Blink. "The sandwich meme?" 

"Have you not seen it, it was getting shared all over Facebook and there are all these spinoffs of it - here, one second, I think I can probably Google it... Uh, I think this isn't the original but close enough?" 

Here is the sub alignment chart meme for Marian's enlightenment! 

That is not enlightening!!! It sure is a grid with the right number of boxes but other than that she's not really seeing it! Why would her patient be choosing to communicate in baffling meme format??? It's going to be really upsetting if she turns out to not get the reference her patient considers critically important because she hasn't spent enough time on social media this year

...It feels like she's missing something but she's way too tired for this and needs to call Radiology and find out when they can take her patient. 

It's probably not actually the sandwich meme but it would be sufficiently an incredible story if that turned out to be the solution to their surprise puzzle of the day, that the resident is going to go over and show the patient the picture up on her smartphone, and then make a questioning face? 

Oh no, unfamiliar person! But this one also doesn't attack her, so that's fine actually. She will look at the new person's strange device. 

. . . Why do Arcadians represent their alignments as bread?

Samora stares intently at the chart. Bottom right looks more like a sea monster than bread, bottom middle is unidentifiable but probably inedible, bottom left is . . . food in a box? Food in a trap? Food being eaten by something? Middle and middle right are probably food but questionable. Top row and middle left are all on a unified theme of wholesome-looking bread and vegetables. Given that, her best guess is that these people also tend to draw the Outer Planes with Good on top and Law on the left. She wobbles her hand to indicate uncertainty and then tentatively pokes the top left box, watching the woman's reaction carefully.

The woman smiles and nods at her, mostly because it’s neat that this interpretation wasn’t immediately rejected, but - is still not actually sure how much it solves the mystery here?? The sandwich meme chart isn’t a coherent question?

- also there’s an alarm going off that definitely sounds like the CRRT machine for the unstable patient in the pod next door and she should probably go.

Kristy brought her everything she needed from the clean utility and med room, and Marian is going to hurriedly hang fluids and vancomycin and IV Tylenol (what’s Samora’s temp up to?) and then - probably it’s least stressful and scary to start with the blood sugar fingerstick, since her patient has at least seen the glucometer in action before. Also it's actually pretty time-sensitive and she really hopes she doesn’t have to spend five minutes doing bad drawings to reassure Samora about it…maybe she can stick her own finger first, to show that it doesn’t bleed very much…?

Samora's temperature is up to 100.8, and she puts up with the finger stick (45 mg/dL) largely because, once she paused in her efforts to establish communication with these people, her level of exhaustion started catching up to her. She doesn't, generally speaking, need to sleep, and it's not safe to sleep here, but she switches from sitting up to lying down.

She's probably got dungeon fever again, hasn't she. It would explain the foul-smelling slime. Another thing to deal with when she has spells. She has no idea what time it is, but you know what they say, it's always less than a day until dawn.

Wow she does not look great– ...okay yiiiikes at least part of that is because Marian really should not have waited this long to check her blood sugar and now she's playing catch-up again. What if she gives two syringes of D50 this time and then sets an actual fucking alarm on her phone for five minutes from now, what if that. 

…And now she needs to try to communicate why it’s very important that they take some blood cultures, which is going to involve poking her twice and removing a much more alarming quantity of blood.

She’ll take a piece of paper and draw on the counter so she can take her time at it. Person with stitched-up wound leaking slime, magnifying glass schematic pointing to a circle with stylized wiggly bacteria in it? Then she’ll draw a stylized needle and bottle (she can clarify by holding up the actual sample bottles) - arrow to a Petri dish and zoom in on bacteria - then an IV bag of drugs and a Petri dish of scribbled-out dead bacteria, and st the bottom a drawing of a person sitting up and smiling with no more wound leakage?

…Ugh, that’s probably not clear at all to someone who didn’t seem to know what a blood pressure cuff is? Marian just can’t think of a different way of conveying it other than silly metaphors that only feel appropriate for six-year-olds. Eh, she’ll try it and see if Samora seems reassured?

. . . They think she's got worms and want to do something about the worms? Samora remembers the Worm-That-Walks and thinks that's a very reasonable desire, assuming Marian is telling the truth about wanting fewer worms rather than more.

