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Story Notes:
Just reposting the story guys. I did plan on re-editing it but I am so busy right now and people keep asking about it. So here you go.

Chapter One

Although the room was loud and alive with noise and activity all I could hear was the hum of the neon lights that shone brightly over head. It had been an hour since I received the call and forty minutes since I had been told to sit in the waiting area. The room was filled with people, some holding gauze to try and cover open wounds, some complaining of how much longer they would be made to wait, some sitting silently like me. The nurses were running around, handing out pain meds, calling names and discharging people, they looked straight through me as though I wasn’t even there, and at that moment I wished I wasn’t.

“Mr Carter?” I looked up when my name was called and knew instantly that it wasn’t good. His pale green scrubs were lightly splattered with a deep red substance that could only be her blood.

“How is she?” I asked standing up quickly and he frowned slightly before he spoke.

“She’s currently stable but things are still extremely critical, Willow has received serious head trauma and I’m concerned with the amount of swelling, we also can’t rule out spinal injuries. I think it would be wise if you informed other family members as soon as possible…”

“You don’t think she’s going to make it do you?” I croaked my heart in my throat at the thought and he looked back at me solemnly and sighed.

“It’s a critical time for her; she’s extremely ill and if she does survive there is no guarantee that she will make a full recovery. There’s a relatives room where you can make some phone calls.”

“I want to be with her, her parents are on the way,” I mumbled trying to keep my emotions in check but it was becoming increasingly harder to do so and I knew if I stood her much longer with him I would loose it completely.

“Of course, if you want to follow me. We’ve got her hooked up to various equipment and she’s already very bruised, if you have any questions you can ask the nurse, I’m going to make a few phone calls to neurology so we can get her a bed,” he said leaving me outside the door to the trauma room.

I stood outside the door frozen for I don’t know how long. She looked so fragile, so pale, like all the life had been sucked away from her. There was so much equipment around her, so much noise around her but she remained silent. I eventually plucked up the courage to push the door open and then even managed to place one foot in front of the other and before I knew it I was beside her, staring at her bruised face and broken body.

I wanted to hold her hand, to let her know that I was there, that she wasn’t alone but she had a drip in one and some other probe attached to her finger on the other which I didn’t want to disturb. The only colour to her skin were the angry purple and black bruises dotted around her face and the specs of dry blood. I suppose I should have been thankful that she wasn’t still bleeding.

“You can hold her hand and talk to her.” The nurse gave me a sympathetic smile as she moved a chair across to me. I sat down and carefully took Willow’s hand in mine, careful to avoid the drip. I didn’t know what to say so I just sat and stared at her , watched as her chest rose and fell with every breath that the machine pushed into her lungs. I bought her hand up to my lips and placed a gentle kiss on it, I think I wanted that kiss to make this all go away, to make her wake up like in the fairy tales but when I opened my eyes again she was still laid motionless, asleep, no unconscious.

The nurse caught my attention as she began pressing some buttons and writing information down on a chart. She frowned when something beeped and a set of numbers flashed on the screen.

“Is something wrong?” I asked as she pressed the button again to take another reading.

“Her blood pressure is just a bit off what we would like, I’m just going to double check it,” she said looking to me and giving me another gentle smile which I couldn’t return. The numbers flashed up again and she wrote them down.

“Is it ok now?” I asked.

“It’s where we would expect it to be, blood pressure can fluctuate quite a bit especially in Willow’s case following a trauma. She lost quite a bit of blood from a few lacerations but luckily she avoided any serious internal bleeding. We’ve given her blood and saline to increase her pressure and she’s maintaining a good BP which is what we like.”

“Is she going to die?” I whispered a tear escaping from my eye. She sat across from me and placed the chart at the edge of Willows bed as she contemplated on what she was going to say.

“I’ve seen people a lot worse than this walk out of this hospital and I’ve seen people a lot better than this not make it. I wish I could give you a definite answer but I just can’t do that. At the moment she is holding her own, she’s stable but the next few days are going to be critical, we’re giving her medication to try and reduce the swelling in her head and that’s why she is sedated and ventilated. She’s going to need a lot of support, and so are you. Do you want me to call anybody for you? Do you have anything you want to ask?” She said rubbing my arm lightly.

