Stay With Me - Yeongyu FF

Chapter 42

(I shall give you here your warning: Beomgyu gets hurt. Really hurt. He's not dead!!!! But yes he's sick, hurt

That was a little bit of a harsh warning sorry)

Yeonjun POV

I wake up the next morning to probably the most stressful thing a lover of a terminally ill person can live.

I shake him, I talk to him, I turn on lights, splash water on his face, but he doesn’t move.

Beomgyu doesn’t wake up.

I panic, a crazy panic, and although it’s 7am, I wake up Mom. I can’t keep my thoughts straight when I can even think. I can’t talk in full sentences if I can even speak. But Mom understands. She calls an ambulance. We carry Beomgyu downstairs. We still try to wake him up. When the ambulance arrives, he’s not awake yet. A doctor checks his heartbeat first thing. They say it’s critically slow. They take him in the ambulance. No matter how stressed I am, I go with them. The nurses ask if he’s my brother. I say no. I call his mother. I tell her what happened. She arrives at the hospital about at the same time as we do. They take Beomgyu to the ER. Mom arrives soon after, and Ms. Choi, Mom and I wait and wait, hoping for the best. We try not to get our hopes up. Ms. Choi is basically hyperventilating, and the nurses try to calm her down. We wait for hours and hours that seem like days before finally a doctor arrives.

“There’s not many things keeping him alive, but for now, he is. He’s entered the final phase of his ALS, probably overnight and we think the reasons for this are those you’ve given us, sir, a lot of stress and lack of sleep recently” says the doctor.

Ms. Choi barely manages to ask her question between her sobs “Is he okay? Is he awake?”

“He’s not awake yet, but he’ll wake up. He won’t have the same energy as he used to, though. We can’t know whether he’ll be able to do everything like he used to. We’ll need to take tests when he wakes up” he explains.

We all stay at the hospital till night, but he doesn’t wake up. We come back the next day, he doesn’t wake either. It takes him a week to finally open his eyes.

We thought that when he did, maybe he’ll regain some colour on his now pale skin, maybe he’ll put a smile on his now straight lips, maybe he’ll make his now dull eyes sparkle again, and maybe the doctors were wrong, maybe he’d be perfectly fine.

But he wasn’t.

He barely manages to smile.

The nurses are there in a second, and Mom asks if we need to leave, they say we can stay until the doctor arrives, so we do. He looks like he could pass out again, his eyes are barely staying open. The nurses are trying to keep him awake till the doctor comes, but they don’t manage it too well, because he falls asleep a few times. Then, the doctor arrives. The nurses leave and we do too, hoping for the best. When he comes out about fifteen minutes later, the doctor tells us that Beomgyu surely won’t be able to walk anymore no matter how much rest he got, and that talking will also be difficult even after all the care. He also adds that right now, he can’t whisper a single word and can barely move, so no matter what, if we ask him something, he can’t give answers in any way. So even though we stay by his side, we don’t really say anything. We try our best to reassure him, and he tries to smile, but he doesn’t have the strength to truly do so yet. Mom tries to give him a phone so he can type, but he can’t even carry it. I lift it up for him, but he can’t carry his arm very high, so he can’t get to the highest keys. It shocks me. Something that used to be so easy now became so difficult for him. The nurse with us says that he’ll be better enough to do all these simple things in maybe a day or two, but that for now, he can do about as many things as a newborn baby.