be safe, bambina

chapter 3

Everyone was rushing around the trauma floor. There were doctors, patients, nurses, all running around the floor, and there wasn't a clear image of Maya or the crew.

It felt like Carina's world had stopped. She saw everything in slow motion as she dropped her phone to the ground.

"Carina..., hey you dropped your phone. Is everything okay?" Dr. Wilson said as she ran over to Carina, leaning over to pick up Carina's phone.

"Maya...she's on her way here. Something happened...I don't know what happened," Carina said, stuttering over her words.

She was just waiting at the door for her wife for fear she may have already lost her. She didn't have the will to wait outside.

Meanwhile, the ambulance pulled up and both Montgomery and Miller popped out of the truck.

"We have a 32 year old female, smoke inhalation, possible brain hemorrhage," Miller said as he helped Dr. Hunt with the gurney. He looked at Miller with immediate fright.

"It's Bishop," he said. "Get her to trauma 1 stat," he yelled to his team of interns and physicians.

The group held on to Maya's gurney and ran inside the hospital, seeing Dr. Wilson's arms wrapped around Carina, who was clearly a mess.

She broke free of Wilson's arms to run to her wife. She grabbed the railing of the gurney and just stared at her wife, holding her head with her free hand.

"You're going to be okay, bambina," she whispered.
As they got to the door, Owen tried to move Carina from the gurney.

"No, I am going in there with you," she said. "The last time I didn't get to go into the OR I lost my baby brother. I cannot lose my wife too."

"Okay but once we get Shepard in here to see what's going on, we have to take it from there...she wouldn't want you to see her like this Carina," Owen replied.
"She wouldn't want you to see her opened up."

As Hunt and Shepard began to run scans, Andy, Hughes, Miller and Montgomery made their way just outside of the room. Carina caught their eye and she immediately ran out to them.

"Are any of you going to tell me what the hell happened at that scene and out of all of you, why my wife is the one in the gurney?"

She was obviously agitated as she looked at all of them, only noticing soot on their faces, no scratches, bruises or ice packs on them anywhere.

"She said this was a first alarm...what happened," she continued.

The team explained that the fire was much worse than they had expected and that what happened to Maya was very sudden.

"I tried to pick her up and rush her down the stairs and out of the building and she wouldn't let me," Miller said. "I could tell she wasn't okay, but she told me she could do it. We all ran out of the building and when the explosion occurred we noticed she wasn't behind us."

"And I went back in there, and I got her Carina, I was not leaving Bishop behind," Miller added.
Just as Carina was about to fire back, the hospital team grabbed Maya's gurney and rushed her to the OR.

"Owen, wait, explain," Carina said.

"There's definitely a brain hemorrhage, we would assume due to smoke inhalation," he said. "But there has to be more to the story. Her blood pressure was concerningly high, like one of a severe panic attack, but we have to get into the OR to repair the hemorrhage. I will know more in time."

"I won't let anything happen to her, Carina, I can promise you that. I deal with hemorrhages all of the time, Hunt and I have this," Shepard added.

The two began their craniotomy. Though more invasive, they wanted to be positive that the bleeding had stopped and that there were no further issues Maya could be dealing with.

It was much harder than the past hemorrhages that Shepard had to deal with. It seemed that every time they had clipped the hemorrhage, something else would go wrong.

"It feels like this is going on forever," Carina thought. "I just need her to be okay."

Andy and Vic picked up their things and sat down right next to Carina, who looked numb. She was staring off into space and looked like she had no feelings, or had cried out everything she had. She was exhausted. She couldn't lose another person in her life, especially someone as important as Maya.