Long Road Back, Part 10
Jan. 14th, 2007 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catspawDaniel groaned as the ringing of his phone sliced through the layers of the best sleep he'd had in a while and dragged him into partial awareness. He glanced towards the bedside clock and came up empty. Of course, he wasn't at home, was he. With a grimace of annoyance he turned his head to the other side: three a.m. Shit. He'd only been asleep for an hour or so. And then sat bolt upright and groped for the receiver as the implications of its ring at this ungodly hour fully penetrated his consciousness.
"Jackson."
"Daniel, good." It was Janet, though at this time in the morning, that couldn't be great. He snapped on the bedside lamp.
"What is it? What's happened?" Daniel passed a hand over his face, wiping away the remnants of sleep, dragging his brain into focus.
"The colonel's had an episode."
He was on his feet now, phone in one hand, other hand groping for his pants.
"An 'episode'? What the hell is that? What happened?" He tucked the phone under his chin with a hiss of exasperation as he tried and failed to get into his fatigue pants one-handed. That was better, much easier with two hands - now where the hell was his tee? He picked up the whole phone and roamed to the limit of its cable, finally locating his tee half under the bed where he'd dropped it.
"We're not sure what happened. Colonel O'Neill was in considerable pain and then passed out. He's back in the infirmary under observation but he hasn't regained consciousness."
Some juggling with phone and tee and he was finally decent. Socks and boots still to find though, and he was never going to manage them while he was still talking to Janet.
"Okay. I'm on my way up. I'll be there in a few."
He made it in five, barrelling into the infirmary to be met by Janet.
"Janet! What's going on?"
She looked bone weary as she replied. "Daniel, I really don’t have a clue, not yet. Nothing more than I told you on the phone anyway. Herrera was doing the ward rounds. The first time she'd been around, the Colonel appeared to be sleeping. The second time, she noticed he was restless so she went in to check on him. He suddenly grabbed her when she got to the side of his bed. He was quite incoherent. She shouted for help, but before it could arrive the Colonel passed out. And he's been unconscious since then."
Daniel pushed past her and headed for Jack's room.
"He's not there, Daniel. He's back in intensive care."
"Shit." Daniel swung around and lengthened his stride in the opposite direction, Janet almost trotting by his side in the attempt to keep up. "Is he back on the ventilator again?"
"No, no need this time. He's breathing independently. We're monitoring that closely though. I did an MRI and a lumbar puncture before I called you, and I've ordered an EEG. We need to find out what's happening."
Daniel nodded sharply. Yes, of course they did.
They had reached Jack's bed. Daniel stood at the end of it, looking down at the figure lying completely still under the blanket. The monitors kept up a steady beep in the background, rhythmic and regular.
"He looks peaceful. Is he sedated?"
Janet shook her head. "No. He's been like this since we brought him here. No other outbursts. I can't say with any certainty what's happening until we get a chance to monitor his brain activity though."
"You think he might be in a coma?"
Janet looked regretful. "Daniel, we just don't know until we've done the EEG. I've carried out all the immediate physical checks. He's breathing okay, but his pupil reactions aren't normal. His labs are being checked out right now, although we'll have to wait a couple of days for the final results of the lumbar puncture. The EEG equipment will be here very soon and we'll get started the minute it gets here."
"Okay, I'll wait." Daniel pulled a chair over from the wall to a position beside the bed.
Janet looked as if she were about to say something. Instead, as Daniel sat down, she dropped a hand on his shoulder. When he looked up, she smiled faintly, squeezed his shoulder briefly then turned on her heel and went out.
She was back in less than ten minutes accompanied by a nurse wheeling a cart full of electronics. The EEG was hooked up in a very short time. Throughout the procedure, Janet kept up a running commentary. For his benefit, Daniel supposed, although he really wasn't sure. The only sense he grabbed from it was 'it looks like a coma, we just have to wait'. After a while he tuned it out, and thought of nothing at all until she finished up and left.
