Chapter Sixteen
Standing outside the isolation unit, Ivie stared through the glass at the hospital bed. Silas looked so small in it, so alone, and she wished she could go in there and sit with him. Infection control started now, however. Even though she could put on the protective suit and take other precautions, in the end, the fewer people he came in contact with, the safer for him.
She had no idea what time it was. What day it was.
She was vaguely aware that Rubes had been coming in at regular intervals to make her eat and drink, but the last twelve hours were a blur.
The chemotherapy they’d given Silas was so strong that it had done its job in a matter of hours, killing off all of Silas’s malfunctioning immune cells—as well as a whole host of other things.
How he was still alive, she hadn’t a clue. Currently they were flushing his body with fluids, trying to help his liver and kidneys do their job, and there was a cold wrap around his head to keep his brain circulation down.
Not for the first time, she worried that they were just killing him in a different way. What if he came out of this a vegetable? Alive, but dead for all intents and purposes because who he was was gone forever, his mind addled by the chemotherapy, his organs fried, his—
“Ivie, they’re bringing in the bone marrow.”
At the sound of Rubes’s voice, she jumped. “Sorry, I’m…”
A mess.
Her cousin smiled gently. “It’s okay.”
And there it was. An IV bag of red stuff that could have been, not to be gross, a cherry sauce or maybe something with tomatoes in it or perhaps a latex paint that had been frozen and lost some of its structural integrity.
The nurse who was handling it was dressed in a loose white isolation suit, her face and hair covered by a mask and a hood, her feet tucked into booties. And as she passed by, she lifted the bag to Ivie as if to acknowledge that it represented all kinds of things: hope, love, a possible future against the odds.
Ivie nodded her thanks.
Then she watched as the nurse entered the isolation unit’s sealed-off anteroom. There, another staff member, in similar garb, was waiting, and it was that nurse who was the one to take the bag to Silas’s bedside.
As the donated marrow was hooked up to the central venous line’s feed, Ivie shook her head and glanced at her cousin. “The donor was such a good guy. So generous. I told him…you know, it was really important to me that he knew in his heart it wasn’t his fault if this fails. I told him over and over again that his gift was amazing and Silas and I are grateful to him no matter the outcome.”
She had been in the OR with Ruhn during the harvesting because she had wanted to support him and participate in the process somehow—and she couldn’t be with Silas right now.
“Your father called me again,” Rubes said. “And your mom.”
“They have been great. Did you tell them I was okay?”
Did you lie for me, Rubes? she thought.
“I did. I lied.”
As her cousin looked over with that sad smile again, Ivie put her arm around the female. Funny, for all their lives, since they were kids, Ivie had…well, not exactly written Rubes off for being a little scattered and falsely optimistic, but she had certainly viewed her cousin as not as strong as herself.
Wrong. Rubes had proven to be equally made of granite.
Just because her outside was as bouncy as her red curly hair did not mean the core wasn’t solid.
“I love you, Rubes.”
“I love you, too, Ivie.”
As Ivie’s eyes went to the tubing that ran from the bag now hanging with the rest of the IV fluids and drugs, through the dispensing computer, and out the other side to Silas’s port, she prayed this was going to work.
And that if it did, the results were something he wouldn’t blame her for.
Time crawled by.
The staff members were so kind, moving a bed directly outside the isolation room, putting it right against the glass so that when Ivie laid her head on the pillow, all she had to do was open her eyes and there was Silas.
People brought food. Her parents visited her. So did other members of her family.
The donor stopped by a couple of times. The Black Dagger Brotherhood’s physicians visited and consulted. Nurses in those white protective suits went in and out of the annex and the room itself. Havers was always around.
To keep her own body from breaking down, Ivie put herself on a schedule of eating and bathing and sleeping, literally setting her iPhone alarms to make sure she stayed focused on basic needs. Clothes from home were brought in, and she was pretty sure the entire staff was making her hot dishes on a rotation schedule, but it was so hard to track anything.
It was kind of like having a high fever, an essential disconnection putting her on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, anything from her environment—whether it was food, conversation, or movement—having to travel a great distance to get to her.
She cared about one and only one thing: some sign of hope.
A twitch of his hand or foot that seemed intentional. A blood test that said his immune system was waking up in its new home. A monitor that announced his major organs were coming back to life.
The stress and suffering were unimaginable, and in the back of her mind, she recognized that however much she had assumed she’d sympathized with her patients’ families before, had known what they were going through, could put herself in their shoes…all that had been bullshit.
Until you walked this path and tried to measure the sliding scale of Hell, you had no clue what it was like. The brain compulsively read into every small piece of data, the tipping between hope and loss constantly bottoming out on one side or another. And just when you thought you couldn’t do it for one more night? For one more hour? For a single second?
You got up and you ate something you couldn’t taste and rubbed your gritty red eyes…and plugged right back into it.
On that note, Ivie checked her iPhone. Tuesday. It was Tuesday.
So it had been three days since the transplant.
Seventy-two hours.
“I brought you some coffee.”
Ivie turned and looked up. It was Havers, and he seemed as exhausted as she felt. “Oh, thank you.”
She didn’t want it, but she took the mug and drank from it because she needed fluids, the caffeine was a godsend, and moreover, the fact that the healer himself had thought to bring her something? She was amazed at the gesture.
They both refocused on Silas.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m looking for signs of a change.”
“How much longer?”
“It’s hard to say. In humans, it takes a couple of weeks, but our systems run so differently from theirs, it’s hard to use that as any kind of benchmark.”
They stayed there for the longest time, her sitting with crossed legs in the tangle of hospital blankets on the bed that was also her sofa and her desk, him standing beside her, straight-spined and bow-tied.
“Thank you for trying,” she said hoarsely.
“I just pray this works.”
“Me, too.”
There was resignation in both their voices, and Ivie recognized it for what it was: the first sign that they were coming to terms with what was clearly a tragic failure.