Oh no. It is now pretty clear that the entire on-site medical team thinks this is hilarious and is in on it and committed, and so Merrin is definitely not escaping this and there's not much point in trying. 

"I....okay. I will eat my cookies now. But, Kalorm, if we are making this deal, you need to stick to your end of it and I am gonna hold you to that. I want you to actually try really hard to eat enough calories once Treatment Planning thinks you're ready. You're probably not going to want to – your gut got pretty messed up, right? – but once it's safe, one of the best ways to help it recover faster is if you use it. Which is why we're giving you some enteral tube feed formula now, right? Anyway, I will eat my cookies and I will not complain and I will enjoy them, and if you try to complain about us making you drink juice in three days or whenever, I am going to remind you of this." 

.....Oh no did she just say all of that out loud. Time to die of embarrassment. 

Kalorm meets her eyes and nods, firmly. 

(Probably Kalorm is not going to notice if she's snickering uncontrollably, as long as she manages to do it silently and facing the other way and not letting her shoulders shake too hard?) 

"Okay. Although, uh, I - shouldn't really eat in here, it violates the infection control protocols and you're immunocompromised." 

Halthis is an experienced medtech and can manage to wrestle herself under control even if this is incredibly funny. "We could put up a plastic film divider?" she suggests, very earnestly. "Or you could eat in the other room like usual, but we can put real-time footage of it up on a screen for Kalorm, so he can confirm that you're definitely eating your cookies like you promised." 

WHY IS THIS HER LIFE RIGHT NOW. 

"I - okay - Kalorm, if you really want to watch me eat cookies, we - can figure something out - but, right now, I am not actually hungry for breakfast and also I think we had plans to get you sitting up on the side of the bed? If you're still up for that?" 

Kalorm is definitely NOT going to say he isn't up for it! ...He's a little worried it will be horrible, just because the base rate of things being horrible has been really quite high, but also it's not like he's going to die of experiencing horribleness. He...cannot remember everything about "yesterday" (which apparently existed) in full detail or in order, but he definitely has a flicker-of-a-memory where Merrin was trying to tell him pretty emphatically that he was doing better and going to be okay and not die? 

He nods. 

"Good!"

Merrin pulls up a chair and sits on the other side of him. "So. Let's plan this out. We're going to be taking it slowly, because you haven't sat up in a week and we don't know how confused your cardiovascular system is going to be about it. Your blood pressure will probably drop a bit just from your heart having to fight gravity more; it won't be very surprising if you end up feeling very lightheaded or nauseated or hot. It'd be moderately surprising if you faint, but Diagnostics is putting 8% on that which isn't trivial, so, uh, you should definitely let us know if you feel like you're close to fainting. If you don't feel like you have time to say anything, you should lean forward and put your head down on your knees, like this." She demonstrates, then sits up again. "That position will help get more bloodflow to your head, and then when you're feeling better we can try sitting up even more slowly. But it'll probably be fine. Does that make sense?" 

If sitting up makes him PASS OUT then Kalorm is going to feel like the least competent person on the planet. He nods, though. 

"Right. So the main hard part, that we can’t help you with as much, is core stability - basically, using your abdominal and lower back muscles to not fall over. I’m not worried about whether you’re strong enough, you clearly are, but I think coordination will be harder. We’ve given you a lot of drugs that affect that.”

(And probably a bunch of it is actual brain damage, but guess what Merrin does NOT consider helpful to go into right now.)

“Anyway, I think you’ve noticed already that some of your muscles have sorta forgotten how to work together and are confused about what to do when.” She pats his arm. “Which isn’t surprising or a negative update! But, uh, does mean that I might be really annoying at you. In particular I'll probably just touch places where I want you to try to engage your muscles more, because that is way easier than expecting both of us to know all the anatomical terms. Okay?" 

Fine. Merrin is allowed to be weird and poke him. NO ONE ELSE is allowed to do that. 

(Kalorm has not actually explicitly in any way communicated that he is okay with Merrin and only Merrin doing this - and Merrin was perhaps not perfectly careful about her phrasing - so she will continue to be unaware of this particular preference. Not that it's entirely surprising that Kalorm disprefers people touching him in general.) 

She nods briskly. "We're going to help you actually get from this position to sitting - I'll prompt you about each step - because it's probably going to just be a lot harder than you're used to, and we really don't want you to fall, you might hurt yourself and also I would be so embarrassed. Okay?" 

It is probably a good thing that Kalorm can't actually snicker in a recognizable way while on a ventilator. It might hurt Merrin's feelings. 

(It's still hilarious.) 

Then they can get started! 

The first thing Merrin does is put the middle section of the bed, where Kalorm's thighs and butt are, on 80%-of-max rigidity, to give him a firm surface rather than a squishy one that will wobble under him. She cranks the head-and-shoulders section of the bed all the way to a 90 degree angle. 

...Waits a moment. "Feeling okay? Any dizziness?" 

