"Well, I just had to shove a flu swab down Ma'ar's nose. I'm sure you can imagine how he felt about it. He spiked a high fever around - Jesus, I don't even know. Five am? Dunno, 194 fucking coded on us and then 192 came back from the OR with his intestines in plastic wrap." 

"Shit. Wow. That - sounds like an awful night." 

Nellie flings up her hands. "Oh, and did I mention that we were short until eleven-thirty? Rick's plane was late or something. 192 was getting ready to crash and burn, and Chantal had a full assignment." 

Marian nods. Glances at the clock. "...Timmies opens in two minutes and I need more caffeine for this. Want me to get you a donut?" 

Nellie flops back in her chair. "You're an angel. Yes. Go ask the resident too, he worked his ass off all night and he's on this morning. ...Oh and tell him we need Ma'ar in negative pressure - he's iso 'cause he's got no immunity to our bugs, being a fantasy wizard and all, but he pointed out the fucking obvious, that he could've come down with something from over there and then we'd be the ones in deep shit." 

"Fuck I should've thought of that." Marian stares at her feet. 

"I mean, we all should've, but this whole shitshow is sure out of left field. Don't beat yourself up, 'kay? Long day ahead. Get your coffee and we'll talk." 

Marian nods, but she looks through the window at Ma'ar first. 

He's lying in bed with his eyes closed, but she doubts he's asleep. His heart rate is running high, and even from here she can see that his expression looks pained. He's on O2 by facemask now - kind of concerning - and if she squints she can make out that his temperature is still above 39 C. 

Wow, he looks awful. Not as bad as he did when she first admitted him - and in a totally different way - but this is not the overnight progress she'd been hoping for. She'd been eagerly musing on whether Nellie would have him up in the recliner chair by the time she made it in...

Marian shakes her head a little. Nothing ever goes according to plan when you work this job. 

She heads for the nursing station to inform Dr Agarwal of their new concern about infection risk, and ask if he wants a donut. 

Dr Agarwal WOULD like a donut. 

He looks mostly puzzled about the isolation question. "I...guess that's easier. I'd thought about putting him in positive pressure - for his protection - but no one seems to know if we can even do that. And we can't do both. Has that problem even ever come up before...?" 

"I have no idea! Ma'ar isn't immunocompromised, though - as far as we know - so if we're going in there with N95s I can't see how we can give him our germs." 

"And once he's recovered we can vaccinate him. Hypothermia does cause immunosuppression - I read some papers - but the study was on induced cooling longer than 24 hours. Might've made him more susceptible when he was in the ER surrounded by infection risks? But he's clearly mounting a strong immune response now. ...Oh, by the way, once you've got coffee for us, I've got to show you something really cool in 192." 

"Uh, sure." 

It's 7:00 am on the dot, so Marian hurries to get in near the front of the line. She figures she might as well get a box of Timbits too. And a couple extra coffees; if no one wants them, which seems unlikely, today seems like a day for LOTS of caffeine. 

By the time Marian gets back, Dr Zee is in. 

She's a tall, willowy dark-haired woman who looks absurdly young to be an ICU attending, but in fact went to med school only a few years after Dr Prissan. (There was, at one point, a bet, resolved by looking up her CV on the hospital website.) 

Dr Zee is, in many ways, the polar opposite kind of doctor. She's meticulous, a perfectionist, and terrifyingly productive; she works at the Civic trauma centre too, AND teaches at the university, and has her name on at least four academic papers per year. She can be impatient, sometimes, but generally only with other people's laziness; she's thorough. It's impossible to call her disorganized or forgetful, when she can pull out a protocol from some obscure study she read and have it pulled up on her iPad in thirty seconds, but she is...not always very tapped into to ordinary human time, as measured by a clock. Rounds with her inevitably take five hours. She has a penchant for disappearing into two-hour family meetings. 

Marian really likes her. She got on Dr Zee's good side early on, as a third-year nursing student working as a care aide in the ICU, part of a new mentoring program. They were both there during a memorably hellish night shift, the one time a patient had to be transferred out because the unit ran out of ventilators (since then funding was approved to buy more, so now the hospital owns enough to cover every ICU bed plus a backup ER spot).

While Marian sat there and manually ventilated the patient in question while they waited for the transfer, Dr Zee narrated every step of her bedside echocardiogram - it was an impressively disastrous one with an ejection fraction of five percent, normal being around 70% - and she must have impressed the woman by knowing several obscure facts about cardiac medicine and the ins and outs of choosing which pressor to start. 

Dr Zee is, right now, standing with her hands on her hips and berating Dr Prissan. 

"So correct me if I'm wrong, but: did you or did you not leave me a full house, no admit bed and no teles we could transfer, and also fail to tell me that one of my patients is an ALIEN. And that's leaving aside our open abdomen and whatever's going on with that poor young lady in the corner. You need to at least send me an email! I'd have been in an hour ago!" She folds her arms. "And since you didn't see fit to notify me, you'd better not try to slink off before we've finished a genuine proper handover." 

Oh. Wow. Today is going to be fun. 

(Marian is not, yet, totally sure if she means this in a good way or a sarcastic way. Possibly a mix with both. Shifts with Dr Zee tend to be productive and educational, and also nobody gets their breaks on time.) 

Dr Agarwal is looking between the two attendings with the deer-in-headlights expression of someone who feels stuck in the middle and would desperately rather not be. 

He eagerly accepts his coffee and doughnut from Marian. "Want to come look at 192? It's really epic." 

It's 7:09 am. The nurses, day and night shift both, are gradually trickling to the nursing station. 

"...Uh, in a minute, I need to -" She gestures at her rain pants and boots. The parka is abandoned on the back of the office chair outside Ma'ar's room. 

Both staff bathrooms are full, so she strips off her outer layers in the break room, rifles through her locker for her brush, and runs it hastily through her hair without the benefit of a mirror, then rejoins the resident. 

Two minutes later they're both ogling 192's insides. 

"Huh!" Marian is suitably impressed. "I didn't know you could do that!" 

"It's really rescuing his kidneys, too, look!" Dr Agarwal gestures at the Foley bag, which has almost 20 ccs of only slightly murky-looking piss in the measurement compartment. 

And then it's time for the shift-change huddle. Amélie is back, and rattles through their patient list in ascending room order, ending with Ma'ar. "...He's in respiratory iso now, negative pressure - do not play around with this one, guys, could just be the flu or it could be alien smallpox." 

"We're about to get on the phone with Public Health," Dr Zee adds. "Until then - all of you heading home now, note that you may or may not be asked to self-quarantine. Act accordingly. If you absolutely must get your McDonalds breakfast sandwich on the way, wear a goddamned mask, all right?" 

There are some grumbles and some alarmed looks. Dr Prissan is rolling his eyes. Dr Agarwal looks like he might be about to wet himself. 

"And that's it," Amélie announces. "Be extra careful with your hand hygiene today, people. Stay out of 202 unless you absolutely must." She turns to Marian. "We're making you 1:1 for today." 

"Oh. Okay." Ma'ar isn't really sick enough to justify that, but Marian isn't about to complain. 

...She so badly wishes she could be a fly on the wall for that phone call with the Canadian department of public health, just to hear some poor mid-level bureaucrat try to respond to 'our patient is a wizard from another world'. However. Bedside report is calling to her. 

Nellie follows her down the hall, Purells her hands, drops into one of the office chairs, and digs into her Timmies bag. "Wanna look at labs while I stuff this in my face, and then I'll give you the run-down?"