'Til Sun Beams Find You [COMPLETE]

Thirty-six (Part 2)

Beeping.

An agonizing and taunting beeping sound was loud in her ears.

For the most part, Nico didn't really mind hospitals, if she was being quite honest.

Outside of the annoying machine sounds, there was peace and quiet that existed otherwise. That peace only lasted for so long until a woman exited the door towards the operating rooms and was standing in front of them, throwing around big words.

She found herself searching through WebMD again, this time her state more panicked as she tried her hardest to make sense of the words the doctor threw around.

Traumatic head injury.. subdural hematoma... brain herniation... midline shift...

"English dawg.. please speak in English," Carter begged the woman.

She didn't even look like a doctor, if Nico was being honest. She looked no older than the two of them, and she clearly hadn't been doing this very long as she seemed nervous sharing the news with Carter.

She had already explained to Dale and Shiela, but Carter was the last to arrive. It was a thirty minute drive from where Nico's parents lived to to their city's largest academic hospital located downtown, and the operation had been going on for 3 hours at that point.

It was nearly 1 in the morning.

"Your grandmother is bleeding in her brain, which is causing her a lot of problems, hence her unconscious state on arrival," she explained in lay terms they could finally make sense of. "The blood is pushing her brain towards the left side of her head."

Okay...

Nico read something about that...

"So then make the bleeding stop," he said like it was obvious.

Carter glanced at the name on the ID card clipped to her scrubs, wondering who exactly this woman was.

Dr. Miranda Chen, PGY-4
Neurosurgery

"We're emergency evacuating the bleed right now, but she's going to need a full craniectomy to decompress. We really won't know much until she wakes up."

He sat down and held his head in his hands.

"How did this even happen?"

A fall like any other. She slipped on her way to the kitchen. Except, falling when you're old wasn't the same thing. She already had less brain from being elderly, and the Alzheimer's didn't help either.

Shiela was a wreck because she felt so guilty that this happened while she was with her. Her husband had come and sat with them, as he rubbed her shoulder while she wept from the heavy guilt in her chest and imminent bad news she felt was coming. At the end of the waiting hall, Dale sat silently with his leg cross over the other, his ankle resting at his knee.

"This cannot be happening," Carter muttered as he squeezed the sides of his head.

He couldn't even find the depth to cry, because the shock of it all was overwhelming.

He had just seen her that morning. He had just heard her laugh. He had just seen her smile. She was just telling him how handsome he looked and how much she loved him.

She was just here.

"How–" Dale cleared his throat of the dryness. "How long until we can see her?"

The woman glanced at her watch. "We should finish up in the next 20 minutes, but we don't know how long it'll be until she wakes."

Dale glanced at her name tag as well. "You're a resident," he stated it more than asked.