“Her parents are on the way in and I’ve left some messages. Has she…has she been awake at all?” I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted the answer to that. Would it make me feel better to know that she had been like this since the accident or that she had been awake and scared and in pain?

“When she first came in she was conscious but not making much sense which will be because of her head trauma. We’ve sedated her to keep her calm so that we can treat her more effectively. We had to put a tube down her throat to help her breathe because some of the drugs we have given her can cause her to stop maintaining her own airway.”

I nodded not really taking any of it in and went back to looking at her.

“What happens now?”

“It’s a waiting game. We need to see how she responds. Hopefully the swelling will decrease over the next few days and after that we should start seeing some improvement in her condition. Dr Rodriguez is speaking to the neurology attending as he has more expertise in this area and then we are going to transfer her to the ICU so they can monitor her more closely.”

“Thank you.”

“Your welcome any more questions just ask ok?” She said as she began another cycle of taking Willow’s vitals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two.

I walked into the waiting room, saw her parents and broke down.

“Oh God, no she’s not gone, not my baby,” Rachel hysterically said as her hand went to cover her mouth and I realised what message me loosing it must have sent out, they say that a picture is worth a thousand words don’t they?

“No Rachel, no she’s alive. She’s just, I feel so fucking helpless,” I said wiping away my tears before I was pulled into a hug.

“Where is she? What happened?” Mike asked obviously cornered about his only daughter.

“She was driving home from the studio and I don’t know, I was told that she somehow flipped the car, that it was on it’s roof when the paramedics got there. There saying that she’s got bad head trauma, she’s on a ventilator for that, I just I don’t know what’s going on, she just looks so fragile,” I said trying to get everything that I had been told out.

“Where is she?” Rachel asked me.

“They’ve got her in one of the rooms, they are waiting to take her to ICU.”

“Can we see her?”

“I don’t know, I guess,” I said walking in the direction that I had come from but I quickly moved out of the way when I felt someone run passed me. Two other people in scrubs followed suit and I knew they were going to her, that something bad was happening. I could hear the wailing of monitors before I got to the entrance, I couldn’t let her leave me, she couldn’t die on me I needed her too much. I tried to enter the room but the nurse from earlier spotted me and blocked the doorway.

“I think it’s better if you wait outside,” She said calmly ushering me and her parents towards a few seats down the hallway.

“What’s going on? What are they doing to her?” I fired at her.

“Are you Willow’s parents?” She asked spotting that there were four more people with me.

“We’re her parents, these are her step parents,” Mike said pointing to Ian and Harriet who were just as anxious as Rachel and Mike.

“I’m Lois, I’ve been looking after Willow since she was bought in. She had received blunt head trauma and has a lot of swelling which we need to rectify. She was ventilated on arrival due to some of the medication we are giving her-”

“I already know this,” I nearly yelled cutting her off. She was holding back on telling me what was really going on and I was starting to panic. I guess when I was risked with losing someone so important to me I became a bit aggressive to find out more information, to find out what could be done to help.

“Mr Carter I know this is a horrible time for you but I need to catch her parents up, I’m not withholding anything from you but they need to know everything as well,” She said before she turned from me to speak to them again and I felt Rachel’s hand sneak into mine and give it a reassuring squeeze. “She has been stable, maintaining a good blood pressure and on our first exam we were confident that there were minimal internal injuries. In the past few minutes her blood pressure has fallen, this could be due to a number of reasons, the medication that we have put her on, an internal bleed, the doctors are in there now trying to determine what the problem is. As soon as we know anything we’ll come and tell you, but right now I can’t have all of you in there, there is not enough room-”

“Lois call the blood bank we need more O-NEG,” Someone shouted from the door to where Willow was.

“I need to get back in there but as soon as we know anything we’ll let you know.”

I felt sick, I felt angry at letting her convince me to go home early because of my headache, I should have stayed with her but she insisted that she would be fine driving home and I had no reason to disagree with her, it was a journey she had made a thousand times before, but most of all I was petrified about losing her.It was the longest five minutes of my life but eventually the Doctor I recognised from before strode out of the room with a clip board in his hand.