The next hour crawled past as Daniel watched quietly. Jack didn't move at all but lay completely still. If the monitor hadn't been sending out its reassuring signals, if he hadn't been able to see the shallow rise and fall of the blanket over Jack's chest, Daniel would have thought he was keeping vigil with a corpse. Every ten minutes or so a nurse would drop by, futz with the equipment and then leave with an apologetic shake of her head to Daniel's unvoiced query. Twice, Janet's head appeared around the door of the room. The third time, she came in with a coffee, which Daniel accepted gratefully, wrapping his hands around the mug as though chilled. Which was really stupid, he thought to himself - the infirmary wasn't cold.
While he was sitting there sipping, he reviewed the events of the previous day. His first reaction was that he'd done something to trigger this relapse - but he was damned if he could think what. Jack had seemed perfectly normal when he'd left him - strike that, what had passed for perfectly normal since he'd started to open up a little. He went over it and over it, wondering what the hell could have happened to have caused such a dramatic reaction. He came up empty every time. He'd kept his cool, even though Jack had been unwittingly, or maybe not so unwittingly, pushing him, and he'd avoided everything he'd discarded as being too traumatic. No, there was absolutely nothing there that he could point a finger at and say, 'Yes. That was it.'
Dammit, he hated having nothing to do except hang around.
The next moment he found himself on his feet, startled into reflexive action by the sudden hoarse yell from the bed. Jack was sweating and straining, shaking as if palsied. Another yell and his eyes snapped open as he reared up from the bed, electrodes popping out of the cap and falling back behind him. Daniel lunged for his shoulders and grabbed them, but Jack shrugged him off with ease. Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel saw a roundhouse punch coming from his blindside and tried to duck out of its way. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite quick enough and it connected with his cheekbone with a resounding smack, though thankfully towards the end of its swing rather than midway.
Through the ringing in his head he heard running footsteps as he went to grab Jack and restrain him again. This time he had help: the SF who'd been on duty outside the room took one side and Daniel took the other, both hanging on grimly as Jack bucked and struggled between them.
More rapid footsteps clicking against the cement floor and then Janet's voice, saying, "Restraints, quickly. I don't want him to hurt himself or anyone else. Herrera, you --"
Her voice suddenly cut off as one of Jack's feet kicked out and caught her in the side, dumping her on her butt on the floor. From the corner of his eye Daniel registered that she scrambled quickly to her feet again, a determined expression on her face, stopping only to slap the alarm button with the flat of her hand before launching back into the fray.
A couple minutes' more flailing and scrambling and this time, the footsteps were more solid, heralding a detachment of SFs who barrelled through the door. Jack had been fighting like a madman, wide eyed and snarling, but suddenly he slumped and fell back. Daniel glanced at Janet and she met his gaze, her eyes conveying a shrug as she blew a strand of hair that had worked loose away from her face.
"Stand down, Airmen," she barked. "I think we're free and clear. Herrera, Clark - get those straps secured and get the Colonel comfortable again."
Daniel let go of Jack's shoulders and staggered away from the bed to allow the nursing staff room to work in a room suddenly too full of people, coming up to rest against the wall. He blew out a sigh and gingerly explored the swelling on his cheekbone with his fingertips, taking in a sharp breath through his teeth as the flesh protested. He looked up and met Janet's eyes.
"Another 'episode', huh?"
"And worse than the last one." Janet was brisk as she buckled the strap around Jack's ankle and moved to the other one, dismissing the SFs as she did so. Only when she was done did she stop and feel her side, then rubbed her tailbone, allowing herself a wince as she did so. "Ouch."
"You okay?"
She grinned at him, all their previous mutual animosity pushed to one side. "I'll live. I'll have a butt that looks like a Hawaiian sunset in the morning I guess, but no real harm done. You? Oh hey, you'll need a cold pack for that. Clark, get a pack for Doctor Jackson when you're done there, will you? One for me as well, please. Thank you. You're going to look like you've done five rounds with Mike Tyson if you don't get one."
"I think I'll feel like it anyway. He packs a mean punch."
"No arguments from me." They smiled at each other briefly then Janet was all business again as she started to hook up the EEG.
