He stares muzzily at her, and then starts coughing again, his whole face twisting in an expression of pain. 

She bumps up the pressure support on the ventilator without actually thinking about it - it'll help him take deep breaths and hold off on a coughing fit until she's at least given him some pain medication - and then remembers that she's not supposed to be doing medtech things, and makes an apologetic face at Kerrin. 

"Pain medication and suctioning?" she asks him, making sure to speak slowly and clearly and loudly. "With nausea medications? There's a new one. We hope it'll work better." 

He's clearly struggling to focus, even as simply and carefully as she's speaking right now, but after a couple of successful deep breaths - and Merrin repeating herself a second time - he manages to nod. 

Kerrin can administer drugs, and wonder how Merrin does that. 

[Do you want me to suction him? Halthis explained it to me - I think we both have more experience than you on doing it more comfortably for patients, when it's not an emergency] 

No he's HER Kalorm and only Merrin is allowed to torture him that's stupid, Merrin's brain, she is NOT EVEN HIS MEDTECH tonight and also Kerrin almost certainly is way better at things. 

She nods, and then is not really sure what to do with her hands and also the entire rest of her body. She feels so in the way right now. 

Kerrin waits forty seconds for drugs to take effect - the new nausea drug won't have fully, but she can already see Kalorm's body relaxing as the bolus pain medication hits him - and then suctions him, bringing to bear every decade of hard-won skill and like five minutes straight of tips from Halthis. 

Merrin will in the meantime explain that there's a new medtech, her name is Kerrin, she's here for the evening but Merrin is also back for a while. 

Being suctioned is definitely never going to be Kalorm's favorite thing, but new-medtech-whose-name-he-already-forgot is, admittedly, also better at doing this non-horribly, and it's about as bearable as he can expect. He can feel that he's coughing up a lot of phlegm. It's...kind of satisfying, actually. Though he also sort of feels like there's more stuff in his lungs that isn't coming out, which is frustrating. 

He's also still pretty groggy, fighting to shake off the remnants of confusing unhappy dreams, and he's pretty sure he knows where he is - still in the stupid hospital in stupid Default - but he wishes he had the slightest idea how many days it had been. Probably not that many days? If Merrin is still here? He thinks he remembers right that she works for Exception Handling, who presumably have other things for her to do. 

Merrin squeezes his hand and tries to figure out whether he's actually seeming more groggy or disoriented than before, or if it's just that she was hoping to see a huge improvement and so far hasn't.

[Uh, maybe don't jump straight to doing mouth care] she interrupts via the subvocalization microphone, when it looks like Kerrin might be about to do that. [I know he'd agreed on that with Halthis, but he hasn't even really met you yet, right - I don't think he's processing very well yet, he seems out of it - and I think you, ummm, need to build that trust with him first. So uh it might be better if you wait for him to indicate if he wants it? Or at least until he's caught his breath and is indicating that he can follow questions] 

Merrin is so earnest. Kerrin nods, and just dabs the saliva from around Kalorm's mouth with an absorbent soft tissue. 

Kalorm's stomach is unhappy but he's not actually very nauseated. His lungs don't feel entirely okay or normal but he can breathe. 

...he's pretty sure there are supposed to be other things after this? What other things? He needs to...do required things so he can try breathing with less help...needs to change position, which sounds nice actually, his body feels stiff and uncomfortable - and there's another one, oh right, his mouth tastes disgusting and is yet again producing saliva he can't swallow.

Kalorm clumsily tries to gesture for both of these things. 

They can definitely arrange to do that! Kerrin will take the lead on mouth care, but let Merrin do the talking. They should coordinate and help each other with turning him. 

"Kalorm, you're due to turn on your right side, but I know that's a little harder for breathing, and the prediction markets think you'll probably be able to get off the ventilator on this try, after you do some respiratory therapy exercises - we'll talk about that in a minute - so we don't want to jeopardize that. I think it should be all right, based on on how it went with Halthis and your improvement trajectory, but I need to know how your breathing feels right now, first. Good, bad - maybe lift your hand higher if you're having more trouble, lower if you're not having trouble?" She demonstrates with her own gesture. 

That was so many words. 

Tired Merrin sympathizes! That was so many words. 

"Kalorm, do you think your breathing is good enough that you can lie on your bad side - on the right - and still be okay to do some breathing exercises that might be hard and then do another run of breathing with less help?" 

See, that was perfectly sensical! Also a yes-no question. Yes-no questions are way easier than trying to figure out quantities of something and then also move his arm around. 

He tries to actually think about this (it takes him like twenty seconds, thinking is hard) and eventually nods. 

"Great!" Merrin pats his arm. (Gently.) "You're doing really well. Let's get you comfortable - it'll be so easy for you this time, Kerrin is really good at this, okay..." 

