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there's a Sith loose in the hospital
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It's not really visibly noticeable but if Marian presses, there's a bit of puffiness, yes. Not much though.

To the EEG, she seems... asleep? Very deeply so, lots of delta waves, but the finer wiggles of alpha and beta, too; not many, but enough to rule out a delta coma. There's no sign of epilepsy or recent seizure, though at this point that's not a very strong indication that she didn't have one.

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The test takes forty-five minutes. 

In the middle of it, an orderly pushing a wheelchair knocks at the side of the door. "Hello?" 

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Marian jumps, startled, before realizing it's just the bizarre articulated-humanoid-robot Burning Man art project or whatever. 

"Uh, thanks, can you put it in the clean utility?" 

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The orderly gives her an irritated look. "You'd have to show me where." 

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Marian sighs and shrugs. "I guess just put it there - no, not in the middle, up against the wall or something... That'll do. Thank you." 

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The tech finishes the test and gives her an apologetic look as she starts removing the cap and electrodes. "I can't give you a final diagnosis. The neurologist should have a report up within a couple hours." 

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"Mmm. Thanks." 

Marian flops on her chair. She probably SHOULD do something about the robot statue in the wheelchair but her feet hurt. She stares listlessly at the monitor instead. 

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Her patient is stable now; her heart rate has settled out in the mid-fifties, and her blood pressure is back to a comfortable 115 over 74.

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This is a definite improvement in her day! Not that she trusts this state of affairs to last! 

She grabs the opportunity to ask Dr Millinger to actually put in an order for getting the patient off the backboard, since she keeeeeeeps forgetting about that. 

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Sure, whatever, she can do what she wants. 

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Marian gets help from Elaine to do this, and takes the opportunity to get a good look at the patient's back and check for any other injuries, scars, or skin breakdown. 

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There's a few more of the rectangular burn scars, and one diffuse round mostly-healed burn on the back of her shoulder; her skin looks good otherwise.

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Marian asks Elaine to get her a dressing to slap on the not-yet-healed burn, and once they have her patient arranged with a pillow behind her to prop her half onto her side, she documents it. She's very curious but it doesn't seem likely she'll have her curiosity answered for a while. 

Elaine is very behind on everything with her patients, so Marian ducks out and spends the next few minutes helping her with turns and meds, glancing occasionally back at her patient's monitor. 

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Everything's quiet.

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Eventually Marian hauls herself off to the clean utility room and spends a while shoving and rearranging equipment so that she can haul the art-sculpture-robot in and stand it up sort of against the back wall. She goes and finds a sticky note and labels it with a patient sticker with her code-name and bar code, and then goes and has a desperately needed bathroom break, and then her pod still seems quiet so she calls to Elaine that she's getting coffee. 

Fifteen minutes later she's back, standing outside her patient's room and looking at the monitor and the pee in the collector-box. 

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Her vitals are still stable; her urine output has slowed to a trickle.

There's some sort of strange marks on her face, beside her nose and around her eyes; it's hard to make out from there.

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Ugh. This calls for a closer look, doesn't it. Right when she was just about to sit down. Terrible. 

Marian sighs and forges over to the patient's bedside to get a closer look at the weird marks. 

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The marks are on the sides of her her neck and the back of her hands, too, and at her hairline, black smudges following the veins - or maybe those are her veins, somehow, the marks do seem to be under rather than on her skin.

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That's so weird! And Marian isn't usually squeamish about anything other than spit, but this is making her feel a bit like her shift is about to turn into a scene from a horror movie, and she's sort of cringing about it. Also about the prospect of asking Dr Millinger what to do about mysterious horror-movie-esque black veins?? 

She grumbles under her breath and then grits her teeth and goes off to find and ask him. 

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Dr Millinger mostly seems too busy and fed up to even question her weird report. "Sure, get some bloodwork, why not." 

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"...Uhhh, what tubes." She has no idea which specific lab test is supposed to be indicated for 'mysteriously black horror movie veins.' 

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He looks irritated. "Why would I know? Just send the rainbow." (This is the common slang for 'all the tube colours used in common tests'.) 

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Marian nods and smiles politely and thanks him, and then goes off and, before sending the tubes, calls the lab and tries to explain to some busy and confused lab tech why they're doing the test. 

(The lab tech also doesn't know any secret lore on this problem, but promises to ask his supervisor.) 

Black veins do, at least, make it really easy to draw blood! Marian gets all the samples on her first try and sends them off via pneumatic tube system, and then parks herself in the chair to wait, glaring at the woman's urine output but not quite upset enough about it to bother Dr Millinger again. 

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Her vitals are stable, at least.

The color starts to fade, eventually; it's slow enough that it's hard to say when it started, but it's noticeably less prominent after forty minutes.

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Probably that’s a good sign? Marian really wishes she were more sure of that, though. 

About an hour after she sent off the blood, she gets a call from the lab. They’re apologizing for failing to get results stat; their fancy new quick-reading machine for electrolyte numbers seems to be acting up? They’re going to use the older, more reliable lab equipment, but it’ll be a wait. 

Clotting factors are all normal, they have that at least. They’re going to run a second check on the hematology, though - something’s really weird about the patient’s plasma, it’s coming up...sort of stained cloudy and dark? 

Marian helpfully sends off yet another tube for the hematology redo, and then finds Elaine to do a round of turning patients - and frequently glancing at her patient to check the black marks - while she waits for the lab to call her back.

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