The pain was indescribable. Cracking my chest open without anesthesia would have hurt less than the pain I was in.
I dug the heel of my hands deeper against my eyelids and stared at black. “The images are up. Want to come and look for yourself?” Adam asked. Was he fucking kidding?
“Of course I want to look at them.” I stood and the sick, empty pit in my stomach churned. It didn’t stop me from storming down the hall to the small dark cave housing the radiologist.
“Chase, I’m so sorry to hear about what happened to Lili. She’s a great girl, sweet and friendly.” Did he think I wanted to bullshit about how fucking friendly he found my girl?
“Let me see the images,” I hissed.
He looked like he was twenty-two. No chance in hell he was deciding the fate of my Blue.
He clicked the mouse and the two huge computer monitors filled with dozens of black, white and grey images. At least the cocky ass was smart enough to step back. I sat in his chair and scrolled through, image after image. You had to be fucking blind to miss the fracture in her skull. A fucking basilar skull fracture and enough diffuse cerebral edema to make her a wait-and-fucking-see case.
“FUUCK. Not again.” A stream of hot bile slid up my esophagus and scorched the back of my throat. Kimi lay in that bed for three fucking years, waiting and seeing, until I finally inherited my trust and flew in every fucking specialist with a pulse. The final consensus was a basilar artery hemorrhage that left her in a total locked in state. People thought being a vegetable was the worst possible fate. They were wrong. Take that nightmare and multiply it by a thousand and that was what my sister suffered through. She was wide awake and aware of everything, yes, fucking everything. But every voluntary muscle in her body, including her goddamn eyes were paralyzed. And none of us had a damn clue, for three fucking years.
My eyes darted back and forth, permanently burning every detail on the two screens into my memory. No matter how many ways I flipped Lili’s images, the diagnosis was the same, the reality was the same. “Fuck.” There was nothing to operate on, no quick fix. “Cancel the OR.” I pushed away from the desk before I put my fist through the screen. Eighteen years later and I was still left waiting and seeing. I stormed out of the dark room squinting against the blinding hallway fluorescents. How the hell radiologists functioned in the dark was beyond me.
“Chase, I called Taylor Hines, head of neurology. She’s on her way in.”
“Well, fucking call her and send her back to her goddamn Labor Day picnic.”
“Chase, I hear you, man, but she’s not a surgical candidate. Take a step back and think like a doctor for a second. Let Taylor manage her. You are way too close.”
Again, with the too close? This woman was my everything. My lifeless heart beat again the first time she nailed me with those blue eyes. My boiling resentment toward the world melted the night she said she trusted me, and my suffocating guilt stopped strangling me the day she said she loved me. Fuck you, too close.
Gupta stared at me, unsure if I was gonna flip out and start throwing shit or slip into a deep dark depression. Honestly, either was a real possibility.
“Fine, I don’t care who you call. I’m not too arrogant to get another pair of experienced hands on deck. And while you’re at it, call the Chief of OB. Have her meet me-”
“CODE BLUE MRI”
“CODE BLUE MRI!” blared through the hospital’s overhead speaker system.
“CODE BLUE MRI”
“CODE BLUE MRI!”
My feet took off and I sprinted down the hall. I pushed past half the twenty person code team to get in the fucking room. My feet felt like fucking lead. Like I just got slathered in cement. Her naked breasts bounced with every forceful thrust; her ribs cracked with each chest compression. The air bag they used to pump oxygen into her lungs blocked my view of her face. It was a clip from a horror movie.
“Hold compression!” someone screamed over the commotion. Everyone froze and looked toward the monitor. I still couldn’t see my girl past the chaos. Voices started echoing from every direction.
“Asystole.”
“Resume CPR.”
“Another round of epi...”
The flat line on the screen arrested my heart. I was dying. I was dead.
“She’s not responding, it’s been twenty minutes.”
“We’ve done six rounds of epi.” The voices got more muffled, more hopeless.
She was lying there motionless and … alone. I broke through the cement. She needed me. She wasn’t going to be alone. I wasn’t leaving her alone. I rushed to the head of the bed. Finally seeing her eyes, I was consumed by an overwhelming sense of peace. Honest and pure peace, heaven.
“Stop compressions.”
“I’m calling it … time of death 2:57 PM.” The dominant voice stopped the chatter. He was calling it. It was over. I closed her lifeless eyes. I walked out of the room.
When I reached an empty hallway, I bent over and fought for more oxygen. Thank fucking god, I breathed.
“Chase, oh shit. Are you okay? I thought it was Lili too, man. I can’t imagine what was going through your mind … she already went to the ICU.” Adam kept talking. “You need anything?”
Inhale.
Exhale.
I breathed really fucking hard. “Yeah, my team and the KimCore.”
“But Chase, hypothermia induction is contraindicated. She’s pregnant.”
Like I needed a fucking reminder.
Inhale.
Exhale.
“No shit, but I need to do something to get the swelling down, and there aren’t many options. I’m not gonna just sit back and let THAT fucking happen to her, Adam. If I lose her, I lose the baby too. So just get my fucking team ready.” Fuck.
I left Adam for the stairwell. Taking two at a time, I cursed the entire way up to the tenth floor. But I needed the time to get my head back in the game, to process what the fuck just happened. I didn’t know who the girl was, but if she had a husband, I knew him. For two excruciating minutes, I was him. And he just died too.
Jim and Sharon were pacing outside the ICU entrance. When he saw me approach, Jim looked me square in the eyes. “It’s okay, son. What’s going on? We need to know. I want the truth.”
“It’s not good, Jim. You should sit.” I owed him the truth. He deserved it.
“I don’t want to sit, I want to know what’s going on with my daughter. Just tell us already.”
“She fractured her skull right here.” I touched right behind Jim’s ear. I wasn’t going to sugar coat it. “Most likely from the blunt force of hitting her head against the cement wall or from the accelerated speed of the downward fall on the stairs. But that’s not the most worrisome finding—it’s the widespread brain swelling that’s the issue right now. It’s why she’s not waking up, the reason she’s in the coma. We need to get the swelling down to minimize the risk of long-term damage. The swelling prevents oxygen from perfusing the brain, and without oxygen, the tissue is at risk of dying.”
“Oh no, not our Lili.” Sharon cried and slapped a hand over her mouth. They were finally grasping the magnitude of Lili’s injuries. “She’s gonna wake up, right? Say she’s gonna wake up.”
“We’re moving as fast as we can, and time is on our side since the accident happened in the hospital. We started some IV medications to reduce some of the swelling. But it might not be enough, we might have to make some tough decisions...”
We. Shit. What if Jim wasn’t on board with what needed to be done? Adam was right. Jim was technically her next of kin. His support was imperative when I made the most crucial decision of my life.