while it regrows that part of her brain

He did NOT need to hear that sentence, actually! He didn't need to think about the fact that the brain needs to be regrown!!! It's actually really hard not to have feelings when his girlfriend's partner's brain needs to be regrown!!!!!!!

"I see," is what he says, and at least his voice is perfectly level even if he's having some trouble with the vein pulsating in his neck. "That's promising."

(It has not occurred to Marian that this might be a distressing sentence to hear. It's good news! Hye-jin may not have the strongest known type of regen, but it's pretty up there, it'll get her back to her previous baseline and it'll probably take more like hours or days than weeks or months!) 

She has time to get Hye-jin's head wound site cleaner and tuck the hair back over it before Dr Hulka sidles in for a bedside echo. 

And how does the patient's heart look on ultrasound? 

There's soft tissue damage through it, but... everything important is fine, and the damage is mostly focused around the heart, not in it.

(There's a telling line of damage that would theoretically pass through the heart, but it is possible Dr. Hulka will carefully not be noticing that kind of evidence, considering.)

Dr Hulka has been a trauma surgeon and ICU physician for twenty-five years. She does not miss the tract of soft tissue injury intersecting the patient's heart. 

However, out loud she just narrates that there's no sign of trauma to the myocardium, cardiac wall movement is normal, septum is intact, valves look okay, there's a small hemopericardium (blood in the pericardial sac around the heart) but it appears stable and there's no sign of cardiac tamponnade. They'll want a followup in an hour or two to make sure the bleeding is stable. 

(She knows that there's a non-disclosed medical fact but does not actually know who checked the box. It might not be Marian.) 

Tae-gun has managed to recover his composure after a bit. She's fine. She'll be fine. She has bullshit regeneration and she'll be just fine and she won't have permanent brain damage that will alter her personality forever because she's fine. Which means that he's also fine. That's how he is.

At least until they come up with some new extremely alarming thing to tell him she's fine.

Dr Hulka can also read between the lines. "Hemoglobin's coming up, bleeding seems to be under control," she says gruffly. "What's her last temp? Backlash is our top priority, we'll keep her here for direct transfusion."  

"Uh, 32 C but that was a few minutes ago." Marian will hastily check again. Still with the low-temp thermometer because it's not inconceivable she lost ground again, what with how the urine fluids exchange was a one-off thing and there's a whole lot of regen going on. 

It's actually made it up to 33 C!

(The whole lot of regen is still taking a toll, to be clear, but her partner is right there holding her, so. It is, just barely with medical assistance, temperature positive.)

"33 C. Up most of a degree." 

"Over, what, half an hour?" Dr Hulka scowls. "Better than nothing but we need to work faster than that. They've nearly got the direct transfusion machine up and running, they'll be over any minute to hook her partner up." 

Aaaaaand she breezes out of the room. She's got other patients, you know. 

Right. Well, Marian is at loose ends up Alison gets here, then. 

"Tae-gun, do you have any questions?" 

He twitches at being called by just his personal name like that but reminds himself as he always has to do when this happens that it's a different culture. "No, Ms. Daly." Was that pointed? He didn't mean it that way. ...much. "At least if I understand correctly, I will simply be giving Ms. Kim Hye-jin blood directly, yes?"

Marian is absolutely going to miss any subtext of pointedness; with the right prompting she migh recall that cultural differences exist around using surnames versus given names, buuuut her entire brain is currently loaded up with ICU context. 

"Yeah. ...Have you donated blood before in general? The process is pretty straightforward, we'll place a catheter in your vein and collect blood, the difference is just that it goes directly to her IV rather than sending it off to the blood bank for processing."

Her voice is absentminded; she's reading the radiologist's note on the X-ray to confirm that A Medical Doctor has put down somewhere in writing that her nasogastric tube is correctly placed and safe to use. She forgot to ask Dr Hulka, there's kind of a lot going on. (...Ugh she needs to go microwave enormous bags of saline for gastric lavage, doesn't she. She is not actually 100% sure how Alison fit them in the microwave and is tempted to delegate this task so she doesn't have to find out.) 

"I have, yes. If that is all then I have no questions."

Alison will be there three minutes later, wheeling the transfusion machine!

(It's not that complicated - basically just an IV pump powerful enough to create a gentle vacuum and encourage the donor's blood to keep coming out, and compatible tubing - but it's from the 80s, blood storage and blood transport logistics have reached the point where direct blood transfusions are no longer really a thing outside of weird cases like guiding fluid exchange. Alison thinks the hospital may have literally bought it on Ebay, replacing the frustrating manual syringe setup in use when she was first hired to the unit. Anyway, it doesn't have a touchscreen in sight, and is actually very reliable in general but the troubleshooting process is not one the nursing staff are as familiar with and you can't just swap in a different unit, they only have one.) 

She has the tubing primed with saline and set up with the adaptor for the standard blood donation catheter (and an adapter on the other end for the needleless luer lock port on the central line, the custom compatible tubing is older and still uses the needle port connection that the hospital phased out years ago.) 

"Lee Tae-gun?" Oh he's under the Bair Hugger blanket, good work Marian. "I need you to read and sign a consent form and then I'll place the catheter." She is absolutely unfazed by naked ICU patient bed-sharing. 

"Yes, ma'am." He summons a floating ice hand to hopefully nonverbally indicate that he does not need his actual hands to sign anything so they don't need to mess with the positioning of anything to free up his hand.

She's going to need his arm at some point anyway but sure, this way she doesn't have to crouch awkwardly to angle the clipboard for him. She'll read out the consent form to him rather than try to move anything so he can see the page; it's standard boilerplate, in English, and pretty short. When this comes up you often don't want to have to take long for it. 

Yeah sure that seems straightforward he'll sign it.

She likes this man’s composure. He’s probably going to be equally stoic about having a needle rather larger than an IV stuck into him to place the access catheter?

Yeah. He has to override his instinctive activation of his defensive power to allow the needle to break skin at all but he doesn't flinch.

Awesome! Then Hye-jin will get some blood pre-warmed, even which she needs anyway and should also be great for guiding. Marian has a good feeling! The pee trick got her a two-degree increase pretty quickly, and this one they can keep going for - probably nearly half an hour, the length of time that the slowest transfusion setting will take to transfuse 450 ml, the standard volume taken for a blood transfusion.

Marian is actually hopeful that Hye-jin might wake up before it's done, in which case - uhhh, actually she should get Alison to check in advance with Dr Hulka if the chest wound means they should hold the standing order in her chart that she's safe to be extubated the moment she's awake and her RN is authorized to do it without waiting for the doctro to assess her. Nobody likes being intubated and Hye-jin has zero sedation in her system. 

She'll also beg Alison for another favor and get her to bring over the gastric lavage setup, it's pretty late to be adding it but every last bit helps. 

Hye-jin begins to stir midway through the transfusion.

Oh, damn it all, she's been hospitalized again. Worse, she's been intubated. She hates being intubated, it's awful. This hasn't happened in years, how embarrassing. Ugh. Okay, where did she fuck up, it's only bad and naughty espers who can't responsibly handle their backlash that get tubed...

... it's all very fuzzy. Hmm. Fuck up to be decided upon more consciousness. She instead takes stock of her surroundings. Hospital - public one, not private, you can tell by the lack of expensive interior decoration, though this is a private room in one, which is fine. Also, she's being guided from somewhere behind her, is that - no, that's not Hideyoshi, the guiding is wrong for him, good, she does not need to commit murder today, that's - yeah, that's Tae-gun.

She makes an unhappy sound around her tube and opens an eye. Can she be free of the tube, please? She hates it so.

"—Hye-jin-ah?"