Marian doesn’t look delighted about waiting while Samora draws something, but she’s gone this far trying really hard to respect her patient’s preferences and it’s not urgent on the level of two minutes to get out the door to Radiology. 

- okay, except she has no idea what the request is that Samora is trying to make via that particular drawing??? Something about tomorrow morning and - that she’ll recover then? And so will the other ICU patients? Why does she have a spiky thing above her head??? (Marian did not in fact spend enough time looking at the grid-chart to memorize all the symbols and has honestly barely paid attention to Samora’s necklace, it’s not in the way or administering drugs or reading out vital signs so it’s not important.)

Also, honestly, even if hypothetically Samora did somehow correctly know that she would recover tomorrow morning, Marian really doesn’t want to wait that long! That’s twelve hours away! Marian is not 100% sure that she’s on track to survive the night if they don’t do something about the horrifying infection!

She nods seriously, but then points at the hourglass drawing, stretches her hands apart, and tries to convey via eyebrows that that’s too long. She retrieves her own drawing and points at the CT image more emphatically.

They want her functional, but in a hurry? She's not going to be of any use to anyone until tomorrow unless they get her halfway healed and stick a sword in her hand, but okay. Heaven knows she's been the one telling other people things were urgent and they had to press on enough times. They can go to the place with the eye machine.

(She misses her party and their smooth coordination, how they shared a common language but could communicate without it in the heat of combat, how much easier it was to make decisions she could be confident in with two other people to discuss them with. She'll Sending them tomorrow and find out if they're okay.)

Marian has no idea this is Samora's interpretation of the urgency and would be so concerned if she did!

She's going to call Radiology again and double check that they are, in fact, ready for her if she heads over now. She's not delighted about doing it alone but the rest of the unit is clearly not in any shape where a second nurse can go with her, there are a bunch of alarms going off in an adjacent pod so it doesn't seem hopeful she can get one of the residents, and calling for a transport tech always adds a random wait somewhere between five minutes and half an hour. She will wrestle the norepinephrine IV pump and the pump running vancomycin onto the bed pole, pull out the monitor cassette (the ICU ones come with a tiny screen, and given that she basically only has an O2 sat and temperature reading with intermittent BPs, that seems fine and she's not going to bother trying to track down the portable transport monitor), and disconnect everything else, the saline bolus and the IV Tylenol are done. Not that it seems to be doing much about Samora's fever yet, which is pretty concerning. She shoves an oxygen mask still in its package into the holding space under the bed, just in case Samora picks the next twenty minutes to start having trouble breathing. 

- glucometer and her Styrofoam cup of test strips and fingerstick thingies plus two boxes of D50, that's important. She'll throw a sheet over Samora just because no one in the hallway needs to see all that slime. They should take the clipboard obviously. That - seems like everything she's likely to urgently need? 

The trip out of the ICU involves walking past the other two rooms in their pod, and also the rooms in Pod One.

The rooms have glass sliding doors with curtains, most of which are fully open, and there are more people in beds with tubes connecting them to various equipment. Most of them don't look particularly conscious, but 102 is sitting up in a chair beside the bed and watching TV. 101 is mid getting a blood transfusion; there are a couple of empty blood bags and two nurses busy signing off on a fresh bag before they hook it to the tubing to start running it into the patient. ...Also the thoroughly unconscious and intubated patient looks pretty awful and his head is wrapped in bandages. 

Oh no???? She can't tell what's happening to that person but it doesn't look friendly. She wants to cast Resistance on him but it's touch-range. She goes for Stabilize instead; it won't help if they're trying to kill him, but it'll make them less likely to kill him by accident before she can come back and see if he needs rescuing.

Marian noticeably gives the room a worried look - it sure looks like they could use help, it’s terrible how she absolutely cannot stop right now - and then they’re past the room and she badges them out the double doors into the hallway.

The hallway isn’t too busy.

- however, one of Marian’s colleagues from 6C Cardiac/Medical ICU is outside with a transport tech and a patient.

This patient isn’t actually attached to any especially horrifying devices! He has an IV and an oxygen mask and that’s it! He’s just a frail-looking older man who is pretty clearly in pain and having an enormous amount of trouble breathing and in general looks very ill.

Oh noooooooo and Marian called first and everything to make sure they were free, she should get dibs.

She clears her throat. “Rose? I - what’ve you got—”

Rose gives her the tired look of someone who really wishes this weren’t happening two hours before she gets to go home. “New onset respiratory distress and chest pain, suspected PE but he’s DNR no intubation.” She glances at Samora. “Uh, you?”

“Uh, trauma, post-op for perforated bowel and now she’s got some kind of horrifying infection.” And her vital signs are still technically okay and maybe Marian should let them bump her but aaaah the spiral CT to check for a pulmonary embolism takes like ten minutes and she hates not being in the ICU.

Samora is of course unable to follow this conversation but she'll cast Stabilize on the unconscious person, because he looks like he might need it even more than the previous one. (What is this place. It's either some kind of terrible temple-substitute for a country with no temples or an Evil wizard's torture-laboratory, and she hates that that's a pair of things it's possible for something to be ambiguous between.)