“Mr Carter I take it you and Miss Abrams are not married?” He asked quickly and I shook my head. “Then you cant give consent, are you her parents?” He asked.

“I’m her mother,” Rachel said.

“We need to do an emergency lapartomy she’s got some internal bleeding we need to stop,” he said thrusting the clipboard at her with a pen and she didn’t hesitate to sign it. I watched as they pushed Willow out on the gurney towards the elevators and knew that it would be futile to follow, I would just be told to wait again.

Waiting was the last thing that I wanted to do at the moment but it looked like I would be doing a lot of it.

………………………………...............................................................................................

“Are you Willow’s family?” Dr Rodriguez asked ten minutes later as he walked into the room where we had been moved to. “I’m sorry about the abruptness of earlier, obviously my main concern at the time was trying to stabilise Willow.”

“How is she?” Mike asked.

“She very sick. She’s got swelling to her brain but what we are concerned with now is her internal injuries, when she first arrived to us we were confident that there were minimal injuries, her lavage was negative, as was her ultra sound scan. Her blood pressure dropped quite considerably after an hour of being here which is slightly odd.”

“Why is that odd?” Ian asked.

“We had assessed her and she was very stable, if someone has internal injuries they usually manifest quite quickly,” he explained.

“So What does this mean?” Rachel asked becoming more confused.

“It’s either been a small slow undetectable bleed, or it could be an unrelated incident, such as an eptopic pregnancy.”

I nearly hit the floor, she couldn’t be pregnant, there was no way she could be pregnant, she would have told me for a start. I could feel five sets of eyes burning into me and I felt a blush creep up my neck and into my cheeks.

“Has she told you that she was pregnant?” The doctor asked me.

“No.”

“Is there any chance that she could be pregnant?” he said. He was basically asking me to own up to having unprotected sex with Willow in front of her parents this was every guys nightmare. “Mr Carter if there is any chance she could be we need to know,” he prompted.

“Yes she could be,” I said quickly and quietly as I averted my eyes to the floor.

“She’s in the OR now and then they are going to be transferring her to the ICU, I’ll ask one of the nurses to take you up there now,” he said as he exited the room.

I wanted the ground to swallow me whole, I felt so uncomfortable sat in a room with her parents where I had just admitted to having unprotected sex with their daughter. It’s not like I expected them to think we were complete angels and did nothing sexually but I didn’t want to have to admit it either. Willow was going to kill me when she found out, then it hit me, if she found out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

I sat on the couch of the waiting room for the ICU waiting on news that had yet to come. My mind was going a hundred miles a minute, the women I loved could be dying and I could do nothing to stop it, she could also be pregnant.

That was the thought that scared me the most. A doctor could walk through those doors at any moment and tell me that I was going to be a father, there was no way I was ready for a child, I barely had my own life together I just couldn’t take care of another one. Then a thought hit me, what if Willow had known that she was pregnant? Had she been hiding it from me because she knew that I would be against it? Because she thought I would make a terrible father? I wasn’t able to dwell on that to much because my thoughts were interrupted my the Surgeon coming into the room.

“How is she?”

“Is she going to be okay?”

“Did you find the problem?”

All these questions were fired at him but he must have been used to this as he gently silenced us and sat on the empty armchair.

“She’s stable for now. We did an exploratory laperotomy and found that it was a separate case. She suffered an eptopic pregnancy, which is where the embryo grows in the fallopian tube, obviously there is not enough room for it to grow and if left untreated can rupture which is what happened in Willow’s case. Has she been complaining of stomach cramps?” he asked.

“Yeah she just thought she was getting cramps because she was due on her period,” I answered.

“Okay, due to the extent of the rupture we had to remove her left fallopian tube, there was just too much damage to repair it, but she’s stable, she still ventilated but that is due to her sedation for the swelling. I understand this is a difficult time for you all and there is a lot of information that you need to take in so feel free to contact me if you have any questions. If Willow wakes up she can contact me with any questions that she may have, the nurse will be in shortly and then you can go and see her if you would like,” he said standing up both Mike and Ian shook his hand while Rachel and Harriet thanked him but I said nothing and made no move to shake his hand.

Surely I couldn’t have been the only one who heard him when he said IF she wakes up?