Same Faces Different Places

The Art Of Healing {{Bughead}}

World:
A Riverdale in the future, where the teenagers are adults and Jughead didn't grow up on the Southside with no money.  

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Summary: Betty is paralyzed after an accident and her doctor, Jughead, helps her walk again

  Please note, that I have absolutely NO medical knowledge and what I did was take an actual case of this I found online and copied the medical terms and procedures.
I am however intimately acquainted with the strain of not being able to walk and do shit on your own (though it has not been paralyses for me but rather a knee injury that left me permanently disabled on that leg) and how long and exhausting the recovery process and physical therapy is/can be for that.

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He arrives back in town a week after the accident but he doesn't hear about it until his first day at the hospital. He and Betty had gone to the same school and attended the same classes ever since he can remember, but that's essentially all he knows about the woman. She had her group of friends and he had been hanging out with the complete opposite of them. He doesn't think they had ever even spoken to each other. She hasn't really changed much, though and so he recognizes her immediately when he walks by her open door on his way to the doctor's lounge.

She's sitting up in bed, her parents on either side of her, comforting the blonde. She's crying, motioning helplessly from her covered legs to the wheelchair in the corner and back, but she speaks too low for him to hear her actual words. He watches them for a moment longer, glad for the layout of the room, because he can see them perfectly, but they can't spot him lurking outside in the hallway. He wants desperately to know what has her so upset but he does not know her at all, and especially not good enough to just waltz into the room and ask her.

So he leaves her to her parents care and makes his way to the lounge, getting ready for his first shift at Riverdale General Hospital. It had not been his first choice, to come back, but his father had recently retired as the only neurosurgeon the small town hospital employs and Jughead had been asked to fill the position. It's not that he doesn't believe in his own abilities as a surgeon, but there were far more experienced doctors lining up for that job. He had accepted only after a long talk with his father, who had been determined that a smaller hospital would be much better for patient care than the big one in New York Jughead had been working at for the last five years.

It takes exactly fifteen minutes and a bored and gossipy nurse for him to find out exactly what had happened to Betty Cooper. He hadn't asked, but the woman had started talking to him the very moment he'd shown up at the nurses' station in his white coat. She's old enough to have been around even when he and Betty had been little children and she confirms as much when she starts telling him about the poor girl she'd snuck a shitload of ice cream to when she had her tonsils taken out ages ago.

Apparently, the poor girl had been hit by a drunk driver five days ago and had severe damage to her spinal cord. She'd been unconscious and barely breathing and had been rushed into the emergency room and then onward into the OR immediately. The surgeons had been able to stop the internal bleeding caused by the pressure of the airbag and managed to control the swelling in her brain caused by the impact of the other car. They had just barely saved her life, but unfortunately neither of them had been trained to repair her spine. The specialist they had come in two days later had taken a good look at her x-rays and had confirmed what she'd already been afraid of. There was nothing he could do, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life.

It's not like he doesn't trust other doctor's opinions and diagnosis, but this is his specialty and, more importantly, his hospital now, which makes the woman his patient and he'd be damned if he would just give up on her without taking a look for himself.