Oh no is it weird to not expect to miss her parents?

"...I think it'll be fine? I - it's almost, like, a family tradition at this point, moving somewhere really far away? My grandparents on both sides immigrated from Europe to Canada, and then my parents were the ones who moved all over, all my aunts and uncles are still in British Columbia." 

- oops she should maybe have said something supportive about Mal's parental experience first? It seems awkwardly late to add anything at this point, though. 

Mal does a swivel to check something on her monitor as she talks. "Oh, huh. Are you the first in your family to come to the States, then? And is this your first time?"

"My parents spent some time in the States when I was little, but it'll be my first time working here."

Aaaand Marian is now really distracted wondering what Mal is looking at. It's rude to read people's screens over their shoulder and also, like, patient confidentiality, she doesn't actually work here yet, but apparently it's going to bother her being in an ICU and not knowing what's going on with all their patients. 

Mallory seems to notice, and smiles slightly as she sticks a thumb down the hall. "Patient with pneumonia on a ventilator. Been mostly stable for a couple days now, and everything looks fine, but it's almost time for another physical check-in. Want to come?"

"Sure, if that's okay with you! I'm happy to help with a turn if you're due. Or I can just hang back out of your way if you'd rather." 

"Oh, that's nice of you!" She stands and takes a bag to strap over one shoulder, in which Marian can see a stethoscope, some suction equipment, pulse oximeter, blood pressure cuff, and other standard diagnostic tools. "If you want to help repositioning I'd appreciate that, but otherwise just watch? Helps keep things simple in case some thing goes wrong... not that I expect anything will!"

She leads the way to a closet full of PPE and hands Marian some gloves and a mask, then puts her own on and heads for the patient's room. "What was your favorite sort of thing to do, back at your old hospital?"

Marian dons her PPE and then can stay out of the way. "Oh, hmm - if I had to pick one thing in particular, I think it's, like, really complicated gnarly dressing changes? It's like getting to do an arts and craft project at work." 

She's going to try to juggle looking around curiously with not making Mal feel obtrusively Observed. 

"Ha, yeah, it does feel like that sometimes! I sometimes feel like I'm training for some way less prosocial skills while doing those..."

Mal trails off as they reach the room, then goes into worker mode, checking the patient over first, then the ventilator to make sure everything's in order. It's a man in his 50s or 60s, fairly muscled and fit despite his age, seeming to be in a deep sleep as the ventilator pumps air in and out of his lungs.

He's also got a bunch of scars. His arms are criss-crossed with them, long white cuts and less clean gashes, including a puncture mark in his left bicep. The highest runs up his shoulder and neck, dangerously close to his carotid artery.

Mal finishes checking that everything's in order, and starts to take things out of her satchel one at a time. First a quick listen to his heart and lungs, then a temperature check, then a blood oxygen measurement, all followed by some writing on her electronic clipboard.

(Less prosocial skills like WHAT? - nevermind, not important.) 

...The scars are kind of fucked up, wow, though they all look old and healed, not super relevant to his current medical condition; he otherwise looks like he usually takes decent care of himself? It's less common for (relatively) young and physically fit people to end in up the ICU with pneumonia but, like, it definitely happens, it doesn't necessarily imply anything concerning in his medical history. 

The electronic clipboard is coooool! It just seems massively better than hauling an entire desktop computer assembly on wheels in and out of patient rooms. 

She's tempted to ask Mal if there's a story behind all the scars, but not when it means interrupting her; she'll also check out the ventilator settings, and peek at IV pumps - she's particularly curious what they have him on for sedation, he looks pretty solidly out and also if Marian were to get into a fight with him over the matter of tubes remaining in his body, she might not win, so she would hope he's sedated and restrained. Having horrifying scars does also feel like it might correlate with being the type of guy who freaks the fuck out about waking up intubated.

She's also glancing around a bit to get a sense of how Mal likes to organize her patient rooms, because it's always neat to see how other nurses do things differently - is she an 'everything laid out on surfaces where she can see it' kind of nurse or 'the counters and table must always be clear' type? 

(Oh, and does the patient have a, what was it again, a yellow strip on his gown for out-of-towners? If not then Mal might well know him, unless he's from somewhere even more rural, but huh that would be a weird thing about working in a hospital in such a small town, though maybe 10,000 people isn't quite the level of small town where everyone knows literally everyone else?) 

The patient is being kept under with propofol, does not have the yellow stripe. Mal does seem to be an "everything laid out" kind of girl, and it's clear from watching her work that she's deliberately going down a checklist of all the things she needs to do; currently she's checking for secretions, probably to determine if any suctioning is needed.

Neat, Marian also likes everything laid out. (And was a lot more deliberate checklisty about things when she had been a nurse for a year, though these days she's drifting more toward "puttering around doing things in the order she thinks of them", and also she was almost always about twice as rushed as Mal seems to be.) She is going to IGNORE the itchy feeling to check when the propofol tubing was last changed because, one, it might make Mal feel judged, and two, she doesn't at all seem like the sort of nurse who neglects that.

...Marian is honestly really bad at standing around being out of people's way and not doing anything, and is stomping hard on the urge to do things like reorganize supplies on the counter (it is Mal's room and Mal's supplies and she presumably has them just the way she wants them!) Maybe she'll try to discreetly peer more closely at the patient's intense scars, and speculate to herself on how he might have gotten them? 

