against medical advice [attn: chantry people]

[jamie]

Saturday, 24 August

A woman asking after Mr. Echeverría went into his room just past eight o'clock in the morning and left maybe ten minutes later. Not even. Went in just after the nurse making her rounds through the unit did. She held her hand over her nose and looked as if she had been weeping and the charge nurse thought nothing of it. Pretty and dark-haired, blue-eyed, in her thirties. Must have been one of his parishioners.

He came to with a silver thumb ring on his thinnest finger.

His heart rate and blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels all bottomed out and stopped at once. Upon further inspection the nurse found him broken through sedation, wrists freed. Triangular cloth bandages once tied to his wrists now tangled in with everything else. He had yanked off the electrodes taped to his chest and was removing himself from the rest of the tubes gone into his body when a silent alarm summoned a small cavalry.

For the first time since they wheeled him in here Echeverría had the appearance of one in possession of at least some of his mental faculties. When the nurse came towards him he held a palm out to her though he could not extend his fingers and his entire arm shook. To her it looked like he was trying to reassure her. He was pale and his hair was dirty and he could not catch and keep his breath even before he pulled the nasal cannula off his face.

Footsteps in the corridor. The boots of the security guards and the clogs of other nurses.

"Mister Echeverría--"
"¿Dónde estoy?" The nurse didn't answer. He said again: "Where am I?"

The door slid back further. He couldn't fight them off but they were not Technocratic agents. In the midst of them stood Ana Sánchez. At the sight of him upright she sighed and held up a hand to keep everyone else back. They left the room and she slid it shut behind them. Pan sat on the edge of the mattress and sweated for the pain in his midsection.

"What you think you're gonna do, huh?" she asked. "Hobble out of here with no pants and get on a bus?"
"I don't like hospitals."
"That's nice. Hospital's been keeping you alive the last week and a half."
"You were there. You know what happens in these places."
"I thought you said that... war, or whatever it was, was over."
"Claro, perdimos, pero eso no significa nada."

She stepped forward to raise the head of the bed so he could lie back. Were not for the rush of blood from his head he would have stayed upright. He closed his eyes until the swimming stopped and when he opened them again Ana had thrown the sheet across his lower body and locked her arms across her chest.

"What day is it, Francisco?"
"I don't know."
"What about the month?"
"I don't know."
"Who's the President of the United States?"
"The Democrat."
"And where are you?"
"The hospital."
"Which hospital."
"The one you work at."
"Uh huh."
"Why am I in here?"

Ana set her hands on her hips and lifted her eyebrows. Tilted her chin towards the bandage over his midsection.

"That," she said, "and you were bleeding into your brain."
"So that's why I don't feel so hot."
"Uh huh."
"Traigáme el papeleo, voy a casa."
"Oh, you think so?"
"Yeah."
"You're gonna feel a whole lot worse if you keep unplugging everything, Reverend I-Don't-Need-No-Doctor."
"I don't."
"No inventes, Pancho."
"No estoy."
"Yeah. No estoy. Don't know what month it is or how you got here but you think you're gonna sign papers and walk out of here."
"I am."
"Not right this second you aren't. We gotta talk to the doctor and find someone to drive you."

He drew a breath to argue and coughed instead.

"Throat a little dry?" she asked. "You were on a ventilator for four days. Don't move till I get back, you try and walk outta here you're gonna be right back on it in about twelve hours."

Pendejo estupido, she didn't say. She hadn't called him that since they were kids and if he were more coherent he would have heard it in her tone anyway. Pan went back to sleep and Ana hauled the door shut behind her.


Monday, 26 August

A battery of tests confirmed Echeverría was orientated to time and place and did not need oxygen therapy anymore but he was easily fatigued and prone to headaches and showed other neurocognitive symptoms of the event he'd survived. "Subarachnoid hemorrhage" was a phrase the doctors kept using.

After a long consultation with the nurse manager, the attending instructed the nurses to remove the various tubes and lines plugged into his body. They removed the stent from his abdomen. The IV would stay in his elbow until he went home. They moved him to a less intensive unit Sunday night. If he could behave himself there he could go home Tuesday morning.

---

Patience is a virtue and one he struggles with even as an ordained clergyman. But he does not try to break out again. They let whoever wants to come in to see him come in during visiting hours. The parishioners have sent flowers and candles and cards and more of them come in on Monday than were at his bedside on Friday because they know he is coming home soon.


Tuesday, 27 August

In the morning a nurse he has never met before will come in with a clipboard of papers and go over each one before she lets the priest sign them. He will be sitting on the edge of the bed in the cowboy boots and black jeans and button-down shirt that Rosa will bring for him and help him put on because he still has a healing wound in his gut. She will stand out in the hallway during this interaction.

Part of her will hope the nurse talks him into staying. He has visibly lost weight just in two weeks and they will be going over the risks if he leaves now and doesn't cooperate with the home health aide they've hired for him or go to his outpatient appointments: Cognitive deterioration. Infection. Sepsis. Death.

