The Healer | Part 3: The Survivors

The Final Call

Edith

I woke up with a start.

My hospital notebook was clattering loudly on the night table beside me.

I groaned and rolled over to grab it.

I sat up and swung my legs out of bed, then hissed with the sudden discomfort in my back.

'Ooh,' I put a hand to it. My back had been sore lately. Likely to do with the fact that there were now two almost-fully-grown babies in my front. This was different though, it was sharper and shooting up my back.

I looked over at George, the noise from the notebook hadn't woken him up. He had given me explicit instructions to wake him or write to him in his own notebook that seemed to be permanently attached to his back pocket should anything strange happen. I felt the shooting pain in my back definitely qualified as strange, but he just looked so peaceful. I looked at my watch, it was only just past eleven o'clock. If I woke him now, I knew he would never get back to sleep.

As I sat on the edge of the bed, the pain slowly subsided. It didn't disappear completely, but it was tolerable.

A nagging voice in the back of my head told me this very well may be the start of labour. It was still a week before my due date, though. Maybe it was false labour. In any case, I figured I would have time to go to the hospital and see what I was needed for before I knew for sure.

I stood slowly and walked out, careful not to disturb George. Once I was downstairs, I opened the vibrating notebook.

Healer Weasley, you're needed on the ward.

That was usually all the notes said. I changed quickly into my hospital uniform. There was no way I was wearing my pyjamas into the hospital.

I'm on my way. I should be up those stairs in about two weeks.

I scrawled a reply back to let them know I'd received the message before I headed out into the dark night and Disapparated.

Contrary to what I had told the nursing staff, it did not take me two weeks to climb the steps to the fourth floor. Though it certainly felt like it. I had to take breaks on nearly every landing and I was still huffing and puffing for breath when I arrived at the doors to the ward. I took a moment to catch my breath before I entered.

For the most part, the nurses were accustomed to having an extremely pregnant Healer come to tend to patients. The patients themselves, however, were not. Some more outwardly than others.

The nurses met me at the door and I was shoved rather unceremoniously into an inpatient room where the patient in question was fitting and frothing blood at the mouth.

It was a patient we had had on the ward for several weeks now. A middle-aged wizard who had gotten on the wrong end of an unknown curse. He had been knocked out since his arrival and his condition had been steadily declining. Our regular diagnostic spells had shown that his internal organs were failing and no matter what we did to them, we had been unsuccessful in mending them.

His death was inevitable. The only reason we hadn't moved him to the long-term residents ward was because Healer Baird didn't think it would be long before he succumbed to the curse.

We had no idea who he was. No one had come forward to identify him despite an article in the Daily Prophet asking for information and he hadn't had a wand with him when he'd been brought in. We were even sure if he was a wizard. He'd been hit by dark magic, that was certain.

I sighed heavily as I approached the bed. The nurses needn't have called me out to manage this. They knew what to do when patients weren't expected to survive spell damage. I suppose this case was different because there was no family with him.