SHE | alex karev

chapter sixty eight

"Okay, uh..." Bailey stuttered. "How long have you had the growth?"

Jodie was staring at her son, who now stood facing the clock glaringly. "Could you cover the clock? The number five bothers him."

"Of course. Rogers, can you get something to cover the clock?" Billie ordered to her intern, who lately, had been the one to always accompany her on her cases. John nodded.

Jodie's son looked around and then walked towards the opposite end of the room, staring up at the smoke detector.

"Are those cameras?" he asked.

"Tommy, what do we need from the store?" Jodie asked as, Billie assumed, some sort of self-grounding technique.

Tom mumbled. "Why won't they leave me alone?"

"Tommy, do we need fruit?"

"Yeah. Why won't you leave me alone?" he kept going.

"What kind of fruit do we need, honey?" Jodie asked as the doctors watched the scene unfold. "Tom, what kind of fruit?"

Tommy finally looked away from the smoke detector. "Um... apples, pears... strawberries?"

"Make a list." Jodie looked over at John. "Could you give him a pencil and some paper?"

Soon, the intern nodded and immediately searched his pockets for a stack of post-its and a pen. Jodie glanced at Billie with a soft smile.

"He needs something to distract him from the voices," she explained. The girl nodded.

"Uh, ma'am, the growth," Bailey reminded, going back to the original topic.

"Oh, uh... yeah, I'm sorry. I— I've had it for a while. I've been meaning to get it checked but, as you can see, my son's illness is a full-time job."

Tommy sat down by his mother and began making the list.

☆

"Black, I'm gonna need you to get Mr. Crowley's wrist x-rayed while I get her up to MRI," Bailey said once they left the trauma room.

"Uh, fine. Sure." She sighed.

John looked at her. "I can do the wrist."

"Dr. Black has more experience," Bailey argued.

"The patient is paranoid and hyper-vigilant, which means he's bound to pick up on the fact that Dr. Black would rather be somewhere else. He may interpret that as Dr. Black being out to get him," when everybody stared at him weirdly, he shrugged. "My brother was a paranoid schizophrenic. Plus, I aced my psych clerkship."

Billie frowned, but in the end, John was assigned to the son and she had no choice but to make a mental note to ask him about it later.

☆

"An abdominal aortic aneurysm. Eight point seven centimeters," Bailey said in shock while her and Billie sat staring at Jodie's scans in the MRI room. "This thing has a seventy-five percent chance of rupturing."

"She's a ticking time bomb," Billie reasoned. "I'm surprised she even woke up this morning, let alone got into a car."

"Okay, uh, cancel all my elective surgeries this afternoon and book an OR. We need to get in there ASAP."

Billie nodded and walked out of the MRI room to do as told, but as she did, she ran into John. The man seemed nervous, running his hands along his curly hair frantically, making a mess of it.

"Rogers? What's wrong?" she asked.

John hesitated to ask. "Have you seen Tom?"

Billie frowned, confused. "I thought he was with you."