Chapter 3
The past two weeks were nothing short of hell.
After the intense conversation with Leyla, to make matters even worse, Reynolds caught up with Lauren in the hallway, just outside Leyla's room. He was just about to go in there and fill Leyla in on her situation. Lauren didn’t like the awkward, sore look on his face, not one bit. They had known each other too long and too well to mistake it for anything else. Something was wrong. She tugged him aside into a corner and demanded he spilled the beans.
Altogether, both surgeries had gone well in the matter of stabilizing Leyla and seeing the primary dangers off. The problem - because there was one - was lying somewhere else. In Reynolds's opinion, the trauma to Leyla's abdomen wasn’t extensive enough to cause and explain such a severe hemorrhage. Which meant either there was another source of bleeding somewhere, one that Reynolds couldn’t locate during the surgery, and Leyla was at risk of going into another shock; or there was something wrong with the clotting factors in her blood.
They monitored and examined her closely over the course of the next few days. And as much as it made for a perfect excuse to go see Leyla, Lauren had absolutely zero time. December had started and it was always the worst period for the ED. Christmas for a doctor was a bunch of preoccupied people who had thousands of errands to run and became so absent-minded, they did extremely stupid and careless things. On top of that, when they landed in the hospital, they became stressed out and impatient, wanted to leave as soon as they could and pressed on Lauren who couldn’t just discharge them, as she tried to futilely explain over and over. And so they switched from tense to cranky, making Lauren's job much harder and annoying her to no end.
So by the time Lauren had finished her (usually double) shifts, Leyla was already sleeping. There was one time she found a moment and paid Leyla a visit but they mainly talked about her possible diagnosis. Besides Lauren asking how Leyla was coping with all this, it reminded more of a doctor-patient exchange than… whatever the hell they were.
After six long days and a lot of tests, they came up with and confirmed the diagnosis of AHA - acquired hemophilia A. A rare blood disease associated with the body producing autoantibodies that compromised and impeded the working of clotting factor VIII. It usually presented in women who had a baby in the last 6 months or in patients who suffered from a coexisting condition such as another autoimmune disease, an allergic disease or a tumor. Leyla obviously had not given birth recently so on they were to another round of tests to find out if she was sick with something that had caused hemophilia. Lauren spent two days frantically researching treatments on her own and tormenting Elizabeth with questions about different kinds of tumors that may have been the root of the problem.
Thankfully, the tests came back clean. The disease was idiopathic. It happened. And it nearly made Lauren lose her goddamn mind.
They didn’t find any other sides of internal bleeding so there was no need to administer rFVIIa in the hospital. Leyla just needed to go under immunosuppressive therapy consisting of taking meds for four to six weeks. If the check-up appointment proved that was enough to dissect the inhibitor - and that was the case for most patients after the first round of treatment - then it would mean Leyla was in remission and there would be no long-term effects, except for occasional check-ups. Some risks of AHA treatment were very grave but they mostly concerned elderly or sick people. Leyla was young and healthy. Her prognosis was very promising. And yet didn’t make Lauren entirely calm.
In case another hemorrhage loomed up, Leyla's doctor decided to keep her in for observation just a bit longer, at least until the meds showed the first effects. Which should’ve been a relief - to have Leyla close at hand, know how she was doing and act should anything happen.
But one could say that… well, Lauren had been avoiding Leyla.
If you asked Lauren, she thought one was full of shit.
After they found out the cause of the bleeding and began treating it, there was no reason for her to swing by anymore. She wasn’t a hematologist or an orthopaedist, nothing she could do for Leyla. So it was perfectly reasonable of her, wasn’t it? To give Leyla space and get out of her way. She wasn’t here willingly, she was hurting and, based on her curtness during their conversations, it was pretty clear she didn’t need Lauren's care or wanted to be involved in her drama. The last thing she needed in recovery was her messy, awkward ex.
But the thing was, as much as Lauren was aware of that, it didn’t make her worry any less.
Leyla's poor doctor was probably one inquiry away from reporting Lauren to HR for harassment in the workplace with how often she ambushed him and fished for information. And he wasn’t the only one. Simply knowing Leyla’s medical status wasn’t enough - she wanted to know how Leyla was feeling and coping with all this. And since her doctor wasn’t the one for tattle with the patients (cold jerk), she had to recruit other people.
Casey was an obvious choice. For a while at least.
“Casey, come on! Don’t do this to me!” Lauren reasoned with her best friend after one too many requests, trying to keep up with his long, hasty stride through the hospital hallways. She didn’t even know if he was really needed somewhere or just attempting to escape from her and running in circles. She was pretty certain she’d seen these exact posters two minutes ago.
“No, Bloom. No, no, no no," Casey refused, walking backwards and getting farther and farther from Lauren with every step so that he had to basically yell by the end of his sentences. “You send me to her every two hours, I'm running out of excuses! And you’re both adults, just talk for Christ’s sake! Adults talk about their issues, you know!”
“Just say you’re a concerned friend! No need for excuses!”
“Stop being a coward, Bloom!”
Lauren balked in the middle of the corridor. How did this bum just call her? Unbelievable. She fully intended to send him her most murderous stare and promise to assign him to the worst cases in the ED for the next month, but he was already turning his back to her and speeding along.
