Well, her vital signs aren't great but they haven't changed from their not-great baseline for multiple hours - except for her fever which actually did come down with treatment - and she looks sick but not worse. Also, importantly, Marian thinks she can probably explain 'we would like to take the slime in your body and instead put it not in your body' in pictures, and persuade Samora to let them stick an ultrasound-guided needle in her abdominal cavity. 

"Yeah, I think so." 

"Cool. You can be ready to help in ten minutes?" 

Well, it's not like she can leave the room or anything. 

...Marian will flag Kristy down yet again to ask for an additional stash of printer paper, and then draw a new diagram. This time she shows the person from the side again, so she can draw an oval in the figure's belly full of bacteria-shapes, and then sketch the paracentesis needle and tubing setup and an arrow showing where it goes, and then draw a second picture where the oval in the figure's belly is gone and the bacteria-shapes are instead filling up a jar. She brings it over to Samora and shows it to her. 

Samora doesn't think pouring the slime out of her will cure her, but she doesn't see how it would make things worse either, and the theory where they're secretly evil really isn't holding together very well in her head at this point, so sure, okay. Maybe one of the secrets of lost Azlant is that taking the slime out will make her recover faster. Maybe they just really want her to stink less. She really wants herself to stink less and she's used to this sort of thing.

It's more like fifteen minutes later that Dr Harrison actually shows up to set up for the paracentesis, which brings it frustratingly close to shift change. To his credit, he actually puts on all the isolation gear.

It’s a pretty straightforward procedure, as they go. Dr Harrison checks with the ultrasound machine where the biggest pocket of fluid is, sterilizes the skin, and gives Samora a tiny poke of local anesthetic before placing the much bigger needle. The resident holds it in place while he plugs it into one of the huge vacuum jars.

Does the slime in fact cooperate with exiting this way? (Marian is slightly worried it’s too goopy.) If so, how much of it is in Samora’a body?

It's not quite goopy enough to clog up the needle, but there's a lot of it. Nearly half a liter. Samora looks away, then looks back at it because looking away doesn't make it not be happening and she should be in a position to notice if they do anything that's definitely not what Marian communicated that they'd be doing.

(Nope, they don't do anything other than what Marian said they would, at least broadly construed! A few times the slime-flow is slowing and Dr Harrison has another peek around with the ultrasound to see if there are remaining pockets of slime and then carefully wiggles the needle in her to try to get those too. It takes, like, fifteen minutes before he has close enough to all of it to give up.)

That is genuinely disgusting! At least the smell isn’t worse, it’s all going into the sealed jar, and maybe relieving the pressure in there a bit will make it stop oozing out of her incision long enough for Marian to clean it up and get it covered again. Though maybe at this point the smell has already, like, permeated the walls? Wow this shift must really really suck for people who have, like, a normal human sense of smell.  

It's 6:25 by the time they finish. (Marian has to recheck blood sugars three times during.) Definitely not worth asking Dr Harrison about an art line on this shift, even if "q5min fingersticks" is kind of a horrible and also embarrassing todo item to leave the next nurse with. 

Presumably Dr Harrison is aware how much of a biohazard to treat that jar and tubing as, and harassing him about it would be rude as well as unbearably awkward.

She should catch up on charting but she's actually just going to sit down on the counter for a minute here, first. 

Samora would really like to know why they keep taking more tiny amounts of blood from her fingers and whether they could just take as much as they're going to need for the rest of the day all in one go, but presumably Marian has thought of that and also she looks too stressed for Samora to want to cause her any more trouble right now. She wants it to be dawn soon so she can fix herself and start solving problems instead of being a source of them.

Okay, it is in fact embarrassing to leave the next nurse with a disaster dressing situation; it didn’t seem justified to fix when they were probably making an emergency OR trip soon but now they are not doing that.

Marian, after three minutes of Sitting, imposes on Kristy to bring her a dressing change tray and this set of supplies, and she’ll do soothing arts and crafts  as nice a dressing as she can manage in ten minutes.

Hopefully she can get away with miming and pointing with her tray and pile of clean absorbent gauze pads and get a nod of agreement from Samora about starting? Also she really is hoping the site is at least oozing more slowly, though she’s budgeted a lot of her gauze just for dipping in saline and using to wipe slime.

(She’s planning to swap out her iso gown and gloves and in between wash her hands SO WELL after this. - and gloves once in the middle so she can take a blood sugar AGAIN, of course.)

Bandages and changing them are something Samora has actually heard of! She's happy to cooperate with this; maybe it will help with the stink situation. Also she's definitely oozing less after the paracentesis.

Yay! It's nice to feel like you've accomplished something! 

6:40 pm. Marian is going to give the room a really quick tidy, and then - oh, right, she should communicate to Samora that she's going home and ??someone?? is replacing her. She would be more confident in asking Kristy to go check whose name is on the board if this seemed less like the kind of assignment that anyone with seniority on the unit would try to pull rank not to get. 

