Awwwwwwww Kalorm. Merrin can definitely wait patiently to hear the rest of the story once he's up for telling it properly with the drama that it clearly deserves, she doesn't want to hear the bad version of it! 

"I'm hoping we can get as far as walking today! We aren't going to go straight to it, it's not fair to you to set you up for failure, and also you just drank an entire cup of apple juice and I really am not in the mood for you to push yourself too hard and vomit on me. But we can absolutely do the first step in a progression towards walking once your pain meds have kicked in. Okay?" 

Nod. 

Merrin helps Halthis set up equipment. They'll want the harness and ceiling lift for weight-assist again, and the support bar for Kalorm to hold, but this time they want both set up as moveable in a straight line, which requires several extra safety precautions. They're not expecting Kalorm to necessarily get very far on his first try, even though they'll start him out with basically 100% weight assist; they'll have someone right behind him with a wheelchair, so he can sit down immediately if he feels tired, and the default plan is to use the lift equipment to get him back into bed. 

...Merrin is musing that she feels kind of tempted to request a sim where she has to do NINE minutes of chest compressions, but one, Kalorm will almost certainly not consider that to count for beating his record if it's in a sim which is fake, and two, she...probably can't, actually. Five minutes is already pushing it. 

It takes them about ten minutes to get everything in place and double-checked. Is Kalorm ready? 

Kalorm is SO ready! Kalorm was getting impatient enough to consider trying to sit up on the side of the bed on his own, except that he cannot actually figure out how he would do that. 

Merrin would be very grateful to him for not doing that, but if he doesn't mention it, she will remain in ignorance that she has anything to be especially grateful for! She still smiles at him as they get the bed positioned right, all the rails down except the upper handle-rail. 

...and this time she doesn't offer her hand at all. "See if you can do it? Just hold the railing to keep your torso steady, shuffle your legs toward the side and rotate...?" 

Kalorm looks kind of stressed about this idea! 

Merrin takes a step closer. "You're probably going to feel pretty unsteady and wobbly. I think you can do it, or I wouldn't be suggesting it, but it'll be hard and I'm right here if you want to ask for help at any point. And I am definitely not going to let you fall, okay?" 

Merrin thinks he can do it! If Merrin is saying it's not dangerous and won't make something go horribly horribly wrong then Kalorm isn't going to be deterred if it's hard! 

...It's pretty hard. He has to use his abdominal muscles a lot - which are still sore, the pain medication didn't get rid of that entirely - and he's not exactly nauseated, just, way too aware of the apple juice which feels like it's sloshing around in his stomach. He...maybe wants to sit still on the edge of the bed for a minute to catch his breath and make sure it isn't about to turn into nausea on him. 

Kalorm is clearly still weak and uncoordinated, but - less so, his movements are shaky but he wasn't at any point even close to toppling over. He doesn't have a lot of oxygen reserve, though; Halthis tried leaving him at 50% O2 rather than bumping him up to 60%, and he doesn't seem to be actively in distress, but he's definitely breathing fast and his oxygen saturation dips as low as 91% before recovering. They should probably give him 60% - or maybe even a couple of minutes at 100% - before they expect him to actually take steps. 

He's also quiet and seems less impatient than she would have expected to keep going. "Kalorm?" Merrin says. "Doing okay?" 

Shrug. Hand on his stomach, then wiggly-hand gesture. (Kalorm is still catching his breath, and also feels like he has to burp and isn't quite as sure as one prefers to be that burping won't turn into surprise throwing up, given the base rate at which he seems to be doing that lately; he's not really in the mood for talking yet.) 

Nod. "You don't seem too distressed, so - I'm guessing your stomach is just feeling a bit off and you want a minute to rest and let things settle?"

(Nod.) 

Well, Merrin won't touch him until he indicates he's ready, in that case, but letting him rest seems compatible with explaining to him what they're going to do next! They actually have an upper half for the harness this time, which is easier to connect up now that his torso is upright; it'll make it a little easier for him not to wobble forward or back with his torso and lose his balance. They're going to be supporting nearly all of his weight in the harness, leaving him with just enough weight on his feet that he can get traction with them on the floor. This round won't, quite, count even as 'assisted walking' yet; it's mainly just to give him a chance to get used to coordinating his movements again, and coached on anything he's finding hard. If it goes well, they'll give him a few hours to rest, including a nap if he needs it - and want him to wait at least an hour after drinking anything, hopefully give his stomach time to empty - and then advance right away to trying with only 50% weight assist and without the torso support. If he doesn't feel ready, or if they observe that he's needing the precautions a lot and wouldn't be safe without them, they'll need to do more trial runs first. 

Kalorm is making such faces about the FAKE WALKING. But it's true that balancing is really hard and, looking at the stretch of floor in front of him, Kalorm does not super feel like getting up and walking unsupported is a thing he could do. 

