Trials and Tribulations - [Bensler EO]

Part Twenty Seven - Warzone

A few days had passed in between surgeries. Her choice had become clear to her that night she stood, looking in the bathroom mirror. The next morning, she had solemnly given Doctor Keller her decision. Perhaps she had known what choice to make since the moment her options had been delivered to her.

Harder chemo, or more surgery.

She didn't bother to look at it from the perspective of odds. No numbers or figures showing her the chances and rates she would be faced with. In the end, she wanted this to be over faster. That mattered the most. The odds were obvious enough from the tone of the doctor's voice, she didn't need them printed in black and white.

In the end, the choices weren't really a choice at all. All she could've done was hold her head a little higher, put on a brave face, and hang onto her decision until the anesthesiologist had her counting backward from ten. Which is exactly what she did.

She hadn't anticipated that when she had walked into Sloan Kettering for the first surgery, she would be leaving with a much larger and much more invasive scar. There was only small talk in between. Elliot never left her side, from the first surgery to the second and the entire time between. There were no midnight discussions diving deep into the logic behind all of it. It was simplicity at its finest as she wallowed in the purgatory of her decisions. She had to disassociate for survival. So, she did.

He was right there with her, only he paid much more attention than she did. He held the straw to her lips when she was too weak to lift her glass. He ran the brush through her hair when the constant lying down began to tangle it. He held her hand when they came in to draw her blood, even when they both knew she would be fine without holding it.

Not a word of complaint left his lips as he slept in the chair beside her bed for the next week. Not even when the first two days after the second surgery consisted of her anesthesia making it impossible to hold foods down. He championed right there with her, not batting an eye at any of it.

Olivia Benson was the last person to ever admit she relied on someone, but she would be remiss if she didn't admit that Elliot had gotten her through this. Pride was far away at this point, only a quiet gratefulness for his presence.

There was a positive in the situation. A very small positive that was so small, it didn't feel welcome into the venn diagram of things that were worth being happy about. That positive was that she didn't need to wake up with a gaping hole in her chest. She vaguely remembered Doctor Keller calling it a dual procedure as he explained it to her. She wasn't listening too much, but she knew that they had planned to reconstruct her chest at the same time as they destroyed it. There was an irony there, she was just too tired to find it.

Having him as a doctor made things a little easier. He was gifted in his skills, and he fought the hard fight for his patients. The assembly of his team was state of the art; enough so that she didn't have to wait an indefinite amount of time and go through a million plastic surgery consults. Right then and there, they removed the cancer and rebuilt the wound it left.