She'll draw a sketch of the room (box, bed, stick figure with bandage) and a stick figure for herself standing beside the bed, and an arrow showing her stick figure going out of the room and winding around the page and eventually another bed and herself lying down. She draws a second arrow going into the box for Samora's room and another smiling stick-figure. Does that convey it? (Hopefully Samora doesn't seem upset or stressed about Marian leaving?) 

Marian going somewhere else to sleep and hopefully not get sick: good and sensible. Someone else coming in here: less obviously sensible but whatever, it's not like she'd sleep even if she was left alone. If she knew whether they were out to prevent her from dying or from trying to leave or some third thing she'd potentially have more to say. She draws a picture of the new person wearing the same gown and gloves as the earlier Marian picture, with a smiling face and no worms.

Yes! Definitely! Marian bobs her head and smiles, mostly because it's really sweet how Samora is concerned about their wellbeing but also because it seems like further evidence that she understood the earlier attempts at communication. 

- and then she needs to try to focus on scribbling some notes to organize her report. It’s been…a lot of day. She didn’t even get this patient until, like, 2 pm, and it still feels like she's had an entire shift in this room in addition to the entire shift she had before that. 

She can already hear the distant bustle of the next shift arriving at the nursing station. 

The huddle at the nursing station seems to go on for longer than usual and involve more arguing, though Marian can't hear what anyone is saying from Pod Two. (She does at one point overhear a "what the FUCK is that SMELL" from the hallway.)

It's 6:49 pm by the time Fraser comes to the door of the room. He's another of the travel nurses in Marian's cohort, a very overweight man in his forties who does "the travel nursing lifestyle", living in an RV and moving to a new hospital gig every few months alternating with road trip holidays. 

"Hey. I drew the short straw again. Heard it's your patient's fault the entire unit is iso?" 

(Samora would be intensely embarrassed if she had the full picture. As is she's only moderately embarrassed.)

Marian likes Fraser. He’s not always the most perfectly professional, but he’s impressively immune to intimidation by scary trauma surgeons and he has the advantage of, himself, not being at all scary to give report to despite having probably an order of magnitude more years of nursing experience than Marian herself. Someday Marian will be in her forties and so much cooler than she is now.

“Yeah, uh, I’m really sorry about that.”

Fraser looks over at Samora, gives her a little wave, and starts pulling on an iso gown. “Wow, she really doesn’t look too bad,” he says to Marian. To Samora, “- let’s have a good night, is that a deal?” 

Oh dear, did Marian not tell him? She says "I only speak Celestial and Taldane" in Celestial and Taldane even though she's not expecting to get lucky and especially not with the latter, and points at the pile of explanatory drawings.

“She doesn’t speak any English, sorry.” Though another thing she appreciates about Fraser is that he pretty consistently treats patients like people - even if he’s at least once jokingly threatened to call a patient’s workplace on them if they didn’t - Marian honestly doesn’t remember what it was over, just that she was vicariously mortified about it. “We’ve been communicating okay but it’s all by drawing pictures.”

"Well, shucks, I can't draw for shit." Fraser shrugs helplessly. "- And the story gets more interesting. Tell me more?" 

"Right. Uh," Marian consults her paper. "She was found unconscious downtown with massive bleeding from multiple injuries - that looked like maybe she was attacked by wild animals? - and, uh, also dressed in weird all-handmade clothes like those historical re-enactment people. With an actual sword on her." 

Wow Marian had kind of lost track of exactly how spectacularly weird this whole situation is! She's managed not to think about the sword and bizarre assortment of personal belongings in hours. Let alone the map thing. ...Which she should get to later, if she goes in anything other than chronological order here she's going to confuse herself hopelessly and miss things. 

"Huh. Okay." Fraser isn't taking notes, Marian isn't sure if she's ever seen him take notes while taking report, but he seems to be listening attentively. 

The not-taking-notes used to stress Marian out but it's not like she's observed him dropping or forgetting anything.

"Right. Uh, she was intubated in the ER, was really hypotensive - obviously, she lost a ton of blood - and they couldn't get the bleeding under control, initially thought she might be hemophiliac but the lab results looked more like DIC so that was stressful, they delayed taking her to the OR for hours."

Whiiiich in hindsight is maybe related to their later problem, though, uh, she's still not sure how Samora would have gotten FUCKED UP SLIME MOLD BACTERIA in her gut to begin with. 

"...It went away, her last coag panel was way better and I haven't had any issues with bleeding since I got her." Yes Marian is aware that makes no sense. "- oh, right, that's also when they would've noticed the hypoglycemia. Her initial blood sugar was thirty-four and she's gotten - uh, I haven't actually counted -" Marian attempts some mental math, Samora has been in the hospital for like nine hours and they probably started treating her sugars an hour in and she's usually gotten D50 at least every fifteen minutes, four times eight, "- she's gotten, like, at least thirty amps of D50."