She's starting to entertain the hypothesis that the box on wheels from the earlier drawing represents one group of people, maybe related to the necromancer from the dungeon, who initially grabbed her and put the thing in her guts, and the building with the + on it represents a different group of people who rescued her from the first group and are trying to undo what they did. It would explain why she still has her holy symbol and her headband, which are definitely the highest-priority items to grab when rescuing her if you don't know she has a backup tattoo and can't tell a masterwork silver sword from a merely good sword, and why they're doing things that make her feel better. It doesn't explain why they haven't brought her to a priest and had her fixed up. Maybe this part of Arcadia is like Rahadoum, and these people object to that and want a priest? It would explain all the effort they're putting into someone who fundamentally isn't that important, if she's the only priest anywhere nearby. Or she could be totally and completely wrong.

She lets Marian take her blood and then considers going for the pencil and paper again to explain how healing works. In the case where they know how it works but not that Samora is an empowered priest, or vice versa, and they can't be trusted, it's a bad plan. In the case where they know at most one of those things and are trustworthy, it's a good plan. If they know both of those things it's a waste of effort whether she trusts them or not. That seems to add up to don't explain, maybe even don't ask how long it is until sunrise, because they can't make sunrise come faster but could keep her unconscious through it. Instead she points at the catheter setup where it's trailing out from under her hospital gown and gestures an emphatic ''???!".

Oh. Fair question, honestly. Though it's going to get pretty frustrating if she has to explain everything by playing Telestrations before she can take her patient for a really urgent scan  though if Samora does start crashing and going into septic shock, this will again become a self-resolving problem

Marian can pick up the catheter bag from where it's hooked to the bed and show her the accumulated pee in it? 

...Possibly that's still, like, insufficiently as an explanation for why. Marian will flip her paper over and do a much hastier drawing of a person flopped with their eyes closed on a bed in a wavy puddle of pee, with a sad face beside it, and then a person with a catheter bag instead and a happy face beside it? 

They thought she was going to piss the bed in her sleep?? Why would she do that?? She draws a (very low-detail) sketch of someone using a chamber pot and mimes pulling the catheter out.

Because she was unconscious! Also her blood pressure is still pretty marginal and her blood sugar keeps tanking and she has an infected abdominal wound that must hurt like hell; Marian does not at all feel comfortable about letting her stand up, and would have thought Samora would prefer not having to move too much.

(Also there’s the much more difficult-to-draw concept that when people are very sick - especially with hypovolemia and persistently low blood pressure followed by an infection unpleasantly near their kidneys and likely to progress to sepsis if it hasn’t already - you want to closely monitor their urine output. Though it’s true that Marian hasn’t had any specific reason to be concerned, so far, Samora’s hourly urine output has been basically fine even with a systolic blood pressure in the 80s.)

Ughhhh. Marian is - not sure this is a battle worth picking? But also it's not actually that she feels totally comfortable on a medical level discontinuing the catheter (and, among other problems, possibly having a sicker, more disoriented Samora later trying to get out of bed to pee when she really, really shouldn't, not to mention missing early signs of her kidneys crapping out from the infection), it's just that it's socially awkward to push back for reasons the patient probably won't follow, and she's really tired of navigating - all of this - and she just wants to get to the freaking CT scan but that's kind of a lot to ask of a patient who clearly continues to be really stressed about the entire hospitalization experience. 

...She's going to sort of nod and shrug and then hold a finger up in a "wait" gesture and go to the door. "Kristy! Um, can you go ask a resident if - the catheter is really bugging her and I think she'll have an easier time with everything else if we discontinue it - can always put it back when she's under in the OR if it seems important..." 

Kristy looks a bit nonplussed but nods and goes off, and Marian heads back over to Samora's bedside. Dooooes Samora seem to have picked up on "we're talking about removing the catheter but need to confer about it" or does Marian need to draw that too? 

No, she gets that these people are working together and consulting each other. And she's willing to wait, because she isn't going to be able to put up a reasonable escape attempt until tomorrow even if she determines one is going to be necessary today, and doesn't want to make it clear how highly she's prioritizing "having as few things as possible between her and the ability to make a run for it" until and unless she's doing that. What's the next weird thing Marian wants to do?

Oh good that’s slightly less awkward than Marian was afraid of!

She needs to take a sample from the drains, which she’ll convey by pointing at the same infection-treatment-drawing and then miming what she’s going to do with the specimen container and the drain before she actually does it? Hopefully Samora won’t object to this? It feels like it should be fairly obviously related to treating the infection and also not too threatening?