"We really need to know what's going on here. I'm thinking we can rule out coma though," she said with a wry twist to her lips. Finished, she turned to scan the readout. "And now I'm sure of it. This is interesting,"
Daniel moved up to look over her shoulder. "What? What's interesting?"
"This is what's happening now."
Daniel looked at the readout, watched the steady pattern of peaks and troughs scroll across the screen. "Okay."
Janet continued, "These are delta waves. Just what you'd expect from a coma." She toggled a button on the machine. "And here's the readout from before the Colonel seized. Initially the rhythm was also pure delta, nothing above three hertz. But look here, the pattern changes. These waves are in the region of seven hertz and staying there. These are theta waves. And here, just before the cap was disconnected, there's a huge spike and wave pattern. As if his brain was idling and then something pressed the power switch. None of these waves fall below 40 hertz. They're gamma waves."
"And that means...?"
Janet was frowning, thinking furiously. "I'm not sure." As Daniel made a small involuntary sound of impatience, she qualified, "It does absolutely confirm that the Colonel's not in a coma. Theta waves imply limbic activity. Specifically, hippocampal activity. It's a brain state somewhere between sleep and consciousness and the thinking is that it's associated with memory and behavioural activation. Gamma waves are associated with high level information processing."
Sudden, wild hope blossomed in Daniel's mind. "So, on the brain as computer model he's what? Rebooting?"
"Could be. But it's not quite so straightforward as that. I can't totally rule out the possibility of meningitis until the culture results come through, and that'll take a couple of days. He's not showing any of the associated symptoms - but I can't say for sure until I get those results. If this persists he might be at risk of even more damage. Seizures are never good."
"So what do we do now?"
Janet turned to him and gave him a sympathetic squeeze on the arm. "I'm calling in Doctor Ross for a consult, he'll do more tests and advise me on the suitability of sedation. Then we go back to waiting again. I'm sorry, Daniel. It's all we can do."
Hope faded as suddenly as it had bloomed.
"Great. Just great." Daniel's disgusted mutter was accompanied by a hand scrubbing up through his hair and around over his face. He turned abruptly and snagged a chair, throwing himself down on it hard enough to scrape it back across the floor, and heaving a deep sigh. "Looks like it's going to be a long night."
"There's not a lot you can do here, Daniel. Why don't you --"
Daniel shook his head, a gesture that brooked no argument. "No. I'm staying." He folded his arms across his chest and stuck his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. One look at his expression convinced Janet that his mind was made up. She chewed her lip for a moment then gave him a resigned look.
"Call me at once if anything at all changes. I'm going to go write up my notes until Doctor Ross gets here."
As the door swung to quietly behind her, Daniel shifted his position on the chair. He moved it closer to the side of the bed, angled so that he could keep an eye on the wave patterns on the monitor. Long minutes passed with no variation that he could see: the patterns stayed on the same frequency with hardly a blip.
The minutes slithered into an hour, then two. Ross appeared, ordered some blood work, advised against sedation and then left. Nurses came and went, walking on quiet feet; the machine chirred on in the background, a low electronic hum whispering of sleep. The night shift went off duty and was replaced with the day shift. Daniel's eyes felt gritty and he closed them to get some relief. His head began to droop.
He couldn't immediately figure out what had wakened him from his doze. A sound. A different sound to the ones he'd been hearing for the last - a glance at his watch - three hours. He looked at the figure lying on the bed.
Jack was no longer completely still. His eyes were shut and he was making no sound other than the soft whistling of breath through clenched teeth, but he was straining against the straps that were holding him down. The leather was creaking under the strain as the muscles in his arms and shoulders bulged with effort, veins standing out starkly against bunched flesh. Daniel jumped for the bell and then looked at the monitor. Christ, it looked like the Fourth of July, the waves spiking and changing almost too fast for the machine to keep up.
Jack started to speak just as Janet came through the door, a low mumble that Daniel had to lean right over him to make out. At first it made no sense at all to Daniel, his brain muzzy and disjointed from lack of meaningful sleep, until he realised with a shock that it wasn't English Jack was speaking, it was Arabic. He was cursing and grumbling in fluent Arabic, a thin note of hysteria rising in his voice.
