"Do you want to know a secret?"

[inkandleather]

Who: Jace Hartley and Ethan Marshall
What: Great big WTF moment
Where: Neurology Unit, Mount Sinai
When: Friday morning

Days like this, Jace wished he was allowed to be a coffee drinker. Stress exhausted him, but he wouldn't be anywhere besides the hospital with Jesse once again admitted after a seizure. There was no particular reason why his condition had exacerbated in the last couple of weeks. Sometimes, with epilepsy, that could just happen. This time, Jace was feeling beyond guilty and beating himself up inside. Jesse had been out of hospital just under a week and he seemed to be getting back on his feet. The night before, Christian had been on a nightshift and Evan had been paged into work on an emergency consult. That was okay, because Nana had found a place to live nearby, and Jace and Jesse knew she could be called if anything happened.

Which it did. Jace woke up about four, immediately aware he was in bed alone. Of course, he panicked, and with good cause. Jesse was out cold on the bathroom floor and Jace couldn't wake him up. His watch had smashed on the tiles when he fell, and that was how he saw it would have been just after midnight (on Jesse's birthday) it happened. Jesse always wore his watch, even to bed, in case Jace had a fit and he could time it no matter where it happened. Jace called his Nana in a panic, who called 911 for him and came right over. Jace had really convinced himself Jesse was dead. That was why he was now standing there exhausted, leaning against the wall at the vending machine trying to talk himself out of getting a coffee. That would just be counter-productive.

"Fuck," he mumbled and instead pushed the option for tea, which would taste like shit but he couldn't take his own meds on an empty stomach. This was the very much not-glamorous part of being in a marriage where both of them had a serious illness. While Jace had a lot of pride in now officially being Jesse's next-of-kin, the decision maker when Jesse was too ill to consent anything himself, it was stressful and still taking Jace some getting used to.

Comments

[livingthelowlife]

Ethan had just finished his first rounds of the day and he had been caught up with things. He had been hoping to catch Jace since the afternoon before, and he hadn't gotten near as much sleep the night before as he wanted or needed. There was too much on his mind after spending the afternoon before studying Jesse's medical records. Jesse had given him consent about a month ago to case study him as part of his Residency and shortly after that, signed an authority for Ethan to request copies of all his medical records from South Carolina back when he initially had meningitis so he could study the progression of his form of epilepsy. It had just been a coincidence that Jesse had been sick these past couple of weeks, so he was assigned as one of Jesse's doctors along with Evan.

Jace had been sitting with Jesse, who was still out to it, when Ethan visited him on his rounds but Jace hadn't said much. It was just like he was sitting there in a daze while he doctors did their thing. It was understandable. Jace was very weathered and jaded to hospitals. It was water off a duck's back. "Jace!" he called out to him from up the hall, spotting Jace now at the vending machine. He had a pile of copies of Jesse's medical records in his arms. Jace was his first port-of-call because Jesse wasn't conscious or well enough to discuss any of this. "Can I talk to you about something? It's about Jesse."

[inkandleather]

Jace dragged his tired eyes from the liquid sloshing into the disposable cup and up to Ethan. What he had gotten used to by now was needing to speak to doctors about Jesse's condition, being kept up to speed with what was going on, and why. Ethan was also one of Jesse's closest friends, so none of this was out of the ordinary. Jace knew Ethan was studying Jesse's case because his epilepsy had developed via a neurological infection, as opposed to Jace's that was from a brain injury.

He just nodded and picked up his cup of tea. "Mm, sure," he agreed. "What is it?" he asked, taking a sip of the cup of tea. Yep, it tasted like shit alright and the way he scrunched his nose up with disdain made that obvious. Luckily, Jesse hadn't seriously hurt himself passing out after the seizure he had. He had bumped his head, but a bit of bruising and a couple of sutures was the extent of it. His epilepsy was definitely flared up, though, so he had to be kept in for monitoring for now.

[livingthelowlife]

Jace looked wrecked. He knew it wouldn't be long before Nana Turner showed up to take over sitting with Jesse because that was the only way Jace would go home to sleep. They had all discovered that the hard way the week before when Jesse had been in and Jace pitched a full-on bitch fit at Christian who suggested he go home for some sleep because he had started to get really vague himself. He had struggled with remembering what words he was trying to say and at one point there, he had even forgotten how to sign his own name. Jace's sensitivity to taking care of Jesse had been raw and he went from zero to bitch 101 very damn quickly. Jace was usually a total sweetheart, kind, funny, chatty. But his condition could impact on him emotionally. It was best to keep out of his warpath when he was like that.

