"Nightmares, apparently - he was screaming in his sleep, and did some accidental magic when Nellie went to wake him." 

"Oh shit. Poor Ma'ar." She looks down at him - eyes closed, skin blotchy-pale with fever, his forehead damp. "- Oh. His temp is down a bit, finally." 

Still at 38.8 though.

"I'm not liking how stubborn this fever is. Antibiotic doesn't seem to have touched it." She frowns. "...I'm inclined to go with my gut and just start him on Tamiflu now. His symptoms are pretty flu-ish, and there's not an obvious site for a bacterial infection this bad. His sputum doesn't really look like a bacterial pneumonia, to me." 

"That makes sense." A plaintive alarm interrupts her. "...Oh, right, I guess I should get the old tube out and put him back on the facemask." Ma'ar managed fine during the actual tube placement, but he's desatting now. Probably having tubes in both nostrils right now is not helping. 

"We'll have to do a– did we ever get that chest X-ray, it was supposed to be stat." 

"...Dunno. It sounded hectic." 

She writes 'CHEST XRAY???' on her whiteboard and shows it to Nellie. 

Nellie makes a face, holds up both hands in a sheepish shrug, and mimes holding a phone to her ear, then goes for the actual phone. 

Marian un-tapes the soft feeding tube as gently as she can manage, and slides it out. It doesn't seem to bother Ma'ar. She puts away the oxygen cannula and replaces the mask.

And then turns it up to 60% O2 a minute later because he's still hovering at 90% exactly. 

Nellie scrawls on a piece of paper and holds it up. XRAY COMING. 

Dr Zee surveys the room one last time, then takes a step toward the door. "Unfortunately, I had better get back to the rest of this unit. I'd rather you stay with him, though. You got a phone extension?" 

"...Uh. No. I should get one." She's now on day two of having a sufficiently hectic and awful shift change that she didn't manage it. 

"I'll have Nellie bring you one. Call me ASAP if he's deteriorating in any way, especially if he starts popping any arrhythmias on us." 

Dr Zee takes her time with de-gowning in the vestibule, washing her hands thoroughly all the way to the elbows. And she exchanges the used-and-contaminated N95 mask for a surgical mask before she slips out. 

Ugh. Despite being less crowded, now, the room suddenly feels claustrophobic. The N95 mask elastic is digging into the tops of Marian's ears, and her face is uncomfortably sweaty under it; she's also somehow managed to get a smear of forehead-oil or something on her face-shield visor, and she can't take it off. She's too warm in the stupid gown. She very badly wants the rest of her coffee and she is banned from leaving the iso room. Her feet HURT and there's no CHAIR. 

Fortunately, two minutes later she's in possession of one of the cheap hospital mobile phones, and she can directly call the phone outside - within-hospital you don't need to dial the main number first, and its extension is right there on a sticky label - and request a chair from Nellie. And then she parks herself by Ma'ar's bed and takes some hasty notes on her sheet of scratch paper. Maybe she should get a computer-on-wheels in here too... 

Ma'ar dozes restlessly. A bout of coughing wakes him, and he drowsily begs Marian for ice chips. His telepathy seems less coherent; it's not even all in actual words. 

The supply-drawer doesn't contain any of the proper mouth care kits, let alone a toothbrush kit, but Marian finds one of the pink flavoured sponges in a drawer, and wets it to clean Ma'ar's mouth out a little. She tries to be very gentle; he's seemed to especially dislike having his mouth poked at. 

This time, he puts up with it without complaint. 

Marian does not actually find this reassuring. 

The X-ray tech arrives, has an irritated conversation with Nellie about how nobody TOLD him this was an isolation room, and then grumbles through donning the protective attire and putting a plastic cover on the X-ray machine and board. 

Ma'ar is concerningly passive and uncomplaining about this as well. 

Marian is not a radiologist, or particularly expert at reading X-rays, but she's looked at a LOT of chests. Ma'ar's is a long way from being the most impressively awful set of lungs she's seen, but he's not looking great either. Both lungs have areas of diffuse patchy white, as though half-obscured by mist. 

Marian extracts her stethoscope - she didn't think to bring one of the disposable isolation stethoscopes, and besides they suck - and listens to his lungs. He's not actually sounding too rattle-y in there right now, that last bout of coughing pretty thoroughly cleared his backlog of upper-airway gunk, but he's getting very decreased air entry to the bases of his lungs. And some new fine crackles, like the sound of rubbing a lock of hair between your fingers right beside your ear. Which means his alveolae are collapsing between breaths, the bottom of his lungs not fully open to ventilation - or could mean fluid, the start of pulmonary edema. They did give him a LOT of fluids... His hands are noticeably a bit puffy from it. But he doesn't have right-sided heart failure, it shouldn't be ending up in his lungs - 

- he's not peeing that much. Marian hasn't flipped the container since she got in, and it's nearly eight now; in over an hour, he's put out 40ccs. Sufficient not to be worried about outright kidney failure, but he's had three litres of fluid boluses in the past few hours, and his body seems to be hanging onto it tight. 

Marian is streeeeessed. 

She watches him with her eyelids half-down, letting the details blur out, just noticing how he looks and how her brain feels about it. 

...Her brain feels DOOM.

Individual vital signs are tolerable, but there's a pattern. His breathing isn't that visibly laboured, but it's too fast, 23 breaths a minute according to the monitor screen. His sats are 96%. Which is fine, except he's on 60% oxygen, and last night he didn't even really need his two litres a minute. His heart rate is 118, despite the fact that he's lying perfectly still, apparently sleeping again - and his blood pressure is also tolerable, without any pressor support, but 102/52 isn't amazing and it's especially non-reassuring with that elevated heart rate. His temp is 38.7, which is an improvement but still objectively a pretty high fever. 

He's also throwing ventricular beats again. No couplets, yet, so it's not setting off the alarm, and with his heart rate that fast, it's easy to miss if she's not looking directly at the ECG tracing. 

She calls Nellie on her phone, mostly because it's better than sitting here and unproductively fretting. "Can you see if the labs are up yet? Oh, and any idea if Dr Zee looked at his X-ray? It's not great." 

"Dunno." Nellie rubs her eyes and stifles a yawn. "Can go bug her. Think she's stuck in 198 with the poor asthma kid." 

"Nellie, I... Maybe I'm overreacting but I have a really bad feeling about him." 

"S'not just you, kid. What's standing out? That I can tell the doc?"