(Appearances perhaps to the contrary, Kalorm actually does not make a habit of throwing himself into physical stunts that feel beyond his capabilities! He has a pretty good sense of what's well within his capabilities! It's just that normally that includes way more things than this! He is not sure he could manage not to straight-up drown in water above his head right now, and possibly he wouldn't be safe in water not above his head, if he managed to fall over. It's terrible - but, so far, the hospital staff have seemed mostly right about which incredibly stupid intermediate steps will get him closer, and Merrin at least isn't holding him to unreasonably low standards. It's oddly reassuring - even if it's awful - that sometimes she thinks he can do something and then he can't do it.) 

He lets them put the harness on him. At that point, standing up isn't even that complicated. His legs are sore in about eight different weird places as well as the normal places like his quads, and complain, but not in a way that really interferes. 

Standing! 

...

...okay what now. 

Halthis has more practice with this part and is also less brainfried from having been here for like SIX DAYS; she'll take the lead.

(Later, they'll probably want to bring in more specialist rehab personnel; there are a lot of things she doesn't know that are relevant to getting Kalorm from "can, with great effort, walk a few meters while in a weight-assist harness and with a sliding bar to grip and two medtechs right there" to "can safely walk around minimally supervised in the hallway." There's a lot of Treatment Planning discussion going on right now on the topic of finding people who Kalorm will even slightly get along with or trust, and Merrin's mother is being seriously considered just for the transferred Merrinrapport, despite the fact that she's still a trainee.) 

Anyway! They have a big animated human-body-mechanics visualization up on the wall screens, with (heavily simplified) animated muscles and joints! It's probably still kind of a lot of visual input for Kalorm to be processing, so they'll zoom in on each part one at a time: foot, ankle, calf, knee, thigh, hip, core. Walking is a nontrivially complicated process! There's a reason it takes children a year or two to master and even the best robots can't do it very well! Kalorm practiced some of the body mechanics yesterday, from a horizontal position, and hopefully that will help him get his feet to the conveniently placed temporary footprint-stickers they've laid out across 10m of floor, but now he has to add in a lot of other muscle coordination to keep his balance (though, of course, nothing bad will happen if he loses his balance, they've thoroughly ensured that.) 

(Kalorm is clearly still having trouble correlating auditory and visual content when getting explanations for things, especially when dealing with other distractions such as being vertical, so Merrin will add in her own gentle prompts by tapping each muscle area as Halthis goes through it on the visualization.) 

This is so confusing! Why are they insisting on explaining walking in the most confusing way imaginable! Why can't they just let him figure it out by trial and error that would be so much less frustrating! 

(See, the issue is that it wouldn't be so much less frustrating for the median dath ilani! Well, many dath ilanis would find this really repetitive and boring and would prefer the version that includes lots of fun puzzles, but Kalorm does not really seem like he would appreciate fun puzzles.) 

(He would INDEED NOT!) 

(Either way, Halthis is not a mindreader and Khemeth is not currently watching and if Kalorm doesn't express his frustration in WORDS then probably no one is going to notice that he would prefer less micromanagement on optimizing his body mechanics? ...Also Halthis is kind of bored and would really prefer the version with puzzles, but this is not about her.) 

Merrin is not bored! Merrin loves watching the animation, it's so satisfying, bodies are so COOL. 

- Kalorm does not seem to be loving watching the animation? Maybe his visual processing just isn't really there yet. He's also probably way less impressed than she is with the sheer delightful effort that went into making this (and then customizing it for Kalorm, because the adult body mechanics imagery is usually significantly more intricate than this, most patients with deficits as bad as Kalorm's are not trying to jump straight to walking.) 

She clears her throat. "Kalorm, would it be easier to just try and flag if you're stuck on something?" 

FINALLY someone GETS it! Relieved nodding!! 

....If he's sure, she can pause the graphics, okay. Kalorm can request specific angles or zooms if he thinks they'll help. 

They WON'T help. Kalorm just needs to pay attention to his body and proprioception - which is hard enough without stupid distractions - and remember how walking works. 

...Walking is so confusing. It's very unfair. Kalorm can do it, he can even get his feet mostly landing on the stupid footprints, but he definitely couldn't do it unsupported, he keeps getting stuck and having to think for a second before he can figure out what he has to do next, and he can't keep track of enough things at once to remember to ""engage his core"" or whatever it was they were coaching him to do when he's also trying to lift his knee and keep his ankle bent enough that his foot doesn't drag. 

...He's clearly struggling but he seems like he's trying to focus? Merrin won't interrupt. 

Yeahhhhh, asking coherent questions is annoying enough that Kalorm is just going to try to explore all the space of Things That Go Wrong With Walking upfront, and then ask the questions. Maybe once he's sitting down again, so he doesn't forget to """engage his core""", because even though he can't actually fall, it's still really stressful repeatedly feeling like he's about to fall. 

He takes several minutes to traverse a very wobbly 3 meters or so, and then asks, breathlessly, if he can sit down. 

Wheelchair is right there! Halthis will control the lift to lower him, while Merrin is right there holding onto him and being reassuring.