Daniel automatically answered in the same tongue, marginally aware of Janet's nod of approval as she monitored the machine. He reached out to smooth Jack's hair and kept his voice low and soothing, urging Jack to relax, reassuring him that he was safe, taking the chance to slip in the odd endearment among his words, anything to calm Jack down.
It seemed to be working. Jack's voice became quieter and his muscles gradually relaxed. Finally his words petered out altogether and he sighed and lay still again.
"Good job, Daniel," Janet said quietly. He smiled tiredly at her and rubbed his forehead.
"I think I need some coffee."
"The machine's on in my office. I sent out for Danish too. Go help yourself, I'll hold things down here for ten minutes."
"Thanks." He flashed her a real smile and stumbled off in search of temporary nirvana.
As he stared, hollow-eyed, at the wall over the rim of his first mugful, he deliberately tried to think of nothing at all. Even Janet's industrial-strength caffeine was proving no antidote to the dragging exhaustion that was gripping him and did nothing to fortify him against the possibility of hours more of the same ahead, all with an uncertain outcome. He tried a couple of bites of Danish but very soon discarded the idea of attempting to finish it. He was too tired to chew, and tossed the remainder in the trash.
Thinking of nothing wasn't helping, he realised. He didn't need to slide into lethargy, couldn't afford to do that. The lack of progress was dragging him down: despite his reputation as a patient man, he really wasn't when it came down to this. This was way too personal for patience, and he hated balancing on a knife-edge, doing nothing at all of any use, while Jack just got sucked under by this slow, dragging undertow.
For a moment or two, he was irrationally angry with Jack. He always expected Jack to fight as hard as he could. And he wasn't convinced that Jack was fighting as hard as he could right now. But his anger fizzled out and died almost as soon as it reached its peak. He didn't have the energy for that, either. Might have been better if he had, at least he could channel it to give himself the impetus to carry on.
He heard Jack's voice quite clearly in his head: "Survival 101. Whadda we have and whadda we need?" Well right now, he had precisely squat. But, he thought severely to himself, that wasn't about to change if he just sat here holding his own private pity party. He not only could do this, he had to do this. On the thought, he dredged deep, gathered what energy he could, drained his coffee and forced himself to stand and move back towards the ICU.
*
Part 11
"Jackson."
"Daniel, good." It was Janet, though at this time in the morning, that couldn't be great. He snapped on the bedside lamp.
"What is it? What's happened?" Daniel passed a hand over his face, wiping away the remnants of sleep, dragging his brain into focus.
"The colonel's had an episode."
He was on his feet now, phone in one hand, other hand groping for his pants.
"An 'episode'? What the hell is that? What happened?" He tucked the phone under his chin with a hiss of exasperation as he tried and failed to get into his fatigue pants one-handed. That was better, much easier with two hands - now where the hell was his tee? He picked up the whole phone and roamed to the limit of its cable, finally locating his tee half under the bed where he'd dropped it.
"We're not sure what happened. Colonel O'Neill was in considerable pain and then passed out. He's back in the infirmary under observation but he hasn't regained consciousness."
Some juggling with phone and tee and he was finally decent. Socks and boots still to find though, and he was never going to manage them while he was still talking to Janet.
"Okay. I'm on my way up. I'll be there in a few."
He made it in five, barrelling into the infirmary to be met by Janet.
"Janet! What's going on?"
She looked bone weary as she replied. "Daniel, I really don’t have a clue, not yet. Nothing more than I told you on the phone anyway. Herrera was doing the ward rounds. The first time she'd been around, the Colonel appeared to be sleeping. The second time, she noticed he was restless so she went in to check on him. He suddenly grabbed her when she got to the side of his bed. He was quite incoherent. She shouted for help, but before it could arrive the Colonel passed out. And he's been unconscious since then."
Daniel pushed past her and headed for Jack's room.
"He's not there, Daniel. He's back in intensive care."
"Shit." Daniel swung around and lengthened his stride in the opposite direction, Janet almost trotting by his side in the attempt to keep up. "Is he back on the ventilator again?"