The priest will thank her for telling him all of this and then he will sign the paperwork and let her help him into a wheelchair. They will wheel him out of the hospital with Rosa carrying everything but the silver band someone left for him on Saturday. That he will keep on his finger.

In Rosa's sedan he will sit in the passenger seat and breathe heavy and not complain. Rosa will get in behind the wheel after she loads the trunk with the things she carried for him and then sigh.

"You are so stupid," she will say to him, and then she will take him not back to the rectory but to the Chantry.

[mnemosyne]

Monday, 26 August

The corridors of the surgical ward to which the priest has been moved are sometimes packed with people. The entire League of Mary descends en masse, carrying with them baked goods and cassaroles and tidbits to tempt their leader's appetite. They do not understand, still, how badly he was injured, how very close he was to death, how a many who eats everything they thrust at him may not be tempted by pan dulces or homemade empanadas after his visceral have been rearranged by a pack of purportedly rabid and technically non-living dogs. The nurses and CNAs and residents and janitorial staff will eat well tonight.

He is in a semi-private room now and although there is no particular limit on the number of visitors a patient in this ward may have there are practical limitations defined more by the city's fire warden than hospital policy. So the League of Mary members take turns, slipping out into the corridor or perhaps retreating so far as the nearest waiting room to allow another believer or three to slip in for a decade of the rosary prayed in a droning murmur that competes with but does not defeat constant hum of machinery behind the walls of the room.

--

Then she shows up.

Mid-afternoon, bold as you fucking please, dressed in -

- well, they would perhaps be prepared to see her in her usual attire. A bustier and cut-off jeans, a cheap pleather skirt with a slip up to her ass and torn fishnets. Some combination of any or all of the above, plus calf-high boots with stacked heels and that definitively masculine swagger to her. The clothing that has the abuelitas of the Church of the Good Shepherd convinced that their priest has taken up on some level with a prostitute.

The more pious among them remind the rest of the story of Mary Magdalene. The rest share gossip about her appearances at the edges of their lives. Her behavior, her foul fucking mouth.

Instead, Serafíne is dressed in a tiny black dress so skintight she cannot possibly be wearing undergarments beneath it. It is sleeveless and black and lace and significant swaths of the dress are transparent or semi-transparent and other than the dress her arms and her long, long legs are bare and nevermind that the length is an illusion of sorts created by the five inch emerald green heels she wears and some physical accident that derives from the way she is put together but the shoes cost more than the hospital charge for this room for a single day and the cost of the dress would cover Mrs. Sanchez's August rent seven or eight times over and the clutch and the necklace -

the League of Mary no longer believes that Father Echeverría has taken up with a streetwalker.

They think he has taken up with a fucking call girl.

And Jesús Cristo, she is breathtaking.

And Dios mío, how she almost breaks down when she sees him, mostly coherent, sort-of-upright. All those tubs and - and - and - things removed, his body functioning more-or-less on its own.

[For reference, as witnessed by Jamie: Serafíne @ 6:13PM

Phobia roll
Roll: 6 d10 TN8 (5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 ) VALID]

[CourtCat]

Monday
Shoshannah, too, is there. Dressed in a simple, white, just shorter than her knees dress with an aqua ribbon belt for accent, she's about as opposite of Sera as she can possibly be. She's also not allowed back into his room to see all the proceedings but when Sera arrives in that dress, looking like that (the devil you know always appears to be safer than the one you don't, doesn't it?), it's almost amusing to imagine the thoughts behind people's expressions. And Shoshannah, who wears her heart on her sleeve far more than most people know or care to read even as she's so intent on guarding the softest parts of herself, gives a relieved little sob of breath and disappears into the bathroom (or somewhere relatively private) for awhile when she finds out that Padre is awake - really awake. When she returns, her face looks well scrubbed and her eyelashes are wet.

It's only when that's done that she makes her way back to his room, and stands as out of the way as she can while still being near him. She doesn't say much, certainly doesn't make a scene, but she's such a presence that of course everyone's uncomfortable - up until visiting hours are over, anyway, or until she has to make room for the flow of visitors.

Tuesday
Again, Shoshannah's there and maybe by now Padre does know more about how much time she spent sitting in the uncomfortable chairs by the elevators, though she doesn't mention it. When she left Sera's place, she'd told the Cultist that she wouldn't be back, that she was remiss in her duties at the Chantry and now that Padre's awake and at least sort of functioning there's even less point in her haunting the place. It's lucky, really, that Rosa happens to be driving Pan back to the Chantry; it means Shoshannah can ask her, all polite and prickly-distant, if she can hitch a ride back too. This is quicker and easier than hitchhiking, and cheaper than calling for a cab, and less of a nuisance (for the other people involved) than calling Sid or someone.

The conversation? That's none of her business. But you can bet she finds a way to have a hand on Padre - this girl who so rarely allows touch - the whole way back.