Rose makes an unhappy face. “Sorry, you must be the one we’re bumping - she does look like she might be septic…”

“You should go ahead,” Marian says. “If your guy’s no intubation.”

“Your girl is already maxed on norepi, though?” Rose, who’s just realized that they’re Talking About A Patient Like She Isn’t There (and has no idea that the patient doesn’t speak any English), offers Samora a reassuring smile. She glances at the monitor. “…And my guy is satting fine, apparently.” 

“Her BP hasn‘t actually gotten worse, she’s been on that all day.” Which doesn’t overall make the situation better but it does feel like it makes it less urgent? “I really think we’ll be okay for ten minutes out here, you should go.” 

…Yeah that’s all the back and forth Rose feel like doing, and the previous patient (an older woman with basically nothing attached to her except an IV) is waiting now. She’ll go in next.

Great and now Marian gets to face the consequences of her choices and stand around in a hallway for ten minutes with a patient who definitely isn’t stable.

….she’ll take Samora’s blood sugar again. How are that and her other vital signs doing?

Her blood sugar is doing its usual thing of steadily vanishing into nowhere, but the Tylenol has apparently gotten on top of her fever because it's back down to 100.2. The disgusting slime is still slimy and disgusting.

She wants to try to draw "what are your intentions towards that man" but she's very tired and sitting up feels hard. That isn't actually a good reason not to. Iomedae wouldn't have stopped trying to understand her situation and improve on it just because she was tired, when she was human. Samora draws the man lying down with a frowning face, her best attempt to replicate the eye machine, and two arrows from the eye machine: one to the man standing and smiling, the other to a skeleton. Wait, that might look like a request for a prediction rather than intentions. She accompanies both of them with smiling versions of the other woman. Does Marian want to point at one of these options? (Should Samora believe her?)

Oh noooo is she worried the other guy is dying, that’s such a valid concern, Marian wishes she could be more unequivocally reassuring about it—

- oh NO (?????) is she worried that the other nurse wants her patient to die (??????) That’s not valid at all at least a confusing worry for her to have, but a really upsetting one! 

Uh. Marian is going to take the paper and cross out the smile on the probably-nurse figure’s face beside the skeleton drawing, and replace it emphatically with a big frown and a tear under the eye.

She points at the standing-smiling version of the man and then the skeleton one and tries to convey via expressive shrugging that she doesn’t know for sure which. Just. There is very emphatically no one happy about it if he doesn’t make it!  

That was actually very understandable and they're getting good at this communicating in pictures business! She smiles understanding, mimes praying (hands folded as though around the hilt of a sword or the sheath of a knife, head bowed) and taps the smiling alive man. Hopefully Marian understands that in this case she means the civilian kind of "gods willing he'll make it" and not any indication that she has anything better than Stabilize up her sleeve.

And then she flops back on the pillow again and chews on the question of how much she believes Marian, which is mostly the question of whether she believes her own judgement to be compromised. 

Awwww Samora is really sweet. She’s going to be feeling awful and she’s still thinking about the welfare of other patients. Marian might prefer she spent less energy on drawing complicated pictures to communicate about it, but it’s still very sweet.

She waits until Rose emerges and frets about running out of D50 before their scan is over.

And then Rose is emerging! "Wow, maybe I should've let you go first after all, my guy is still satting fine. Uh, good luck?" She stops, wrinkles her nose, and then lowers her voice. "...God, is that smell her?" 

Moments to be really glad Samora doesn't speak English!! That was not enough of a whisper that she wouldn't have overheard it! She probably wouldn't have, like, been offended, because she's a lovely person (who just very understandably kicks nurses when she has no idea what's going on, but like, Marian does krav maga, if she were that disoriented and being poked with things she would probably try to kick someone too). 

"Uh, yeah, it's bad." And she'll swap places with Rose and push the gurney into the CT room. 

The machine is a lot more elaborate than in Marian's drawing, but it is, in fact, basically a long narrow table with a big hollow cylinder or fat ring at one end. 

Oh no Marian forgot that the order was for an abdominal CT with and without contrast, and therefore forgot to warn Samora that the contrast injection is going to feel pretty weird (in particular, Marian has always been told it feels warm in the crotch like you just pissed the bed, though she's never had a CT with contrast herself to confirm this.) ...Hopefully she's established enough trust that Samora won't freak out about this and try to escape or something. The contrast part of the scan only takes like two or three minutes anyway. 

She gets the tech's help to wrangle the bed up against the table, bedrail down on that side, and get the height adjusted level, and - hmm, if she gestures where they need her to go and then helps hold the IV tubing going to the central line and stuff, would Samora rather wriggle herself over? She doesn't have to, if it turns out she's feeling too tired or weak or it hurts too much - there's a slidey transfer board and Marian can also point at it and try to convey what the alternative is - but Samora is a) really strong, and b) seems like in general she would prefer to move herself rather than be moved.