"No, no need this time. He's breathing independently. We're monitoring that closely though. I did an MRI and a lumbar puncture before I called you, and I've ordered an EEG. We need to find out what's happening."
Daniel nodded sharply. Yes, of course they did.
They had reached Jack's bed. Daniel stood at the end of it, looking down at the figure lying completely still under the blanket. The monitors kept up a steady beep in the background, rhythmic and regular.
"He looks peaceful. Is he sedated?"
Janet shook her head. "No. He's been like this since we brought him here. No other outbursts. I can't say with any certainty what's happening until we get a chance to monitor his brain activity though."
"You think he might be in a coma?"
Janet looked regretful. "Daniel, we just don't know until we've done the EEG. I've carried out all the immediate physical checks. He's breathing okay, but his pupil reactions aren't normal. His labs are being checked out right now, although we'll have to wait a couple of days for the final results of the lumbar puncture. The EEG equipment will be here very soon and we'll get started the minute it gets here."
"Okay, I'll wait." Daniel pulled a chair over from the wall to a position beside the bed.
Janet looked as if she were about to say something. Instead, as Daniel sat down, she dropped a hand on his shoulder. When he looked up, she smiled faintly, squeezed his shoulder briefly then turned on her heel and went out.
She was back in less than ten minutes accompanied by a nurse wheeling a cart full of electronics. The EEG was hooked up in a very short time. Throughout the procedure, Janet kept up a running commentary. For his benefit, Daniel supposed, although he really wasn't sure. The only sense he grabbed from it was 'it looks like a coma, we just have to wait'. After a while he tuned it out, and thought of nothing at all until she finished up and left.
The next hour crawled past as Daniel watched quietly. Jack didn't move at all but lay completely still. If the monitor hadn't been sending out its reassuring signals, if he hadn't been able to see the shallow rise and fall of the blanket over Jack's chest, Daniel would have thought he was keeping vigil with a corpse. Every ten minutes or so a nurse would drop by, futz with the equipment and then leave with an apologetic shake of her head to Daniel's unvoiced query. Twice, Janet's head appeared around the door of the room. The third time, she came in with a coffee, which Daniel accepted gratefully, wrapping his hands around the mug as though chilled. Which was really stupid, he thought to himself - the infirmary wasn't cold.
While he was sitting there sipping, he reviewed the events of the previous day. His first reaction was that he'd done something to trigger this relapse - but he was damned if he could think what. Jack had seemed perfectly normal when he'd left him - strike that, what had passed for perfectly normal since he'd started to open up a little. He went over it and over it, wondering what the hell could have happened to have caused such a dramatic reaction. He came up empty every time. He'd kept his cool, even though Jack had been unwittingly, or maybe not so unwittingly, pushing him, and he'd avoided everything he'd discarded as being too traumatic. No, there was absolutely nothing there that he could point a finger at and say, 'Yes. That was it.'
Dammit, he hated having nothing to do except hang around.
The next moment he found himself on his feet, startled into reflexive action by the sudden hoarse yell from the bed. Jack was sweating and straining, shaking as if palsied. Another yell and his eyes snapped open as he reared up from the bed, electrodes popping out of the cap and falling back behind him. Daniel lunged for his shoulders and grabbed them, but Jack shrugged him off with ease. Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel saw a roundhouse punch coming from his blindside and tried to duck out of its way. Unfortunately, he wasn't quite quick enough and it connected with his cheekbone with a resounding smack, though thankfully towards the end of its swing rather than midway.
Through the ringing in his head he heard running footsteps as he went to grab Jack and restrain him again. This time he had help: the SF who'd been on duty outside the room took one side and Daniel took the other, both hanging on grimly as Jack bucked and struggled between them.
More rapid footsteps clicking against the cement floor and then Janet's voice, saying, "Restraints, quickly. I don't want him to hurt himself or anyone else. Herrera, you --"
Her voice suddenly cut off as one of Jack's feet kicked out and caught her in the side, dumping her on her butt on the floor. From the corner of his eye Daniel registered that she scrambled quickly to her feet again, a determined expression on her face, stopping only to slap the alarm button with the flat of her hand before launching back into the fray.