“Some friend you are!” Lauren could only splutter after him with flippant indignation.
He waved his hand dismissively at her before he turned the corner. “You'll thank me for it!”
Like hell she was.
The residents were marked out for the position of the next mole. They used to hang out with Leyla and she overheard them talking about the accident - there was no way they weren’t visiting their injured, sick friend. A direct approach was out of the question, of course, so Lauren tried to pry it out in innocent conversations. Unsuccessfully. She wasn’t very subtle. They just looked at her with the same awkward sympathy they’d given her when Leyla had been hiding from her and either kept their lips sealed or changed the subject in this cursed solidarity of theirs. Lauren was at her wit's end and ready to remind them that she had the power to fire them.
The last thing she came up with were consultations with her friends. Reynolds was the first obvious choice - he performed Leyla's surgery, had taken a liking to her back when she used to work here and would probably check on her sooner or later, even without Lauren's prodding. Iggy was a bit far-fetched but acceptable - an accident that left you immobilized for two months was very likely to take its toll on a person, wasn’t it? But after that, Lauren's pool of the fellow specialists shrank and the whole ruse became a bit ridiculous. She even sent Elizabeth over there once. Elizabeth. The surgical oncologist. To the trauma patient. Great were the lengths of her desperation.
It wasn’t like she wanted this, despite what Casey or anybody else who had noticed believed. It made her feel foolish, knowing how absurd this whole hare and hounds must have looked to a third party. The thought that she couldn’t see Leyla when she was just a few floors above her brought her no joy. But for Leyla's comfort and her own good, she was at constant war with this tugging at her chest that prompted her towards her ex’s room. It cost her a great deal to stay away.
Too great, sometimes.
“Hey,” Casey greeted her softly, shuffling his way towards her one night. He leaned his back and elbows on the counter behind them the same way Lauren had. They were both working the graveyard shift and it’d been a calm one so far, surprisingly. The lights in the ward were dim, hallways empty, the patients mostly sleeping or watching TV quietly. “I was looking for you.”
Lauren snorted under her nose.
“Were you?” she asked with incredulity and disdain at herself. “Or did you know right away where to find me?”
No need to answer that one. Lauren felt pathetic. For being so transparent with her feelings, so predictable and desperate. For leaping at the first chance to check on Leyla without exposing herself and all the hard parts that came with it. She still couldn’t ask her how she was but it helped a little to see her so peaceful, sleeping just behind the glass.
Was there a chance Casey would just leave her alone if she didn’t say a word?
Probably not, if his persistent stare was anything to go by.
She let herself watch Leyla for just a moment longer before yielding to Casey's shrewd gaze, basically burning holes into the side of her face, and meeting it. He looked serious. Serious Casey was never a good thing.
“I haven’t heard you mentioning her for weeks. I honestly thought you got over her,” he confessed.
“I thought so too,” she admitted and immediately followed it with dubious fumbling, “I mean I did, on some level. But I still thought about her sometimes and... I just-" Lauren sighed. In all honesty, she was tired, at this point, of pretending and circling around. “Eh, I don't know anymore. I was okay. Like truly. But now that she’s here again… What is it about her that I just can’t stay away whenever she’s around? It’s like she appears and I literally lose my damn mind and forget about everything. Why we aren’t together anymore and why we shouldn’t be. What I've done and what she’s done. And I worry, all the time, even though I’m a goddamn doctor and know she will be almost certainly fine. I'm acting like a teenage girl with her first boyfriend.”
It was as if Lauren was drawn to her like a magnet whenever she knew Leyla was close. It had always been like this - it was the reason Lauren had moved out and left Leyla her apartment when they’d broken up. But she couldn’t just kick Leyla out of the hospital, nor did she want to.
A beat passed between them as Casey turned Lauren’s words around in his head. He nodded after a minute and stated like it was the simplest thing in the world:
“Guess she wasn’t the type of love you just get over.”
There was nothing simple about it. Lauren tore her eyes away from him and looked straight ahead at Leyla while answering:
“Guess so.”
She should get back to work. She didn’t want to act like a creep and there was always something to do in the hospital to take her mind off the situation.
“You know I've been wondering…” Casey probed out loud, pulling Lauren out of her thoughts and keeping her in place. “Don’t you think it’s a bit weird? That Leyla didn’t ask to be transferred to another hospital?” Lauren pinched her brows so Casey elaborated, “You know like her own hospital? Where she works?”
Lauren’s confused grimace deepened.
“What are you hinting at?”
Casey made a face at her.
“Come on. She literally chose to stay at a place where you are all the time.”
“No, no, no. We’re not going there, Casey," Lauren protested strongly, shaking her head. “Don't try to get into my head, I can’t go down that rabbit hole again. We’re over, okay? Over over .”
“Hey, I’m not trying to get into your head! I’m the first person to call you out on your bullshit, you know that," Casey pleaded his case with his mouth quirking up at one corner. “But I'm just saying. There may be something here.”
Lauren rolled her eyes with a bit of affection.
“Or maybe you’re just being delusional because I rubbed off on you,” she teased and nudged him with her elbow.
“God, don’t even say that.” He jokingly faked shivers of terror, then threw a content smile to Lauren who even managed to muster up a chuckle. If nothing else, she at least had Casey to go through it all with.