"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."