A couple minutes' more flailing and scrambling and this time, the footsteps were more solid, heralding a detachment of SFs who barrelled through the door. Jack had been fighting like a madman, wide eyed and snarling, but suddenly he slumped and fell back. Daniel glanced at Janet and she met his gaze, her eyes conveying a shrug as she blew a strand of hair that had worked loose away from her face.
"Stand down, Airmen," she barked. "I think we're free and clear. Herrera, Clark - get those straps secured and get the Colonel comfortable again."
Daniel let go of Jack's shoulders and staggered away from the bed to allow the nursing staff room to work in a room suddenly too full of people, coming up to rest against the wall. He blew out a sigh and gingerly explored the swelling on his cheekbone with his fingertips, taking in a sharp breath through his teeth as the flesh protested. He looked up and met Janet's eyes.
"Another 'episode', huh?"
"And worse than the last one." Janet was brisk as she buckled the strap around Jack's ankle and moved to the other one, dismissing the SFs as she did so. Only when she was done did she stop and feel her side, then rubbed her tailbone, allowing herself a wince as she did so. "Ouch."
"You okay?"
She grinned at him, all their previous mutual animosity pushed to one side. "I'll live. I'll have a butt that looks like a Hawaiian sunset in the morning I guess, but no real harm done. You? Oh hey, you'll need a cold pack for that. Clark, get a pack for Doctor Jackson when you're done there, will you? One for me as well, please. Thank you. You're going to look like you've done five rounds with Mike Tyson if you don't get one."
"I think I'll feel like it anyway. He packs a mean punch."
"No arguments from me." They smiled at each other briefly then Janet was all business again as she started to hook up the EEG.
"We really need to know what's going on here. I'm thinking we can rule out coma though," she said with a wry twist to her lips. Finished, she turned to scan the readout. "And now I'm sure of it. This is interesting,"
Daniel moved up to look over her shoulder. "What? What's interesting?"
"This is what's happening now."
Daniel looked at the readout, watched the steady pattern of peaks and troughs scroll across the screen. "Okay."
Janet continued, "These are delta waves. Just what you'd expect from a coma." She toggled a button on the machine. "And here's the readout from before the Colonel seized. Initially the rhythm was also pure delta, nothing above three hertz. But look here, the pattern changes. These waves are in the region of seven hertz and staying there. These are theta waves. And here, just before the cap was disconnected, there's a huge spike and wave pattern. As if his brain was idling and then something pressed the power switch. None of these waves fall below 40 hertz. They're gamma waves."
"And that means...?"
Janet was frowning, thinking furiously. "I'm not sure." As Daniel made a small involuntary sound of impatience, she qualified, "It does absolutely confirm that the Colonel's not in a coma. Theta waves imply limbic activity. Specifically, hippocampal activity. It's a brain state somewhere between sleep and consciousness and the thinking is that it's associated with memory and behavioural activation. Gamma waves are associated with high level information processing."
Sudden, wild hope blossomed in Daniel's mind. "So, on the brain as computer model he's what? Rebooting?"
"Could be. But it's not quite so straightforward as that. I can't totally rule out the possibility of meningitis until the culture results come through, and that'll take a couple of days. He's not showing any of the associated symptoms - but I can't say for sure until I get those results. If this persists he might be at risk of even more damage. Seizures are never good."
"So what do we do now?"
Janet turned to him and gave him a sympathetic squeeze on the arm. "I'm calling in Doctor Ross for a consult, he'll do more tests and advise me on the suitability of sedation. Then we go back to waiting again. I'm sorry, Daniel. It's all we can do."
Hope faded as suddenly as it had bloomed.
"Great. Just great." Daniel's disgusted mutter was accompanied by a hand scrubbing up through his hair and around over his face. He turned abruptly and snagged a chair, throwing himself down on it hard enough to scrape it back across the floor, and heaving a deep sigh. "Looks like it's going to be a long night."
