The surgeon considers for a few moments. "...Eight." It's impossible to tell from his manner whether he's particularly expecting this to work. 

That's mean, it needs both hands The patient can handle it. She put a necklace on herself. 

Eight, Marian conveys to her. I think there's going to be more numbers after. 

Acknowledged.

Iomedae's fingers are extraordinarily painful to move but she extends eight of them. 

And Marian will additionally relay 'three' and 'seven' and 'four' before the surgeon seems to decide that's enough. Sorry, she tells the patient. I know that probably really sucked. 

Aaaaaaaand now time to grit her teeth and wait and hope that the patient actually pulled it off and that she didn't just hallucinate the entire telepathic conversation 

It seems an entirely reasonable experiment. Are you all right?

I'm fine. I'm worried about you.

The resident wanders out into the hallway holding a piece of paper. 

The surgeon does not actually enlighten him to their location yet. He glares at Marian. "Shoo. Go sit in a conference room or something."

And then, once Marian is definitely not in earshot or line of sight of the resident and cannot possibly collude with him in some sort of absurd prank, he badge-swipes back through the double doors. "Well?" 

"Well, the patient is apparently awake and can hold up fingers."

The resident shows him some numbers. They are, in fact, the same numbers, in the same order. 

The surgeon makes a face. "....What about that. Well, either we're all insane, or that patient is telepathic." He digs a coin out of his pocket. "Heads you have to stick your head in a sink, tails I do." 

Marian sits on a conference table and fidgets. 

They sent me off somewhere to - go discuss, I guess. Wow she hates not having eyes on her patient. Being in continuous telepathic communication with her patient is a bonus she doesn't normally get but it does NOT make up for not being able to see the monitor or hear any alarms. How are you? Still breathing okay? 

Not compared to my usual expectations about breathing but I don't expect to lose consciousness again unless I try to use magic again, and maybe not even then.

Okay. Just try to rest. I know it's hard when you're in this much pain, but it'll be easier if you can keep your body's oxygen needs as low as possible. ...If you do lose consciousness there are more things we can do, we can put the breathing tube back in, but usually we would give people drugs to make it more comfortable and you are kind of absurdly resistant to drugs. 

Marian fidgets and is only slightly screaming internally. 

If you need to put the breathing tube back in I will try not to destroy it again, but I really expect I'll be recovered enough to depart in a few hours. I don't know confidently, I haven't tried to recover from injuries without miraculous healing in a long time, but I am - hard to kill. You should not be worried about me.

....Yeah, Marian is still going to be worried though. 

...The coin comes up tails. 

The surgeon sighs, leaves the resident to supervise the door and make sure Marian is safely staying put - at this point it seems like she's probably not having a psychotic break, and there are several dozen bizarre elements of the situation not explained by that theory anyway - and of people who might try to pull an elaborate prank on the ICU, Marian is near the bottom of the list, but it doesn't cost anything to keep her out of things a bit longer. 

The patient continues to look shockingly stable and fine for someone minus most of their skin. It's not just the numbers on the monitor, which would be stupid to fake, it's a deeper gut sense you get after enough years of clinical experience and seeing which patients turn the corner and which end up deteriorating. 

"I'm going to borrow your necklace," he tells the patient - which she might or might not understand, right. He goes to try to remove it. 

She does not understand! She does not resist, though, at least not once it's clear he's not going for the air-tube on which she is presently reliant. (Before that's clear she does grab at it protectively.)

Wow, he is super not going to steal her BiPAP mask, that would, in addition to being medically dangerous and seriously ill-advised, be a dick move. He'll even smile reassuringly at her if she seems to be looking at him. (He's not very good at it. Bedside manner is not the part of his job that he gets the most practice at.) 

He leaves the room. 

Marian is FRETTING. Also...kind of bored, to be honest? Which is ridiculous, but she doesn't actually have anything to do with herself aside from bother the patient over telepathy, which is sort of rude when she just told her to rest. 

...Also wow she has accidentally been rude about a completely different thing, hasn't she. 

My name is Marian, by the way, she thinks at the patient. The surgeon is Dr Keenes. What's your name? 

Iomedae. Doctor is - a title? Signifying what?

It means someone who's been to medical school and done a lot of additional training, and is qualified to make medical decisions in hospitals. ...We don't have magic or miraculous healing here, just drugs and machines and surgery. I'm a nurse, which is a lower level of training, so I do bedside patient care but there are a lot of decisions I can't make on my own and have to ask the doctor about, like what drugs are safe to give a patient. Though in the ICU nurses work with more autonomy, I kind of just made a lot of decisions about you before I had a chance to explain to Dr Keenes what was going on.  

Great, Marian is definitely coming up on an adrenaline crash and it's apparently the particularly stupid and embarrassing kind that makes her inclined to be weirdly giggly for no reason. At least she's in a conference room by herself and can take a minute to get it under control. 

They seem to have been very reasonable decisions! I do want my magic items back.

I think we can get you everything back! Some of it is just in a bag in your room, I think, and the armor is going to be mostly in the ER but I can get it or make sure someone else does. ...What do the other ones do? 

There are a lot of them, and I usually do not share everything I can do in order to make it a little harder to kill me, but they generally make me not reliant on food and water, improve my defenses against magical and nonmagical attack, make me wiser and more thoughtful, give me better luck, and so on.

That's such a ridiculous list. How. Why.

...I guess the one that makes you not need food or water would help right now - we're giving you IV fluids but we can't give you nutrition as easily that way. Marian is remembering that Iomedae still only has a handful of peripheral IVs, they never did end up finding a moment to place a central line, though at this point it's...probably not a spectacularly high priority. Marian's brain is still insisting on giving her an antsy feeling about it, though. Which one is that? 

It was one of my rings. I think you took it off. It will take a week to reacclimate to my body and will not be helpful in the short term, unfortunately. You also took off another ring, my necklace, my cloak, and my headband, I think? And then the gauntlets and those things contained in them. 

Oh no! Marian feels so apologetic and guilty now, even though there is no possible way she could have known at the time. I'm really sorry. We usually take rings off because people's fingers swell and it can cut off circulation, and also it's an infection risk. You can have it back, it's in the room. ...There's also a shirt that you had on under the armor. It's pretty gross and so is the cloak, though. 

That seems like an entirely reasonable policy for you to have. And one that didn't even kill her, though it probably would have if they'd removed the implanted ioun stones. Do you have some test other than taking off the air mask for determining whether I can safely take off the air mask and go get dressed?