Nodding!!! 

"Right. Uh." Merrin pulls her chair over again, and sits. "...This might be upsetting. You had some really close calls. I'll go through everything, but - you're fine now, right? You're past the high risk period for basically all the really serious complications. It could end up being a while to get off the ventilator, but you're going to be okay." 

That is not actually reassuring at all!!! Kalorm scowls at Merrin. 

"Sorry. Uh. Do you remember the second time we took you for a scan? It was after the procedure where you were under general anesthesia, you'd woken up and we'd taken you back to the ICU, and it's when I was starting to get really worried." 

Kalorm has to spend a while piecing that together. He definitely remembers a scan happening. He - isn't sure he can pick apart memories of two separate occasions? He had completely forgotten that he apparently had a thing done under anesthetic, presumably because he was, in fact, not awake to experience it at the time. 

He makes an equivocal wiggly-hand gesture. 

"Is it just all kind of blurry? Yeah, that's not very surprising. The sequence was basically - you were constipated and your gut was stunned and not moving, so when I came in, would've been late morning, I had to give you an enema. You had a bad reaction - were vomiting and then lost consciousness briefly - so we got you stabilized and then brought you over for an urgent scan. It didn't look bad enough to justify surgery, but Diagnostics wanted more information, so we brought you to the OR and did an upper endoscopy and lower-end colonoscopy with you under anesthetic, and made a couple of tiny incisions basically just to get biopsy samples. You were pretty drowsy and sleeping off the anesthetic, and by then you were already in the early stages of shock, so I wouldn't be surprised if basically everything from then onward is hazy. But I had a serious conversation with you about the treatment options were, conditions under which you would need emergency surgery, or where we would need to put the breathing tube back in. That would've been around five-thirty pm. You agreed to emergency treatment if you ended up needing it, but with a request that I not leave. I, uh, explained that I need to sleep and you asked if I could just sleep here and I agreed. So I've been sleeping in the little pod thing in the corner." She gestures to it. 

Kalorm remembers...flashes of that, he thinks? He very vividly remembers the enema, and throwing up bile and not being able to breathe, and then waking up freezing cold on the floor with Merrin leaning worriedly over him. He remembers being lifted back into the bed, and glimpses of a hallway moving past, and being slid into the dark close tunnel of a CT-MRI scanner bed. He doesn't remember the operating room but he does remember...getting an epidural? It's a creepy concept but it worked really well. 

He vaguely remembers Merrin explaining horrifying intestinal surgery to him. It's occurring to him that he doesn't actually know if that happened! Probably not? Merrin would have said something? Also, like, probably he would have noticed if his bowel was sticking out of his belly button or whatever it was, but he's not more than 80% confident of that, things to do with his body are hard to figure out right now. 

He remembers being so cold and so tired and so scared. 

...He doesn't remember asking Merrin to stay. Didn't she say it had been three days??? Has she been sleeping in the corner of his hospital room for THREE DAYS????!!!!!! That's. Just. It - helps a lot to know, actually, it makes it feel way less like those days are just lost forever into the void, but...wow. She must be so tired. If he were her, he would be in the worst mood by now. Hospitals are BAD. (Proooooobably Merrin doesn't find hospitals as bad as he does, since she agreed to work in one, but still.) 

He wouldn't know what to say even if he could talk, which he can't, so he just nods. 

Merrin has no idea how to interpret that expression! She'll just...keep explaining? 

"Uh, after that you had some worrying symptoms, so we went to get another scan. It confirmed that you had a systemic infection - it was in your bloodstream and had gotten all over your body - and your lab results were getting worse, but you did okay during the scan proper. think we got back to the ICU around 7 pm. You started having more trouble breathing, around 7:45 we had to put on a bigger oxygen mask that would help push air into your lungs - like the ventilator but without the breathing tube - and we needed you to be awake and alert for it, but you were so tired. I explained that if your breathing or your blood pressure got any worse or if you got too drowsy to answer questions, we would need to put the breathing tube back in. I was checking on you really often, and - at some point you weren't waking up so I escalated it, got a bunch of backup in the room, and we put you back on the ventilator. At about 8 pm, so almost exactly three days ago. My prediction is that you probably don't remember much if any of that, you were in shock and already having a lot of trouble staying awake." 

...Yeah, no, Kalorm doesn't remember that at all, and digging for it feels like dredging his brain over gravel. (He's still half awed half appalled at the fact that Merrin has been sleeping in his hospital room!!! Who does that!!! ...Okay, on reflection he is not at all surprised that Merrin would agree to it if he in fact asked her, but he's kind of surprised that the hospital administration let her. It seems like the sort of thing that's against their protocols???