"There's not a lot you can do here, Daniel. Why don't you --"
Daniel shook his head, a gesture that brooked no argument. "No. I'm staying." He folded his arms across his chest and stuck his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. One look at his expression convinced Janet that his mind was made up. She chewed her lip for a moment then gave him a resigned look.
"Call me at once if anything at all changes. I'm going to go write up my notes until Doctor Ross gets here."
As the door swung to quietly behind her, Daniel shifted his position on the chair. He moved it closer to the side of the bed, angled so that he could keep an eye on the wave patterns on the monitor. Long minutes passed with no variation that he could see: the patterns stayed on the same frequency with hardly a blip.
The minutes slithered into an hour, then two. Ross appeared, ordered some blood work, advised against sedation and then left. Nurses came and went, walking on quiet feet; the machine chirred on in the background, a low electronic hum whispering of sleep. The night shift went off duty and was replaced with the day shift. Daniel's eyes felt gritty and he closed them to get some relief. His head began to droop.
He couldn't immediately figure out what had wakened him from his doze. A sound. A different sound to the ones he'd been hearing for the last - a glance at his watch - three hours. He looked at the figure lying on the bed.
Jack was no longer completely still. His eyes were shut and he was making no sound other than the soft whistling of breath through clenched teeth, but he was straining against the straps that were holding him down. The leather was creaking under the strain as the muscles in his arms and shoulders bulged with effort, veins standing out starkly against bunched flesh. Daniel jumped for the bell and then looked at the monitor. Christ, it looked like the Fourth of July, the waves spiking and changing almost too fast for the machine to keep up.
Jack started to speak just as Janet came through the door, a low mumble that Daniel had to lean right over him to make out. At first it made no sense at all to Daniel, his brain muzzy and disjointed from lack of meaningful sleep, until he realised with a shock that it wasn't English Jack was speaking, it was Arabic. He was cursing and grumbling in fluent Arabic, a thin note of hysteria rising in his voice.
Daniel automatically answered in the same tongue, marginally aware of Janet's nod of approval as she monitored the machine. He reached out to smooth Jack's hair and kept his voice low and soothing, urging Jack to relax, reassuring him that he was safe, taking the chance to slip in the odd endearment among his words, anything to calm Jack down.
It seemed to be working. Jack's voice became quieter and his muscles gradually relaxed. Finally his words petered out altogether and he sighed and lay still again.
"Good job, Daniel," Janet said quietly. He smiled tiredly at her and rubbed his forehead.
"I think I need some coffee."
"The machine's on in my office. I sent out for Danish too. Go help yourself, I'll hold things down here for ten minutes."
"Thanks." He flashed her a real smile and stumbled off in search of temporary nirvana.
As he stared, hollow-eyed, at the wall over the rim of his first mugful, he deliberately tried to think of nothing at all. Even Janet's industrial-strength caffeine was proving no antidote to the dragging exhaustion that was gripping him and did nothing to fortify him against the possibility of hours more of the same ahead, all with an uncertain outcome. He tried a couple of bites of Danish but very soon discarded the idea of attempting to finish it. He was too tired to chew, and tossed the remainder in the trash.
Thinking of nothing wasn't helping, he realised. He didn't need to slide into lethargy, couldn't afford to do that. The lack of progress was dragging him down: despite his reputation as a patient man, he really wasn't when it came down to this. This was way too personal for patience, and he hated balancing on a knife-edge, doing nothing at all of any use, while Jack just got sucked under by this slow, dragging undertow.
For a moment or two, he was irrationally angry with Jack. He always expected Jack to fight as hard as he could. And he wasn't convinced that Jack was fighting as hard as he could right now. But his anger fizzled out and died almost as soon as it reached its peak. He didn't have the energy for that, either. Might have been better if he had, at least he could channel it to give himself the impetus to carry on.
He heard Jack's voice quite clearly in his head: "Survival 101. Whadda we have and whadda we need?" Well right now, he had precisely squat. But, he thought severely to himself, that wasn't about to change if he just sat here holding his own private pity party. He not only could do this, he had to do this. On the thought, he dredged deep, gathered what energy he could, drained his coffee and forced himself to stand and move back towards the ICU.
*
Part 11
