Lost Boy | Carlisle Cullen |

SIX

He woke slowly three days later. His muscles were sore and his head throbbed as if someone had placed twenty rubber bands around the circumference. His eyes were harder to open, crusted shut with dried tears and debris. The light blinded him, as it would anyone who had been asleep for so long. He could not move his arms as easily as he wished and his legs would not pull up at the knee when he tried.

"James," his brother mouthed as he placed his hands on either side of his face and began to feel temperature even though the readings were right next to him on the dynamap.

"What happened?" James questioned as he attempted to bring himself up on his elbows. His skin was even sore and felt sensitive.

"You contracted sepsis. We caught it early on, you didn't lose anything, but it was frightening," Jeffery explained.

He looked around, noticed he was lying in a private room in the ICU with two IV pumps beside him and a monitor for his vitals. "How long do I have to stay here for?"

Jeff looked at the numbers, they had come just below baseline and had stayed there for a day now. "We should really get your temperature down to 98.7 at least, your blood pressure up past 110/70, and your heart rate back to about 70 to 80."

"So another three days," James crossed his arms and winced at the tightness of his biceps.

"Or one more, it just depends on how your body responds to fluids and solid food," he responded.

"Can you at least bring some of my work here, then?" James questioned, he was not about to sit alone in a hospital room for three straight days with some news channel playing on the television.

"If you tell me where your keys are, then sure," Jeff shrugged, might as well, he didn't have another shift till the following week.

"In the bowl next to the front door, just grab the file folder that says Ovarian Cancer on it." His brother stood, nodded, and made his way out of the room with a promise of being back shortly. "Some pants, too!" James requested as he pulled the sheets further up his waist so that his junk was covered.

He lied back in bed and counted the number of ceiling tiles in the room, sure there were more in the private bathroom but he needed to start somewhere with his hour long distraction. There weren't medical supplies in the rooms at the ICU like there were in the ED so he couldn't rummage through drawers. Well, fact was, he didn't know if he could stand in the first place.

This room was very bare. White walls, white floors, only the machinery and one extra couch for visitors to sit on. He supposed visitors couldn't frequent a high level floor such as that one, maybe only during certain hours if the patient was stable. He would have to come up with other games to play to take his mind away from the pain in his body and the time it would take to get his work from Jeffery. He would find a way, it just took him a decent amount of time to do so.