"Come and sit down. I want to run something by you. I'm not sure this is something I should wait on until Jesse's feeling better..." It was cryptic. He didn't mean it to sound like that. He would have a challenge here explaining in a way Jace would follow and comprehend. Jace was brain-injured. You could never forget that. He needed to be treated different to how they would generally approach discussions with a next-of-kin. It was why Evan had become Jesse's treating doctor by default.

[inkandleather]

Jace gave Ethan a confused and uncertain look. He didn't seem to be about to deliver bad news though. And if it was bad news, Evan would be doing the delivering of it. He was about to take another sip of the tea, but he got hit by a yawn and put his other hand up to his mouth to cover it. He needed some sleep, he just didn't like leaving Jesse unless someone was here with him. Not because Jesse was out of it, but in case he woke up. Jace knew what it was like to come-to back to lucidity after a seizure and not have someone there. It wasn't scary, it was just foggy and disorientated, usually accompanied by feeling very sick and woozy. It just wasn't nice to be alone.

"I need to take my meds anyway," he told Ethan while he dug around in his messenger back to find the travel box with his pills for the day in it. Ethan led him to a nest of sofas by a window up the corridor, and he stopped on the way to get Jace a cup of water from the cooler to take the pills. He didn't need to burn his tonsils gulping down the sheer volume of them with tea. He put his tea down and poured his pills out into his palm so he could work his way through them. "What is it? Should I be worried?"

[livingthelowlife]

Once Ethan was sitting beside Jace on one of the sofas, he put the files into his lap and shook his head. "No. I wouldn't say this is something to be worried about as to concern about his condition. It's really directly relevant to his health. There's just something I've found researching back through all his records when he was a kid. He was in hospital for a very long time when had meningitis, he was really sick. You know that, that's nothing new I'm telling you. This here is a complete copy of his records from that admission," he explained, holding up the biggest pile of papers about six inches thick.

"I've read the whole thing. He was in the Pediatric ICU for close to two months, the first four weeks, he was in a coma. He actually began to have his seizures during that time. His EEGs show the pattern beginning right from the start because the infection was so bad. It just wasn't immediately known to be epilepsy, and more just suspected as symptoms of the meningitis because the infection exacerbated quickly," he explained and then waved his hand because Jace was giving him a bit of a blank look while he was in the middle of his production line of putting pills in his mouth. "Long story short, he was really sick and they took some precautionary measures in case he took a turn for the worst. Discussing potential end-of-life choices with his family, and taking blood from them if he had any sort of hemorrhage. Jesse has a rare blood type..."

[inkandleather]

"AB Negative, yeah," Jace said with a nod. He was listening to what Ethan was saying, but it was hard to take in. Hearing about things like end-of-life choices and other such similar things would never be easy for Jace, because he knew his own family had been in that position for quite some time. Jesse was his husband, so it was difficult to have this information on the table in front of him. He knew about it. Of course he did. Jesse had spoken to him about these things over the course of their relationship and subsequent marriage, but he wasn't sure how much of it he wanted dredged up right now.

He looked at the very thick copied file, not sure what he was supposed to make of it. "Are you going to tell me they missed something important back then...?" The question was hesitant because he didn't really want to ask it, but at the same time, he was nervous about what Ethan was getting at here. "Do they make some sort of wrong decision back then? I mean, he's sick. I know he is. But when he's well, he's perfectly fine."

[livingthelowlife]

"No, nothing was missed. I think there was something very purposefully veiled over though..." Ethan admitted. If there was one thing difficult to argue with, it was religion's biggest rival: science. Medicine was science and there were clinical things in medicine that you just could not dispute. There were forever questions and puzzles, or serious conditions that weren't cut and dried, but something like he had stumbled on here, it was very cut and dried. "The thing is, I really, really do not think Jesse knows about this, or probably even had any reason to question it. I do feel bad sort of dumping this on you out of the blue, but I only came across it yesterday and you've got the reigns with Jesse here. You're his husband. You need to know too."