He nods. 

Merrin reaches in and squeezes his hand. 

"The stuff after that was...pretty stressful. For various reasons, putting you back on the ventilator made the shock a lot worse – sepsis can cause your heart muscle to get confused and stop working effectively, so your heart was really struggling. We were giving you a lot of fluids and drugs trying to help your heart pump harder and maintain enough bloodflow to your organs, but with all the inflammation, your heart was really sensitive to the side effects. A few minutes in, you started doing a very dangerous fast arrhythmia, and when we tried to shock you to bring you out of it, your heart started fibrillating and wasn't pumping blood. It took about five minutes of doing chest compressions before we could get your heart working on its own again, and, uh, I was doing that right on top of the incision from the last time we did ridiculous things to your heart to keep you alive, so, uh, if your chest hurts a lot, that's my fault. I would apologize, but it's in fact why you're alive, so."

Shrug. "It wasn't that close. Even at the worst point, Treatment Planning was 96% sure we could either get your heart beating again or maintain your circulation another way, and 90% sure you would survive and recover to leave the hospital. ...To be clear, that was given the prior distribution on further complications. At this point, you're almost certainly going to recover. But it was pretty scary at the time, and it makes sense if it's scary to hear about now." 

Okay, yeah, Kalorm can see how that could be a stressful topic to think about for some people. But it's...not, really. Merrin makes the very good point that it was before, and he had already, with some effort, made the update that Merrin would probably not be bothering to be this annoying about making him squeeze a stretchy ball if she didn't think he was going to get better. 

The main thing he's noticing is that Merrin is really impressive. And - nobody else seems to act like it? Merrin is the one person in this entire stupid hospital who isn't terrible (though he is willing to acknowledge, grudgingly, that Young Woman Medtech and Older Woman Medtech are, like, at least surprisingly minimal-terribleness, and the younger man who's here now is weird but not all of the weirdness is the bad kind.) Merrin is definitely the only person who can explain things to him in a way that isn't simultaneously exhausting to follow and infuriating. Merrin has apparently literally not gone home in three days and Kalorm isn't sure even his mother would do that for him. She wouldn't understand why it mattered if he was too unconscious to know. 

(Khemeth would understand, but Khemeth understanding everyone is creepy, and besides, Khemeth has a lot of demands on his time, and whether or not Kalorm thinks that the things he chooses to spend time on are stupid, Kalorm is not going to stand in the way of his life and wouldn't ask it of him.) 

Kalorm seems to be taking this really calmly? Merrin is slightly confused but she's definitely not complaining. 

"Anyway, it worked and we got your heart beating again and - do you want to hear a summary of the 24 hours after that?" (Emphatic nod.) "Okay. Uh. The first 12 hours were pretty tense. You were on, like, eight drugs just for hemodyna– uh, for heart and blood pressure stuff, with all sorts of complicated interactions and side effects on other organs, and you had a lot of water backed up in your lungs - because your heart was failing, but also because we were giving you multiple liters of IV fluids, which you weren't peeing out because some of the drugs tell your kidneys to retain fluid, and with sepsis your tiny blood vessels get leaky so all that water ends up in your tissue instead of your bloodstream. You were running a pretty low blood pressure for a few hours - not panic-low, but like, 80/50, even with all the drugs we were using to increase it - and your lungs needed a lot of help from the ventilator. Though - I feel like even at that point you actually looked better than you had right before you started deteriorating, in hindsight I think that must be around when the antibiotics really kicked in and we were starting to turn things around on the sepsis."

She reaches over and squeezes Kalorm's hand. "There were definitely a lot of stressful moments. Uh, Treatment Planning wanted to give you a blood transfusion to make sure your blood could carry enough oxygen around, you were a little anemic, but then that made your lungs worse, we had you breathing 100% oxygen and it still wasn't enough. We– I was asleep at this point, actually, but the overnight team gave you some bronchodilators as an inhaled treatment, and increased how much the ventilator was helping push air into your lungs. Which helped with breathing but was bad for your heart, you started doing a different arrhythmia - less dangerous, but they still had to shock you out of it. They eventually had to start giving you drugs to paralyze you and reduce how much oxygen your metabolism needed, and breathing 100% oxygen for a long time is actually kind of toxic, so they put you on a fast rate low volume ventilator mode to cause less damage to your lungs. Once I was awake at like six am, we decided to try rolling you onto your front, like we've still been doing. It really helps with breathing for some people, and I sort of had a feeling your heart would like it better too. It went well, you were doing better almost from the very start." 