Wait, is he supposed to nod or shake his head if he's feeling okay? ...Also, Kalorm is in fact dizzy, but he's pretty sure it's because his head just moved, and it's subsiding now; he's not noticing the bad kind of lightheadedness that comes along with feeling not-exactly-too-hot. 

He shakes his head, and tries to convey that this means he does feel okay by also smiling. 

"You're doing really well." 

Merrin drops the bedrails for the lower two sections of the bed, but then actually extends the head-section bedrail into a sort of handle, which she pats. "Kalorm, can you try to reach over and grab onto this? With both hands, if you can manage it - try with your closer arm first, so you've got something to steady yourself against, and then see if you can roll your shoulder a little bit towards me and reach with your further arm as well." 

This takes a surprising amount of strategizing! Kalorm is going to try very hard to do it on his own without any help, though! 

First up: figure out how to arrange his arm on the same side as the handle so his hand is where the handle is. He thinks he wants his elbow to be...bent? And down? Conveniently it's the arm that doesn't hurt and have a splint on it. (Kalorm feels that the splint is Kind Of Unfair. It doesn't make it not hurt to grip with that hand, it just also makes that arm heavier and harder to move.) 

There is a lot of uncertain wobbling, but he does manage to get his fingers wrapped around the handle. Though, ugh, he's going to want to move them up or down so there's even room for his other hand to grip. Up seems better? He wiggles his grip further up. 

...Reaching over with his other hand should be trivial, and definitely shouldn't feel like something that he could easily get badly wrong. But he's trying to think through how he needs to move his body, including turning his torso to face Merrin, and it feels sort of like planning a 5m jump from a higher roof to a lower roof - he can probably do it, but he has to commit to the motion, at which point he can't undo it and so he'd better do it right. 

(Needless to say, most dath ilanis did not spend their childhoods regularly roof-jumping. Kalorm isn't sure what was wrong with them. He predicts Merrin has ever jumped between roofs. They're just so tempting.) 

Okay. Deep breath. TURN and REACH. 

Merrin catches his hand; he managed to reach far enough, but also missed the railing by a good twenty centimeters. "That's it. Hmm, actually, would you rather hold onto me or Halthis with this hand? It might give you better leverage." And she'll be able to hold onto him back; unsurprisingly, his grip strength is a lot weaker on the broken-arm side. "Next thing is going to be shifting your legs toward the edge of the bed, okay? You probably want to sort of wiggle one foot over a bit, and then the other, and then use your arms to pull yourself closer to me? Which will mean you're gradually rotating to face me instead of that way. Make sense?" 

Kalorm's spatial reasoning is apparently still not working very well - or maybe it's just his proprioception that's still borked - because he has to spend a while mentally translating what Merrin means. Why can't she just show him pictures. 

After fifteen or twenty seconds, he nods. 

Great! Then Merrin will prompt Kalorm to bend his knee, lifting his leg a little off the mattress, and inch his foot over toward her. Then the other foot. Then use his upper body strength to pull his butt toward her, rotating a little in the process. Then repeat. 

...It turns out he is absolutely not strong enough to do the pulling part fully on his own. Merrin transfers his weaker hand to her shoulder, so she can get in closer and use her own hands to support his back and pull him toward her each time. 

Wiggle. Wiggle. Pull. Wiggle. Wiggle. Pull.

This is pretty hard and exhausting! On top of all the cognitive overhead to figure out what he has to do to make his body work, Kalorm's muscles don't seem to want to do anything smoothly. His motions end up being jerky and wobbly, with what he's sure is a lot of pointless wasted effort to do something that should be easy. He definitely couldn't manage this without Merrin's help. 

He can feel his heart pumping harder in his chest, his breath coming faster. He's definitely dizzy, in the moving-his-head-is-bad way. But he's not lightheaded, and he feels pretty able to keep up with breathing enough. 

And then his feet are both over the side of the bed! He's rotated the angle of his body around maybe halfway, so his legs are pointing diagonally, around 45 degrees off from when they were pointing straight toward the end of the bed. 

"You're doing great," Merrin says cheerfully, still firmly holding his torso mostly-upright; even with Kalorm's grip on the railing and her shoulder, his core strength isn't quite there and he seems liable to topple backward if she lets go. "Your feet don't have a lot of leverage from this position, so Halthis is going to hold your lower legs and pull you sideways, and I'll help you rotate your torso around toward me. Keep holding onto me and the railing, okay?" 

She waits for Kalorm's nod of acknowledgement, nods to Halthis, waits for her to be in position, and then counts off. On the count of three, they rotate Kalorm around the remaining distance. 

Kalorm is getting really tired of the thing where sudden movements make him dizzy! He squeezes his eyes shut. 

He's not quite far enough toward them; his knees need to be over the edge in order for his lower legs to dangle. "I'm going to pull you further toward me," Halthis says, and - after first checking that none of Kalorm's tubes are under him and likely to get uncomfortably yanked - does this by gripping the sheet and dragging it a little closer to her. "There. You can let your legs dangle, now, the floor is right there..."