Some of the scars are definitely older than others, and she can tell that at least two of them were made by different sorts of injuries. A third... even looks like a bite mark? Hard to tell what kind, other than "not human." If it was a dog, it was a big one. There's enough damage, some over tendons, that she'd expect the patient to suffer from some loss of function, either from the original injuries or the scar tissue.

Another couple minutes pass before Mallory asks, "Okay, ready to help turn him?"

Con...cerning...? Marian's new top theory is that he's from one of the "farms and ranches" mentioned - people injure themselves on farm equipment sometimes, right? - and they either have a wild animal problem or a really badly trained guard dog. If he lives somewhere remote where it's hard for him to make it out to see a doctor, that might also explain why a guy barely older than her parents and probably in equally good shape (old injuries aside) ended up in the ICU on a ventilator rather than, like, getting antibiotics prescribed before it got that bad. 

She smiles at Mal. "Yeah, of course, happy to. ...Is there anything I should be particularly careful of with him? He, uh, looks like he," vague gesture at the scars, "has maybe been through some shit?" 

"Oh, I was worried about that too at first, but he's in pretty good health other than his lungs! We get guys like this in fairly often, some women too, and I always check for healing breaks or fractures or damaged organs or something, but they're mostly fine aside from what they're in for. There are sayings about Haven folk coming from sturdy stock." She finishes preparing for the turning, and gets into position. "Not everyone, mind, but my friend in high school was doing some skateboard trick off a railing, fell and smacked his head right on the pavement, no helmet or anything. I thought for sure he'd gotten himself killed, but he just had a mild concussion. When I told my mom she just clucked her tongue and said, 'Ah, well, that's the Hennigars for you.'"

“Wow! Yeah, that’s really lucky - would super have freaked me out, too.” Marian arranges herself on the other side of the bed, ready to follow Mal’s cues. “I find it pretty satisfying when patients are, like, mostly fine except for one problem. We would get a lot of the, like, six different chronic health conditions that all exacerbate each other.”

It feels weird and unprofessional to comment on this in a patient room, but she hasn't...seen a lot of overweight people...? Despite the fact that the US has such a reputation for high obesity rates (it was one of her Montfort colleagues' first comment when she said she was interviewing at a US hospital.) Maybe that's more a big city thing? Possibly this town just has really good public health or something, what with the wealthy benefactor - there was also that one weird comment about the locals being responsible with their vices... 

"Six?! That's... oof. Sounds like a nightmare." She shakes her and sighs. "Okay, let's get him lateral facing you?" She prepares to lift the blanket he's lying on to gently roll him onto his side toward Marian. "On three, two, one..."

Tuuuurn while Marian keeps hold of his stomach so he doesn't roll too far forward...

"Great, thanks." She starts to reposition his legs and arms with pillows so that he's in a comfortable position. "I haven't had someone that bad off before. Heard of a few cases, but personally my most complex was a woman who had chronic heart failure and AKI, so it was hard to balance the diuretics without damaging the kidneys more. Did you have patients that bad often?"

(Oh, Marian likes Mal. She, too, has strong opinions about positioning patients comfortably.) 

"Oof, yeah, that's a classic, it sucks. I think the worst we had on the unit was, like, CHF, COPD, type II diabetes, chronic kidney disease and peripheral vascular disease from that, and none of that was even the reason she was admitted, she was post-op for repairing a perforated ulcer. ...Also weighed 400 pounds. We had her for, like, two months.  I guess most of the patients weren't quite that bad but we always had those folks for so long, basically all the staff on the unit took care of her at some point or another." 

"Ugh. Part of me thinks a patient that complicated is an interesting challenge, and that poor woman must have really struggled day to day..." Mal finishes adjusting the patient. "But when you put it like that it just sounds... exhausting."

“It can definitely be an interesting challenge, yeah, but it gets sort of depressing, it’s - they don’t usually have great prospects for quality of life afterward even if they recover, you know?”

"Yeah." She seems distracted by her thoughts as she finishes up, then seems to rally herself. "Let's head back, unless you have any questions about all this?" She gestures around.

"Nah, let's head back." Any questions Marian does have are not ones she wants to ask in a patient's room. 

Also oh no did she accidentally pick too depressing a topic for job interview bonding with potential future colleagues??? Or maybe she came across as un-empathetic to those patients, who of course also still deserve the best care? ...She doesn't think Mal is upset with her for bringing it up but she is definitely now paying a lot of attention to that possibility. 

She seems troubled, but not upset? As they make their way back to the nursing station she's even smiling slightly as she says, "Lucy's patient just had some abdominal surgery, if you want to shadow her for her checkup too? You seem like you enjoy having something to do."

Slightly nervous giggle. "Sure, that sounds good! I like helping and, yeah, I'm not great at sitting around. ...Uh, assuming they'll know where to find me for my actual interview if they need to?" One advantage of bopping around here seeing what's going on and occasionally managing to be helpful is that she's not sitting around being self-conscious and anxious about the interview. 

"Figured. And yeah, they'll probably call here. Let's  check that, actually... hey Luce," she says as they reach the nursing station. "Any calls for her yet?"