It's kind of sweet when Merrin gets weirdly excited about other people being good at things. Kalorm lets them turn him. His hip is achy again and twinges when Merrin grabs him slightly too forcefully to roll his weight toward her. He tries not to struggle. 

He is, in fact, very comfortable once they get him tilted slightly toward his right side, with strategically arranged pillows keeping the weight off sore spots. Kalorm is starting to get very tired of not being able to move on his own. 

...some more of the stretching exercises would be nice but asking for that seems hard, since apparently Halthis vanished at some point while he was unconscious after the Badness happened. 

Halthis did give a handover report! A very thorough one! Even if Kalorm was not awake at the time. And Kerrin didn't exactly slack off after that, she has reviewed the treatment history in a lot of depth, even if she spent the last 45 minutes talking to Merrin instead. 

"Kalorm, would you like some range of motion exercises while Merrin explains the treatment plan options for getting your lungs ready for the minimum settings trial?" This time she makes a very deliberate effort to speak more slowly. Kalorm seems to be processing more slowly than he was when with Halthis earlier in the recordings she listened to. Maybe it's because he just woke up. 

That almost gets a smile from Kalorm! (Smiling is annoying; the tube is in the way.) He can have his aching calves gently stretched while he listens to whatever Merrin was going to explain. 

"Right." Merrin shifts so she's not in Kerrin's way, but where Kalorm can comfortably see her and she can also lean back in her (really quite amazingly comfy) floor chair. 

And she arranges so that one of the big LCD screens - the portable one on wheels - is also at a nicely visible angle. 

"So. You were having trouble breathing mostly because you breathed in a lot of seawater when you got pulled underwater, and you have pneumonia – a lung infection. That's why you had so many lung secretions to cough up and we have to suction you. It's getting better, but some of the mucus got sort of sticky and dried out, and so it was stuck down there and actually blocking air from getting into some little areas of your lungs. That's why your scan from before you woke up looked like this." 

She toggles the controls to pull it up - an adjusted 2D image seen from the front, not a CT slice - beside a healthy control image, so she can point out how it's hazy grey rather than dark, with patchy areas of white like clouds that get denser toward the lower lobes; the bases of his lungs are so soggy and collapsed that they sort of fade into the white of his solid organs rather than forming a clear contour. 

"- And here's your most recent scan from after you did the last trial and then the lung-expansion ventilator program." It's still not great, but you can at least sort of pick out lung bases, and there's still haziness but far fewer patches of cloudiness. 

"We want to get that looking even better before we make you breathe on your own, but that means we need to help you clear out the really stubborn mucus that's been hanging around way down in your tiny bronchioles for days. Unfortunately none of the ways to help with that are comfortable, because of your injuries. They'll be more or less painful, and more or less effective, and some are faster. So I'm going to explain some of the different options."

She pauses, waits to make sure he's still making eye contact and seems to be tracking. "Following so far?" 

Scans of lungs look so weird, but kind of neat? And Merrin continues to be good at explaining things so that it's not incredibly confusing. Kalorm grimaces - he can feel the stupid "stubborn" "sticky" gunk in his chest, that his body badly wants to keep coughing about but given how hard he already tried, he's pretty sure that coughing even more won't help and will hurt. 

He nods. 

"Right. Good. So what we'd normally do is a sort of physical therapy that basically uses gentle percussion and vibration on your chest, and changing position, to help loosen things up in there so that you can manage to cough it up. We would combine that with having you inhale some drugs that help make the mucus thinner and more watery – you actually got some of that just through the ventilator when you were asleep, earlier, so if you noticed you were coughing up more stuff a couple minutes ago, that's why. The issue is that you have cracked ribs from the accident, and we hacked open your sternum and then wired it back together, so doing this by applying force to your chest is going to be really, really uncomfortable, and getting you into all the usual positions from here will be a hassle. I know you can be patient with that, if it's important, and obviously we'll give you a bolus of pain medication, but I did want to warn you." 

The downside of extra pain medication is one that Kalorm is facing right now; he's sleepy, and his head his foggy. He knows it'll wear off soon, and he can push through, but it doesn't really make him enthused about needing more drugs. 

He nods to indicate that he understood, though, and then tries to gesture for Merrin to keep going. 

Kalorm is clearly drowsy and trying SO hard to follow anyway and Merrin appreciates this! She smiles at him. 

"We can also do less intense versions of that - the usual way is a vest that goes around your whole torso, and we would either temporarily lift you back into the bed, or we also have special equipment for mobile patients who need physical therapy for breathing, but we can use a sort of vibrating handheld probe, and only turn you side to side. It'll be less painful, but it won't be as good for clearing your lungs out, and it takes way longer - the standard version would already take half an hour total, since we need to give you inhaled mucolytic drugs first while you do deep breathing exercises." 

Kalorm doesn't want to do the STUPID version of the thing! He scowls at Merrin.