Playing for Rya

24. Far Away

Song: Dancing on my own by Calum Scott; Cover by Nicole Cross.

Miami, Florida.

A steady beeping filled the hospital room in which Beverly's patient lay hooked up to a bedside monitor which measured her vital signs, a ventilator which provided her body with respiration, and a catheter which monitored her urine output.

Beverly sat in the corner beside her patients bed, her legs propped up on another chair she'd placed directly in front of her to make herself more comfortable.

Although she was not on call, she had decided to spend the night in the intensive care unit, so that she could keep a much closer eye on her patient Jo, who had just come out of a liver transplant surgery.

Although liver transplants were a fairly routine surgical process at Miami Medical, Jo's surgery had been a more risky process due to the toll that chemotherapy had taken on her body.

As if dealing with cancer wasn't enough, Jo's liver had begun to fail, a particularly bad reaction from the treatment she'd been receiving.

She'd recently been handed Jo's case and had been moved by the woman's determination to overcome the hand fate had dealt her, she'd bonded with her patient pre-surgery and was just as determined to fight alongside her.

The surgery had been a success, but Jo wasn't out of the woods just yet, there was still a chance that the her body would reject the transplanted organ and if that turned out to be the case, Beverly wanted to be on hand to immediately perform a shunt, a liver bypass that would enable Jo's body function to continue as normal until another solution could be reached.

As a third year resident, one of the latitudes she enjoyed was being able to assess a patient and make the call on whether or not to perform low risk emergency procedures such as these.

She spared a worried glance at pale woman, who looked far more weathered than any forty-something year old should, and muttered a quiet prayer for her to pull through this hurdle too.

She gave a deep tired sigh and dropped the medical journal she'd brought along with her to help pass the time, but which so far had failed in keeping her occupied.

She was tired and restless and it was in times like this that she would've loved to talk to Derek, but it was past the middle of the night and she didn't want to have to wake him up.

She toyed with her phone which lay on her lap.

Of recent, over the last couple of months, it had felt like she had to constantly make up excuses for why she couldn't just pick up the phone and talk to her boyfriend; it was one thing or the other, either it was the middle of the day and he had to be in a business meeting or it was nighttime and he had to be tired after a long day at work.

She couldn't quite remember when she had started feeling this way, but it was becoming more and more obvious that there was a strain in their relationship.

She gave another sigh, there was nothing either of them had done to bring on this strain, he still called everyday to check in on her like he'd done for the past three years they'd been dating, but recently those phone calls had begun to last for shorter periods of time and were less relaxed and casual than they once were.

Granted, Derek wasn't the obvious in your face romantic, but, he had his ways of showing how much he cared, even over the phone, and lately, if she was being honest with herself, she hadn't exactly been feeling that affection. She figured that if she had going to blame it on something, it had to be this distance between them.

He'd had been spending more and more time at his medical facility in New York and less time at his group headquarters in Miami, which was ironic considering that she'd taken a medical residency in Miami and moved here because she'd wanted to be closer to him.

And for the most part they had gotten closer, she'd been happy to travel back and forth to New York to spend time with her family on holidays and whenever she could get time off as long as she and Derek, were together and happy.

But that didn't seem to be the case anymore as his recent travel schedule meant that she rarely got to see him, and when he was in Miami, either her job or his, or both, got in the way of them spending time together.

She'd found herself wondering, time and again, what it was that had him so preoccupied in New York, she had known him for four years and had  been dating him for three, and by now she'd thought she had a fair grasp of how he and his companies operated.

She understood that his businesses took a major portion of his time and that he traveled fairly frequently, to the cities in which his companies were located, but of the three years they'd been together she'd never known him to stay for extended periods of time. As much as he kept apartments in some of those places, he always came back home, to her.

But not anymore.

In the last six months she spent most of her nights alone in his large apartment and in his massive empty bed, to the point where she'd begun considering moving back into her one bedroom apartment which was far smaller and felt far less empty even when she was alone, not to mention that it was closer to the hospital where she worked.

But she was hesitant about doing that because it just seemed like it was another step backwards in their relationship and if they continued the way they'd been doing for months now, eventually, there would be nothing left of their relationship.

She stifled a yawn as her eyelids grew heavy and began to droop shut, and the steady rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor began to drag her into the realm of unconsciousness.

Setting her phone aside, she sank lower into the uncomfortable hospital chair as one final thought waded into her semiconscious mind;  she needed to do something, needed to see him, needed to talk to him...

...and if going to him was the one thing that would get his attention, then a short trip to New York wouldn't hurt...