Yeah, Merrin can tell! Honestly she should probably have had a discussion with him on the 'pain medication' question because this was super predictable! (Possibly she should have gone back up on his continuous IV infusion once he was more awake and it wasn't tanking his blood pressure, but he actually seemed fine at rest - like, probably uncomfortable, but not to the point that he wasn't willing to try taking deep breaths or that it was spiking his heart rate.) 

With most other patients, she would give him a dose now, but he said no - for whatever reason but she trusts him to have had a reason - and Merrin is not, in fact, willing to ignore that except maybe if there were an actual emergency. Which this isn't. Kalorm isn't breathing very effectively, and she needs him to calm down, but, like, sometime in the next thirty seconds. 

- She does need him to pay attention to her, though, and right now he is clearly not really processing verbal input at all, and has his eyes closed so she can't even, like, visually demonstrate "taking slow deep breaths" at him, even assuming he can parse that (though she guesses he can, even now.) 

On some instinct that she doesn't parse deeper than "well it would work on me", she pinches the skin of his wrist really hard. 

It hurts a lot less than the everything else! It's unexpected, though, and - anchoring, somehow, cutting through the confused panic of feeling like he's suffocating - Kalorm's eyes fly open and his vision is blurry with involuntary tears, but he can make out that someone is there. 

Deliberate thought isn't really working right now, but he knows what he's supposed to do. He has to take a deep breath and that will help. 

He does that. 

Merrin is so proud of him! His oxygen saturation never even quite dropped below 90% and is now recovering. 

(You know what Merrin likes? NOT having a hard ceiling as well as a floor on allowable O2 saturation! She can just max out the ventilator O2 concentration and probably this is an overcorrection but that’s FINE and she doesn’t have to THINK about it, which is good because she’s somehow ended up working for 14.5 hours again and there isn’t enough caffeine in the WORLD to cancel that out.)

She wipes Kalorm’s face with a wet cloth - he’s flushed and sweaty again - and then repeats scripted reassurance that he may or may not be attending to yet, which she tests by occasionally asking him to squeeze her hand.

He manages it within thirty seconds, by which point his eyes are properly focusing again. He also looks, perhaps, kind of freaked out.

Merrin's back kind of hurts from awkwardly squatting on the floor trying to watch the monitor screens and also be in Kalorm's field of view at the same time. For once, she is actually inclined to go check her performance incentive as soon as she's home, to make sure that Finnar and Khemeth are actually taking into account how ergonomically terrible a floor Kalorm is, especially given that - reading into Khemeth's final remarks to her - they might want her around for her Kalorm-reassurance properties for a while. 

(Though she doesn't regret making that call. It seems to have made a real difference to Kalorm's overall mood and cooperation, and it'll in fact reduce the risk that he seriously injures himself if he decides to, for example, try to get up and walk before this is medically a good idea.) 

"I'm guessing," she says gently, "that you expected that to hurt and were declining pain medication for other reasons? And also, um, that it maybe hurt a lot more than you were expecting, or the pain affected you harder than what you're used to?" 

...Nods to both. 

"That's okay. Sometimes we try things and the way they go wrong is useful information, right? Also, good news is that to me it looks like your lungs might be improving, though I suspect on day shift they'll want a scan and some other followup tests."

Pause to see if he seems to be following that? 

The last bit is maybe starting to exceed his attention span or working memory (assuming Merrin can correctly read his brief, faint confused-irritated-tired facial expression), but otherwise her speaking speed is parseable. 

Fair enough. 

"I just checked the markets again a few minutes before you woke up," Merrin says. "Probability spread on when you'll be ready to come off the ventilator are starting to tighten up."

She had not actually mentioned the "six hours, premised on Kalorm makes questionable decisions" aspect before, and that was actually the biggest update, because it's now already been six hours and Kalorm is being about as cooperative as anyone could reasonably ask because he is VERY GOOD, which Merrin already knew but which apparently the experts betting on the markets are finally updating on. 

