"I said I would!" She slips her arm under his blanket to squeeze his hand. "Sounds like you had kind of a terrible night. I'm sorry." 

Despite the temperature probe still reading 39.2, his hand feels cool. Marian doesn't like that at all. She tugs the blanket aside and lightly presses down on his nail, watching it whiten, then gauges how long it takes the colour to return. It's...slower than it should be. Not horrific, but two, three seconds. 

Ma'ar lifts his head a little off the pillow, tiredly observing her do this. :You are worried about me: 

"I am! You should stop it and get better!" He's reading her mind, he'll know she's joking. "...How bad is talking to me right now? Should we use the picture board instead?" 

:Not bad. I am mostly recovered from backlash. Just...very tired: Ma'ar closes his eyes again. Behind the oxygen mask, he licks his lips. :Thirsty. Can I have water now: 

"Nellie said you've been throwing up half the night. I don't think it's a good idea to let you drink anything. Maybe we can get some more ice chips and you can have one at a time." 

Ma'ar opens his eyes long enough to glare at Marian. Then shakes his head. :I know. I still feel sick. Just. Being thirsty is uncomfortable: 

"I know. I'm being mean. If your mouth tastes bad, it might help if I, like, brushed your teeth? ...Later. I need to take your blood sugar and then the new doctor on today is coming in to see you."

She lets go of his hand and starts prepping the glucometer. ...Shit, she's going to need a lot more 3cc syringes in here if she wants to keep doing this from his art line. 

The number comes up as 66 just as Dr Zee shuts the vestibule door behind her and comes to peer over Marian's shoulder. 

"...Damn," she says, mildly. "He needs continuous dextrose, I think, but we really need to minimize his free water intake." 

Marian frowns. "Labor and delivery does those syringe-pumps - no but that's not compatible with the D50 amps... Oh." A memory flashes to the surface, from her summer as a nursing aide, they needed a fluid-restricted patient on continuous bicarb and had to take half the fluid out of a bag of saline in order to fit the requested number of amps of bicarb in it... And apparently her brain is unusually willing to consider bizarre and creative problem-solving after hearing about some of Nellie's overnight successes. 

"Could we just, like, suck everything out of a 100cc bag of saline and fill it with D50 instead? And run that at whatever per hour? It wouldn't be a lot of water." It would also be so sticky, though, Marian isn't actually sure if the regular IV pumps could handle it. "Oh, or we could put it in a bag of normal saline - or mix it with 3% saline, even..." 

"Let's get pharmacy on it. In the meantime we'll push a couple amps of D50 - have Nellie deliver those? And get that bolus going, please. Looks like his urine output is dropping off significantly, and he's pretty tachycardic. I don't want his heart working this hard when his potassium is critically low." 

Ma'ar is watching them blearily, his eyes moving back and forth. 

Okay. Right. She needs to communicate to Nellie, outside, that they need two amps of D50 right now - and the room is pretty well sound-isolated and she doesn't want to yell - in hindsight she did not entirely think this through... 

The patient whiteboard, it turns out, is hanging on a wall hook, and removable. Marian's been ignoring it; in general the ICU nurses are terrible about updating the whiteboards with their names and the date, and it's not like Ma'ar can read English or French anyway. Marian grabs the half-dried-out whiteboard marker from its magnetic seat, tugs the board loose from the wall, and writes "2 AMPS D50" in large square letters, then taps the window, waits for Nellie to look up, and shows it to her. 

Nellie nods and hops up from the desk. She's also donned a surgical mask and is keeping it on. 

Right, okay, in the meantime, saline bolus and potassium... 

Dr Zee glances around for a chair, makes a mildly irritated sound, and then does the same thing that Marian did at one point; she drops the bedrail and perches on the edge of the bed, facing Ma'ar, putting her gloved hand on his arm. 

"I'm Dr Zielinski. Your name is Ma'ar, yes?" 

Ma'ar nods. 

His Thoughtsensing is, in fact, working better. He still feels deeply drained - even Velgarth's Healers know that the body's attempts to heal from illness and injury draw from the same underlying pool of resources that Gifts do, and his reserves haven't had any chance to recover - but his abused Gift-channels no longer hurt, and Thoughtsensing at touch range doesn't take a lot. 

