Dr Prissan shrugs. "Go nuts. He's low risk, young and wasn't intubated long." 

Marian nods, though she's privately thinking that she wants to be somewhat more careful than that, just in case Ma'ar does some other crazy thing and ends up needing to be reintubated. 

"I heard my name?" Amélie strolls into the nursing station. "What's up? ...Please tell me it's not a trainwreck." 

"It's not! I just wanted to talk to you about, uh, who should get my guy in 202 tonight. He's...complicated. And he seemed pretty anxious about it." She bites her lip. "....Uh and also I feel like maybe I need to do an incident report or something about how he almost mind-controlled Dr Beckett to extubate him? That's a near miss, right?" 

Amélie blinks at her for a moment. Then glances at the chairs. "...If we're going to talk about that now, why don't we have a seat for it." 

"Uh, sure, but can we do it by 202? I don't want to be too far." 

     (Amélie shrugs and follows her, detouring to collect the binder of staffing assignments.) 

Ma'ar is still asleep, though he must have been restless at some point; he's managed to slide halfway down the bed and end up kind of diagonal. 

She'll fix his positioning once he's awake anyway, or once it's been two hours, one of those. Right now Marian is busy being terrified that she's going to be in trouble and get written up. She can't think of anything she obviously missed or did wrong but this is not, exactly, a rational fear. 

"Uh. So. How much do you - actually know? About him and what happened?" 

Amélie massages her forehead. "Why don't you tell me everything? I overheard a bit, but, well." 

"I know it sounds crazy! I'm pretty convinced, though, it - made sense of some things that happened when I found him last night. Oh, and also the whole weird deal with his sugars. Anyway, so - uh, up until I went on lunch break, I thought he was just a new immigrant or something and didn't speak much English, he seemed to only understand me sometimes. Then when I was away, Dr Beckett went in to see him, and I'd been weaning his sedation..." 

She relates all of it: the texts, her confusion, running to the room, managing to restart the propofol while Ma'ar was distracted by being suctioned, blocking Dr Beckett from ill-advisedly extubating her patient on the spot. And everything that she managed to learn from Ma'ar after she negotiated a truce and he agreed to talk.

"He assumed he was still in his world - I mean, reasonable - and so he thought the random security guy was an official and he'd been captured and detained. He must've been so scared in the ER, I can't imagine, no wonder he hit a nurse when she tried to go at him with a rectal thermometer..." 

Amélie makes a stifled sound into her fist. It might be a snicker. "Yes, the whole unit's heard that story by now. So he...thought he was under arrest for war crimes? Does he seem - dangerous, violent, anything like that, do we need an actual cop or security guard by his room -?" 

"No!" Marian bursts, a lot louder than she intended to. She wrestles her voice under control. "Sorry, but - please don't, I've just gotten him to start calming down about the concept of hospitals and needing to stay here. I don't know what he did, but he's not dangerous to us, he's been a lovely patient for me." 

"Right." Amélie starts fidgeting with a pen. "I wouldn't do an incident report. The point of those is to catch errors, right, and figure out if we need new policies. And I can't imagine this'll happen again." 

"I hope not." Marian is filled with the sudden, vivid, unwanted image of injured, disoriented, terrified war refugees from a destroyed fantasy world dropping all over, ruining nurses' nights at every ER in the world. Probably they'd have...heard, though? Something would be in the news if that happened. 

"Just write up a really detailed narrative note, all right?" Amélie tugs her own battered worksheet from her pocket and unfolds it to make a note. "And we ought to make an info sheet for him, something we can print out and stick on his door like we did for Mr Robbins." Another patient, with an entirely different - and entirely mundane - but no less complicated particular history. "And I'll...email the floor manager, I guess. He's out today for a training." 

"Should we, uh, tell someone in the government?" Marian kind of feels like you're supposed to tell, well, a real grownup, if it turns out that magic is real. At the same time, though, she ABSOLUTELY doesn't want any scientists or bureaucrats or, god forbid, press reporters, anywhere near her patient. 

Shrug. "Let's let Marc make that call. I don't know who we'd contact." 

"Mmm." And it can wait, Marian thinks. At least until Ma'ar is up for doing interviews. If she has her way about it, that won't be for at least a week. 

...It's occurring to her that if there's any way to go in the other direction, from Earth to Ma'ar's fantasy setting, then - someone should maybe be doing that? There was just a major disaster there, after all, they probably need humanitarian aid. But thinking about that feels even more vastly above her pay grade. 

"- I  guess the other kind of urgent problem is that he's got nowhere to go when he's discharged." 

Amélie scowls. "And presumably no legal identity, if his story's true. Which means no OHIP. Also no family contacts or power of attorney. What a mess. Tracy is going to be so grumpy about this." 

Marian kiiiind of feels like whether this messes up their clerk's paperwork is not the biggest concern. 

"We consulted social work, right? That's going to be such a weird conversation with them, but maybe they can help. And he needs to be here another couple days anyway." Marian is suddenly so exhausted. "Anyway, so who's on tonight?" 

Amélie flips open the binder. 

Marian has a look.

Nope, definitely not letting Isobel anywhere near Ma'ar. Marian has some...previous issues...with Isobel. She's an excellent nurse who's been on the unit for ten years, and everybody quietly deals with the fact that she's - well, as Anne-Marie once put it, 'a raging bitch'. Her patients tend to do well and the joke is that she bullies them until they're desperate to recover and get the hell away from her. Probably this isn't true, she's mostly just a bully to new nurses and incredibly disrespectful to care aides, physios, RTs, and cleaning staff. STILL. 

Kaysi is...fine. She's a solid ICU nurse with ten years of experience. Marian doesn't have much in common with her. She does have wild respect for her management - she's never once seen Kaysi clock out a minute after 7:30 - and her legendary ability to take no shit from high-maintenance patients or their families. However, she's also a very serious Catholic, who sincerely tells all her patients that she'll pray for them. Marian isn't sure how she'll feel about "wizard from a fantasy universe", and she...kind of doubts Ma'ar will appreciate prayers. 

Rick might be fine? He's really smart and he's a sweetie. Astonishingly good with the 'little anxious old lady' archetype of ICU patient. However, he's also a 6'4" black man with a head as bald as an egg and shoulders like a football linebacker, who does power lifting as a side hobby. (He's the guy you ALWAYS want on shift with you if extensive CPR is going to be needed.) It's not that she's worried Ma'ar is racist, as such, but he's so jumpy and he might be intimidated. 

Mayumi, for her part, is incredibly sharp, knows more obscure pathophysiology than most residents, and can handle patients on a million drips without missing a beat, but she's also a shy, soft-spoken Filipino woman who hates conflict - and probably she's needed for one of the much sicker patients on the unit. Also she weighs about 90 pounds; she's not going to be able to restrain Ma'ar if he gets confused and agitated again.  

Chantal is back tonight and she had 201 last night. Marian would trust her with Ma'ar in a heartbeat. However, she's assigned as charge nurse again and probably she shouldn't also get a patient as complicated as Ma'ar. 

Pascal is probably the one she knows best. He's a fellow new grad, from the same graduation cohort as Marian. She likes him. They've been through some shit together, over four years of nursing school and then three months of precepting, and like her he worked his way through third and fourth year, pulling night shifts as a care aide. He's from a– well, a much lower-class background than hers, the first in his family to finish college, and he's...not book-smart. At all. She feels terrible thinking it but it's true. He nearly flunked out in first year on Anatomy & Physiology II, and his theory grades were never above Cs. She's not sure how he finagled an ICU placement at all, she thought there was a minute GPA requirement, but she thinks he deserved it; he's the most conscientious human being she's ever met, a dogged tireless hard worker. She remembers him bringing flash cards to their ER night shifts, getting her to quiz him on pharmacology in between cleaning gurneys and emptying bedpans. He's fastidious about details; his rooms are always spotless, his dressing changes works of art. His patients love him and always ask for him back. However, she is not enthused about making him responsible for a patient who has weird, novel metabolic crap going on which won't be on any of his flash cards or mentioned anywhere in his reference books.  

Nellie. Hmm. She's a new arrival on the unit, but not a new nurse; she moved here from Austin, Texas earlier this year. She spent six years working at a big hospital, in a busy high-acuity MICU, and it seems like nothing that happens out here at Montfort can ever faze her; some of her stories are WILD. Nobody's quite sure why she moved out to Ottawa, Ontario, and no one's dared ask. She speaks French with an atrocious accent, and hasn't bothered even a little bit to learn the gendered pronouns. Nobody dares give her any shit about that either. She's almost as tiny as Mayumi, but unlike Mayumi she's a black belt in judo. She has a gun collection and once invited Marian to the firing range with her. (Marian declined.) She used to sing in an amateur country band - her performance at the staff karaoke night last month was spectacular - and she sings to her patients sometimes.

Nellie is kind of a baffling person, but she's seen some shit. And, for all that she apparently likes to shoot guns at things on her day off, and is not at ALL afraid to chew out the attending doctor in front of literally everyone on the unit, she's gentle and empathetic with her patients, and fiercely protective of them. 

...On the one hand, who the fuck knows what Ma'ar's going to see in her head. Anne-Marie once jokingly said that Nellie has to be fleeing a dark secret in her past, and the resulting laughter was nervous because it seems uncomfortable plausible. On the other hand, she'll do a great job of taking care of him. 

"Can we assign Nellie?" she asks. 

"...Hmm. She had 198 and 199 last night. Reckon she could keep 199 and take your guy too? And Chantal can keep 201, and if we're lucky then 192 will transfer by end of shift..." 

Marian has no idea who the patient in room 199 is. "Uh, sure, if they're not too heavy a patient?" 

She lets Amélie head back to the nursing station, muttering at the assignments list, and starts Googling for picture boards she can print for Ma'ar. 

It's 5:01 when Dr Prissan marches down the hall, the new evening resident in tow, a tall, remarkably skinny Indian man with jet-black hair in a perfect bowl cut.

He stops and clears his throat two feet behind Marian. "So. Seems we're getting a real sick transfer in from Almonte," a small town just under an hour's drive from Ottawa, "and since I'm stuck here until they show up anyway, thought I might show Dr Agarwal here how one does a bedside echo." Dr Prissan sounds clearly offended about the fact that he'll be staying past 5 today. "Also, since he'll be taking call tonight, I thought I'd better get you to fill him in."