He opened the copied pages to the places he had marked with small Post-Its. "Jesse's AB Negative. That's clear as a bell right through. But here, at the back of the file, there's sheets and sheets of cross-references to his Mom's blood tests to make sure she was fine to donate in case he needed a transfusion of any sort. Her blood type is B Negative." He showed Jace the sheet he was referencing and then leafed through a couple after it. "But there's only set of blood tests here from his Dad, whose blood type is O. Both of them are compatible to donate to him, that's not the issue here. The problem is that a parent with Type O can't actually conceive an AB blood group child. It's genetically impossible. Jesse's not his father's biological son."

[inkandleather]

On the last pill he was swallowing, finishing off the water with it, he nearly choked when Ethan got to his point. The sip of water went down the wrong way because it seemed absolutely ludicrous. He was coughing, trying to get the pill to go down like it should and he patted his chest, looking at Ethan with eyes watering now. "Um..." he began, because fuck, this was confusing. It seemed ludicrous. No, Jesse didn't have a functioning relationship with his family at all anymore. They were strict Catholics and froze him out because he moved to New York and came out as gay. Most recently, when he had tried to reason with them an invite them to the wedding, they declined and said it wasn't a wedding or a marriage with two men. Jace knew Jesse had been heartbroken, but wrote it off as their last chance.

He looked at the pages, but he knew he didn't have a remote clue about genetics or clinical anything. All he knew was what Evan told him, and repeatedly for him to absorb it. These were just numbers on a page, numbers that made no sense to him. But he was telling himself he wasn't going to get upset and frustrated with his lack of ability to process this. He was just going to need help and more explaining. This was for Jesse's benefit. That's all that mattered. "Are you sure it's impossible, and not just, like, a very low chance? If it can't be O, what blood group should his dad be? Because this is... they're religious as fuck. They make him feel like his the epitome of walking Satan spawn being gay, when all along his mother is a big lying cheat?"

[livingthelowlife]

"Completely, absolutely, clinically, medically, genetically impossible. Not even any wiggle room. If his mother's B Negative, that means his biological father has to be A Negative or AB Negative. His... this guy who is supposed to be his father has the most common blood group of all with O. It's his biological Dad that would have been the reason he's the rare AB Negative. I don't want to confuse you more than you already are, Jace. You don't have to absorb the actual ins and outs of this. The nutshell is that the guy he thinks has been his father all along can't at all be his biological father. His mother had to have slept with another man somewhere along the line who has A or AB Negative type," Ethan explained and he closed the notes over so Jace's line of sight wasn't trained to the confusing test results there.

He sighed and gave a small shake of his head. "I know it's heavy, okay. I don't at all know how he'll take any of this. But he is a nurse, so he will understand the genetics of it all. Honestly, I think the most plausible thing that's happened if his mother knows Jesse isn't her husband's and she's just covered it all up. She probably stepped up as the primary source of blood if Jesse needed it. The father wouldn't have been further needed, that's probably why he was only tested once. She would have made the most sense at the time. Considering how sick Jesse was, it was probably easy to not pull focus onto this and just leave it buried in pile of medical records. If she's the only one who knows the truth, and had her husband on Jesse's birth certificate, who's to dispute it?"

[inkandleather]

It was true. Jesse was a nurse and a highly qualified one. He would know exactly what Ethan was talking about here. Something he wouldn't at all have even known about at seven years old when he first got sick. Hell, there was a very distinct chance here that the guy who thought he was Jesse's father didn't even know anything about this. If he knew, he wouldn't have been tested for a blood match, would he? Or maybe he would, to keep up the ruse so neither of them looked like a sinner to their beloved church? Jace didn't know. He didn't understand any of that religious mindset. It just made him feel very angry that Jesse's own family could be so cruel to him, dismissive of him because he was gay.

He put his hands over his face, and then rubbed his eyes. "Fuck... fuck. What, did they think Jesse getting meningitis and nearly dying was punishment to her for sinning and fucking around on her husband? Was her having a gay son punishment too? Was that why he's been shunned? No, I'm not fucking making excuses for them. This is bullshit. I know for a fact they were married three years before Jesse was born. It's on his birth certificate, we had it there for getting our marriage licence. Who's to dispute it? Me. I'm going to fucking dispute it," he resolved, taking his phone out of his pocket. "I'm going to need copies of those things you just showed me."