hopeful, all at once. "Because we're going to beat this. We're going to beat the bad guys, and there's not jack shit they can do to stop us. We are bigger, and we'll win. And then you know what? Me and you?" I swallowed hard again, scooting closer to the bed to reach over her hips and take her other hand so that both of hers were in mine. "You... You're going to be one hell of a nurse. And you're going to... We're going to move far away, somewhere where we'll be normal and away from what we aren't. Away from Maine. Back to Louisiana, if you want, so we'll be near your family. They miss you, you know. We can all be together. And, if you'll have me, we can spend the rest of our lives together and have a family and... I love you. Please, please keep fighting. I know you can. Just..."

When Audi and Ryan came in ten minutes later, I contemplated standing up and stepping back to let them get a better look at her broken frame, to touch her, to try to talk to her, but I couldn't make myself move. I was relieved when they didn't ask me to, either. They just situated themselves beside the large machine that breathed for her, beside her IV poles, beside the monitors so that they could be by her for the next thirty minutes.

"We, ah, talked to Lee outside," Audi said to me. I tore my eyes away from her and landed them on him. He was blurry to me for some reason.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Said she was pulling through."

Ryan chimed in with a small chuckle. "She's a fighter." He had a hand on the top of her blanket, over her knee, gently squeezing. His eyes were tired, and the bruises on him had surfaced. Black and blue. He surprised me when he showed up beside Audi in the emergency room, and at first I thought I was hallucinating. Audi informed me that Ryan bugged him about joining the mission to get us away from Scott to the point that Audi nearly choked him to death, but, in the end, Audi liked his spunk. So here he was.

I decided, for once, to agree with Ryan. "She is that."

The day moved on like that, slow, with four more thirty minute periods where Audi and Ryan came in to silently stand by her bed, squeezing her hand, making uplifting remarks on how her color was already coming back and how her blood pressure was going up and how the sound her heart beat on the monitor seemed stronger to them, faster. I tried to let myself become happy, to believe their words, to believe Lee's words, but I wouldn't believe anything until she opened her eyes.