"Anyway. 20% within 10 hours, 50% within 20 hours, 80% within 32 hours. Though obviously if the team decides you seem ready at, uh, 3:30 am tomorrow morning, and you would rather get a full night's sleep first, that's up to you. You should probably assume that we aren't going to push you on it, since I think everyone agrees you are doing an entirely adequate job of pushing yourself. You can request doing a minimum-settings trial anytime you want, and if your vital signs are stable then the day staff will okay that, but you also don't have to ask every 90 minutes. It may help you be ready a bit sooner, but there's a nontrivial risk that it delays the process, if you push yourself to the point of exhaustion. Does that make sense?" 

That gets an actual smile. 

Kalorm is now Merrin's FAVORITE PATIENT OF ALL TIME and day shift had better take good care of him Merrin smiles back. 

"I summarized some other info and Diagnostic and Treatment Planning updates but it's sort of an overwhelming quantity of numbers even for me, so I'm not going to assume you want all of it now. I made you a picture board that just has all the different categories of things we have live-updating predictions on, if you want to know, say, when we think you'll be ready to start getting up and stuff. I'll go through it with you, but I tried to pick images that would be pretty self-evident - and interrupt me if you do want new estimates on any of these..." 

The pictures are indeed fairly self-evident! Merrin did a good job of that, and maybe more importantly, of picking simple black-and-white images with nice thick lines that are easy to focus on. Khemeth honestly went too far in the direction of picking pretty illustrations, which Kalorm would normally appreciate but right now he is finding multiple colors weirdly overwhelming (and even once he had sort of noticed this as the problem, it felt incredibly exhausting to try to communicate it via his existing communication channels, so it's an enormous relief that Merrin seems to have guessed it.) 

Kalorm will in fact interrupt to point at a couple of the pictures, starting with: 

Awwwwwwww Kalorm is so motivated! It's great! That's for 'assisted walking', not just 'starting physical rehab period', and the probability spread is still pretty wide, but the 80% end has come down a bunch, mostly updating off Kalorm's sheer degree of intensity about the arguably-pre-rehabilitation effort toward getting off the ventilator. 

"20% in 6 days, 50% in 9 days, 80% in 16 days. The more-than-two-weeks scenarios are mostly going to be accounting for complications." She grins at him. "If you manage it in less than six days, I think you'll earn a cookie. ...For when you can have cookies. Median estimate on that is still three weeks, your gut got hit pretty hard while we were trying to stabilize you." 

...She thinks this is probably a thing Kalorm will roll his eyes about but, like, in an amused way and not a "that was obnoxious of you" way??? Hopefully??? It sort of just slipped out, because Merrin is very tired. 

Yeah no that's basically exactly Kalorm's response! 

He will also point at: 

(The mouth swabs do help, briefly, but Kalorm is already so tired of being thirsty.) 

Merrin can't help grinning again. "Probability spread on when you'll be able to tolerate clear fluids is now 56 hours, 4 days, 7 days. Note that this means more, like, we can give you a cup of juice and let you drink as much of it as you want, without that making anything worse - though that does rely on you trusting your body's limits and not chugging an entire cup of juice at once if you're nauseated, please don't do that, nobody will have a good day. Anyway, though, if your swallowing reflex is fine, then we can start giving you some ice chips to suck on within a few hours after you come off the ventilator, and I bet that's going to be way sooner – I mean, I actually put a bid on that market, I thought the 80% was too high, so if you try hard then I will get money." 

(Not, like, very much money, Merrin does not as a general rule ever place large bids on any markets let alone, like, her own patient's, but she is going off the sense that she must have some kind of illegible private information because, sorry, 32 hours for "80% that Kalorm is off the ventilator" is way too high, sure there's a tail of 'something goes wrong' outcomes but her intuition is insisting that it's more like a 1 in 20 than a 1 in 5 risk.) 

Genuinely happy-looking Kalorm! 

Oh good! If Kalorm hadn't realized that getting off the ventilator was the key to getting ice chips sooner, maybe he will be even MORE motivated and Merrin will get money he's probably already the correct level of motivated and Merrin really should not try to throw social pressure at it, why would that possibly help. 

"Anyway. Pain levels okay right now?" She waits for him to nod. "Good. I do think we'll need to figure out a way for you to tell us what your issue was with the drug we've been using, since it sounds like it isn't 'you don't need it', and I'm not super comfortable with you trying the minimum-ventilator-settings again unless we have a way to make sure you don't end up in so much pain that you stop processing verbal input. Buuuuuuut I've been on-shift for a pretty long time and I, uh. Really actually need to hand off to my day-shift replacement and get some sleep. So I'm going to call him in here for that in a minute. Is there anything else you need first?" 

Kalorm has additional questions but all of them are going to be intractably frustrating to ask via terrible drawings– no, wait, actually, if there's a time display somewhere he can point at...? 

Merrin spends a while trying to figure out what he's attempting to point at! (His weakness and lack of coordination, and the fact that the time display in his field of view is near the ceiling on the opposite wall, means that it's sort of hard to tell.) 

"- Oh! Uh, it's about 7:40 am right now." 

Kalorm makes a wiggly "sort-of" hand gesture. Points in the vague direction of the time display again. Points at Merrin. 

(Pointing is really exhausting, it turns out. Kalorm's arm is tired. This is a stupid problem to be having.) 

Oh no what does he mean. Merrin is too tired for nonverbal-communication-puzzle-games, particularly as carried out by someone who (through no fault of his own! he's trying very hard and recovering faster than anyone really expected!) currently has the fine motor skills of a toddler. 

"Uh, sorry, I don't know what that means - do you want paper, or the picture board...?" 

Both of those sound MORE tiring. Kalorm is pretty close to giving up and just not knowing the answer to this question until Khemeth is back. 

(He is RESENTFUL of how important it is right now that his brother has a detailed accurate model of him. At least he's family, though, it's better than the stupid flaming medical prediction markets having a detailed accurate model of him.) 

One more try. Emphatic pointing at the time display, at Merrin, and then hand gesture toward the door, finger-walking away from himself, finger-walking back...

??????????????

(Merrin feels terrible that she can't seem to figure this out but she is so tired right now.) 

Apparently Personnel – and the reference prediction markets on "what is Kalorm trying to communicate this time", which despite the fact that they almost never get the right answer before Merrin, are still running albeit with fairly sparse bids – are actually going to get this first! It's perhaps easier because the current Personnel has only been on for an hour, rather than coming on fifteen hours, and because he already has shift schedules on his mind - including, in fact, for the specific question they're >95% sure is what Kalorm wants to know. 

Message to Merrin: [He wants to know when you're next going to be on-shift. Which I realize we haven't decided yet, and we would have preferred not to push you to commit to anything now before you've slept, but he might be reassured if you tell him you can visit tomorrow morning even if you're not rested enough yet for a full shift?] 

Oh. Wow. Okay. That is simultaneously ADORABLE and really touching, and also pretty stressful??

"Um, are you asking when I'll be back?" 

(Emphatic nodding!) 

"Ummm. I don't actually know when I'll be fully rested enough not to be fatigue-impaired, and I shouldn't be the main medtech responsible for you while I'm still tired, but - I can at least come by for a few minutes tonight when I wake up, and again whenever I next wake up after that?" Her circadian rhythm is going to be a CONFUSED DISASTER for a few days anyway; she's going to take the circadian-rhythm-correcting meds, obviously, but apparently Merrin has a WEIRD METABOLISM because they've never worked that reliably for her, and also she's sort of inclined to irresponsibly sleep for twelve hours and then have a really hard time getting back onto a day shift schedule. "They moved my apartment module over to the hospital, I'm close by."