It's really weird that that's a thing! Kalorm had in fact noticed that breathing feels less bad when he's facedown, even though for some reason they aren't letting him just, like, lie on his front in the bed like a normal person. Maybe all the tubes would be in the way? Which is ALSO annoying but not actually Merrin's fault. 

He nods. 

Merrin smiles at him. "That night was really the most exciting part, I think it was pretty clear by later that day that we were starting to get on top of the infection. You were still in really bad condition, though, so after that it was just two days of slowly tweaking things and waiting for your body to recover. Some major highlights, hmm... We were giving you drugs to make your kidneys get rid of more water, because we had given you a lot of fluids to get you through the night and your whole body was swollen, plus we were having to use really high ventilator pressure to keep it from backing up into your lungs. We had some excitement with your electrolytes going too low and your heart not liking it, you did some more fast arrhythmias and scared me, but we fixed the problem and you were fine. By that evening you were stable enough that we stopped having to keep you paralyzed." 

Ugh. Is that why his hands look stupid. Bodies are ridiculous and should not do all those things. 

...Kalorm's attention is wavering. He does in fact badly want to know all of the things that happened, but it was so many things! Merrin is having to say so many words and each individual piece is making sense, mostly, but he's suspicious that it's falling out the other side of his brain as soon as he has to pay attention to the next thing, and that he won't even remember most of this later. 

Merrin notices. "...I know, it's probably really overwhelming. We can go over it again later when you're not on so many drugs. The main other things that happened were - you had a reasonably good night, and by the next morning your gut problem was doing way better and we stopped giving you the stuff to wash everything out of there and started giving you a bit of sugar water down the feeding tube instead. That went well, so by the evening - last night, around 24 hours ago - we were able to start a little bit of liquid tube feeds formula. You're probably not absorbing it well," his stool is coming out the other end sort of milky, it's not undigested formula but it's definitely not normal-looking, "but that's still really good progress. Treatment Planning thinks that once you're breathing on your own and swallowing okay, you can start working toward drinking water and clear fluids like juice."

She smiles crookedly. "Not cookies, yet, being ready for solid food is probably going to be at least 2-3 weeks, but you'll get there." 

What is with the cookies?????? Kalorm is so confused. Figuring out how to ask for clarification sounds pretty much impossible, though. He can get an explanation on the cookie thing LATER once he can TALK. 

Dalthem has been pretending to check market updates, but in fact is mostly listening to Merrin, and marveling at how she managed to get Kalorm to sit there and pay attention to all of that! Kalorm's attention span and processing speed are so limited! 

...He's sort of worried that Kalorm will be DONE after this and not up for a bath after all. 

Merrin believes in Kalorm! Specifically in Kalorm's persistence with anything that he sees an actual purpose in. 

"So that's pretty much all the things." She pats his arm. "And then today we've been working on strength-building, and you made a lot of progress." 

Does she want him to do MORE THINGS now. Kalorm gives her a deeply exhausted look. 

Merrin waves her hand. "We're all done with exercising for today! It's like any kind of training, you need recovery time. But also, uh, it's pretty common to be sweaty after a lot of exercise, and while I wish we could take you for a real shower, we're not quite there yet. We can do a bed bath as our last thing of the day, and I think you'll be a lot more comfortable sleeping if you're clean. And not, you know, smelly – I know you can't smell it but I'm sleeping in here. It probably sounds like a lot of work, but we can do most of it, it'll be less effort for you than any of the other stuff we did. Okay?" 

OKAY FINE. 

Merrin will let Dalthem take the lead on it this time. He probably has good bath opinions, she doesn't want to step on his toes, and also she is, in fact, pretty tired. 

She reassures Kalorm that the cameras are off before they get started. 

Kalorm's verdict is that he REALLY HATES bed baths, but like, not because it's uncomfortable or unpleasant - sensory-wise it's actually kind of nice - just because it's terrible not being able to bathe himself. Merrin is right, though, he absolutely cannot bathe himself right now. 

He's very tired. He keeps dozing off and half-waking when they need to turn him again. 

Well, it's been a long day. For both of them, really. 

It's still only 9:30 when they finish, but maybe Kalorm doesn't need to do a whole 90 minutes supine right now, and they can roll him and get him comfy for the night? Merrin may perhaps have an ulterior motive here, which is that she wants to SLEEEEEEEP