(She double gloves to do it, so she can shed one glove layer and still be gloved to put the specimen jar in a biohazard bag. Marian is not normally that easy to gross out but the slime is doing it! It's really concerning! Possibly the patient should be in contact iso, it would be one thing if it were contained in the drains and dressing but there's kind of a lot of slime...) 

She gets those sent and now she needs to figure out how to explain why she needs to take an arterial sample, which is– oh shit her alarm is going off in her pocket and she doesn't want to touch it to turn it off yet because her brain is sort of pre-emptively declaring this an iso room and insisting that her hands are Not Clean by definition as long as she's physically in the room. ...that's stupid, she'll hand-sanitize and then turn off the phone alarm and take. another. fucking. blood. sugar. She really hopes Samora will let her do it again because she's not sure she has the wherewithal to have a Pictionary negotiation about it. 

Everything is taking so long and she's starting to actually get pretty stressed about bringing a patient with this much shit going on to Radiology. Uh. What are Samora's vital signs and blood sugar like right now? Does looking her over give Marian a feeling of doom about leaving the unit? 

She's not going to start objecting to anything she was previously fine with unless she thinks of a new reason it's a bad idea. Her sugars are holding up okay, and her vital signs are fine except her fever is up to 101.3. She looks--kind of awful, though, mostly because of the slime but also pale in the face and slumped tiredly on her pillow.

Marian seems stressed, and Samora apparently has her classified as sufficiently probably an ally that this is her problem now. How to be reassuring without a language . . . ah, there's an idea. Samora says something and does another set of inscrutable gestures and Marian suddenly feels as though whatever she does next she'll be unusually good at it.

It’s not even slightly going to occur to Marian that the feeling is related to the inscrutable gestures! Maybe she’s finally getting enough of an adrenaline boost to outweigh the fact that it’s approaching 5 pm and her brain is kind of fried, significantly from the taking blood sugars every 5 minutes for like three hours, she had not realized how incredibly over that she was going to get by now.

She looks at Samora. She has - moderately doom feelings, but she actually feels like a half-hour field trip outside the unit will probably not be a disaster right now? So she need to figure out how to convey that they need to do that, and stretch goal convey why they need to do it. (…She kind of wants to prioritize that above the blood gas? Samora’s problem really doesn’t seem to be with breathing, she’s pretty sure Dr Harrison only wanted it because of the self-extubation, but without an art line to draw from it seems like a worse tradeoff of scary-for-the-patient versus actually medically useful.)

Clipboard. Pen. She can do this.

She draws a person on a bed again, this time from the side so she can draw the abdominal cavity as having actual area and circle it - she can put question marks to indicate that they don't know how bad things are in there - no damn it, Samora might speak a language with a different alphabet - she will shade it out and then point and make a questioning-shrug-expression. 

And then draw a box-room around the bed and a windy arrow from the person in bed down the page to another box-room; she mimes footsteps with her fingers along the windy line to try to convey "we're going there" (hopefully Samora won't think she has to walk there??) She draws a narrow rectangle below a cylinder, and a stick figure person on the rectangle and then another arrow and them in the cylinder. She draws a big stylized eye above the cylinder and then an arrow down and circling the stick-figure's middle.

...okay, now can she convey "and if it's really bad we might need to go straight to the OR", because it would be so awkward if it is super bad and they do need to go straight to the OR and she hasn't...communicated...this... 

- new sheet of paper. She hastily draws two versions of person-in-a-bed-from-the-side at the top of the page. One of them can get some squiggles to indicate intestines and a smiley face underneath. The other one - can get Marian's best attempt at squiggly guts with a couple of obvious breaks and little rays to indicate leaking, and lots of stylized bacteria, and a frowny face underneath? 

And that side of the paper can get another arrow down to another room-box, and a person-figure drawn from above so she can show the incision being open and, uh, draw some disembodied hands stitching together a break in the squiggly guts, and an arrow going out into a cylinder-bucket where the stylized wiggly bacteria will go? And then she just barely has space to draw another arrow to a person-figure with the incision stitched up again, who now has smiley face beside them? 

They want to look for worms in her guts and . . . cut them out? And then sew her back together??? That seems really excessive and like it's worth explaining how she works just in case they're friendly and doing this because they have no healing and don't know she has it.

She draws herself lying down, an hourglass with sand going through it, the sun coming up, herself kneeling with the sunburst-and-sword symbol above her head, and herself standing up smiling. And then adds herself surrounded by lying-down people with frowning faces and radiating little lines, and herself surrounded by standing-up people with smiling faces, for good measure.

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.