Counting To Fifteen [Grey's Anatomy]

chapter twenty nine - separations & gone girls

Daisy and Calypso being gone made Mark think.

Really think, for the first time in a while.

The apartment was so quiet without the girls. Mark hadn't expected to miss it, but he sort of yearned for the headaches he used to receive as a result of the girls bickering over the silly things.

Mark felt guilty for ever having debated getting rid of the girls. The quiet he had been craving was so eerie, and Mark hated it.

Presently, the man was trying to get through his shift at the hospital. Work usually didn't feel that long to Mark, but he found that minutes dragged on at the speed of molasses. He was ready to be done with work and go home.

Er...maybe not go home. Maybe work was a good distraction from the eerie silence of the apartment he so strongly abhorred.

Mark frowned as he looked down at his patient's chart, knocking on the already opened wooden door. "Mr. Walter?"

The man sitting in the hospital bed was a patient of Mark's—one that had been discharged days ago. Mark wasn't sure why the man was back.

"What are you doing here? I thought-"

"Something's wrong with my face." The man groaned, white gauze covering a solid half of his head. "You said it'd be better by now."

Mark frowned, pulling on a pair of nitrile gloves as he tried to coax more information out of his patient. "How long has the pain been this bad?"

Mr. Walter looked desperately over to his wife for help, the woman's brows knitting as she tried to recall. "Um...since last night, maybe?"

"A lot of this is just swelling from the surgery, it'll go down if you give it some time." Mark reassured as he looked at the man's puffy cheeks and semi-swollen nose. He looked as though he had gotten beaten up as opposed to just having undergone a face lift.

Mark peeled back the white gauze, grimacing at the oozing stitched incision that sat right along the man's jawline, adjacent to his ear. "You haven't been dressing the incision site?"

Mr. Walter looked almost dopey as he gaped up at the doctor. "Was I supposed to?"

"Well that might be your answer." Mark let out a quiet laugh, crossing the room to gather the supplies he would need to fully clean and re-dress Mr. Walter's incision.

Usually, Mark would leave such tedious things to the interns. But seeing as Mr. Walter happened to be one of Mark's favorites, the doctor didn't mind taking the time to give his patient a little extra comfort.

Mr. Walter was charming and sociable, and he had the same dry sense of humor that Mark had. Mark liked that.

Mr. Walter looked immensely overwhelmed at all the supplies that Mark had pulled out. "Do we really need all of that? Can't you just load me up with that stuff you gave me last time?"

"If you're referring to the hardcore doses of drugs, no I cannot." Mark spoke bluntly, Mr. Walter letting out a short laugh immediately followed by a string of groaning out in a combination of annoyance and pain. "This is gonna help, I promise. Your wound is infected, it just needs to be cleaned out and I'll get you some antibiotics."

To say that Mr. Walter cried out like a baby while Mark cleaned his wound was a major understatement.

Working in the medical field, Mark held no judgment for any of his patients or the things that they felt. Everybody had different pain tolerances, everybody was feeling different things that Mark couldn't possibly understand.