It's hard to concentrate, though, because he feels awful. 

Ma'ar is no stranger to pain, and he's hurt worse than this before, plenty of times. Pain is fine; pain is simple; he knows how to endure it. And the drugs they're giving him work; his bones still ache but it's muted. 

It doesn't do anything for the relentless nausea, though - in fact, he's pretty sure the pain-drug makes that worse. Occasionally he manages to burp and feels better for about fifteen seconds and then it's back. Occasional random waves of prickly heat wash over him, and yet throughout it he's nonetheless so cold. He feels dizzy and faint and so, so tired, his limbs heavy. His mouth is desiccated, his lips cracked and chapped, and his throat feels swollen and raw even when it's not precisely hurting. 

And some of the discomfort he can't even pin down as a specific sensation. He just feels...wrong. 

He tries to focus on Dr Zielinski anyway, though. It seems important. 

"Well, I'm honoured to meet you, Ma'ar. I wish it were under better circumstances, because I have a lot of questions - about your world, your magical abilities, the war you mentioned to Marian... There's so much we can learn from each other. But now clearly isn't the time." 

She looks into his eyes. "You have a military background, right? So I'm going to be very honest with you, because I know you can handle it, and you wouldn't thank me for mincing words. You're very sick right now. We...should have done better, and we didn't. Fortunately, our world has some pretty damned good medicine, if I can say so myself, and you're clearly very tough. But I am quite worried that you're going to have a rough time of it before you start to get better." 

...Ma'ar thinks that he likes Dr Zielinski. 

She's evidently been briefed about the language barrier and how Thoughtsensing works around it, and absorbed the implications, better than anyone else including Marian - she's speaking aloud but also thinking aloud, laying down each concept deliberately and clearly. It makes it so much easier to follow. 

- and, underneath that: she's smart. Brilliant, even. She's entirely focused on him, but it's as though half of her mind is pointed at the conversation, and her script for having a serious talk with her patient– except 'script' makes it sound so rigid and inflexible and it isn't at all...

And half of her is looking at him, and through him - scanning the numbers on the monitor - remembering different numbers that she skimmed in his chart, numbers measured from his blood - and most of it is opaque to him, but not to her. She knows, effortlessly, what all of it means.

(He catches a glimpse of himself through her eyes and it's...alarming. Her attention flashes through the oxygen mask, quietly noting flaring nostrils with each breath, and separately she's noticing that his arm feels cool and clammy - and she isn't scared, she's seen so much worse than this, but she is worried - there's a pattern she's seeing and recognizing, and Ma'ar can't quite grasp it but he can tell that she's worried for him...) 

"- Ma'ar. Hey." She taps his arm, then squeezes. "You with me?" 

She's noticing that his eyes are slipping out of focus, and - compensating for his slightly browner skin tone - he looks pale behind the fever-blotches on his cheeks, and he's shivering slightly despite the moisture of sweat reflecting the light on his forehead - 

:- Yes. I am listening: 

"- Thank you. I'm sorry, I know this can't be easy for you right now, it's just - there are some important conversations to have, here, and I'm worried you're going to feel even worse than this later today." 

(Marian mashes the START button on the pump for Ma'ar's potassium drip and then squeezes the bag of saline to make it go in faster. She's thinking that it's VERY AWKWARD to be developing a crush on Dr Zee for being amazing, but, apparently, this is what her brain is doing anyway.) 

Nellie raps on the window to get Marian's attention, holds up two boxes of 50% dextrose syringe-ampoules, and then points toward the vestibule-airlock. 

"Ma'ar?"

Dr Zee squeezes the patient's hand again, waits for his dark confused eyes to refocus on her.

"- Sorry. I think the first conversation we need to have, here, is around potentially-lifesaving but also very unpleasant medical treatments. I hope to hear a lot more later about your world's medicine, but... Nevermind. Here on Earth, well, we're pretty good at keeping bodies alive, but the methods we use can sometimes seem very horrific to laypeople. And...if I understood Marian's note correctly, you - initially thought you were a prisoner and being tortured, is that right?" 

Ma'ar is having a hard time following all the implicit-reasoning behind her words. But...maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's enough that the word-concepts themselves are obviously sincere. 

:- Yes. I...was wrong. I ought have updated sooner: