Jenna Joseph sat in the rather uncomfortable chair in the ER waiting room, trying to keep her tears from flowing too uncontrollably. Josh and Debby were on either side of her, the latter with her hand on Jenna's shoulder. None of them spoke, because none of them could think of the right words to say. What could one possibly say? Josh and Debby had already exhausted the phrase "it'll be alright", and if Jenna even tried to speak, she would lose what little control she had over her tear ducts. She wiped some of her tears away and reached for the packet of Kleenex that Josh was awkwardly holding out to her. She had to try and get herself under control.
But it was really hard to do that when they didn't even know what was wrong.
It was supposed to be a time of relaxing. When everyone got back from the first leg of the Bandito tour, they were supposed to relax and get ready for festival season. Josh and Debby were going to stay in Columbus for about a week to spend some time with Josh's family before going back to L.A. Tyler and Jenna were going to go back to their late nights with Tyler forgetting to sleep because his creativity wouldn't stop and Jenna making 3 A.M. snacks to share with him. Tyler was going to go back to his studio and Jenna was going to go back to her kitchen and her garden. Things were going to seem normal, at least for a little bit. But that's not what had happened.
The last few days of the tour, Tyler had complained about a stiff neck and a bit of a headache. But everyone assumed it was just a side effect of being on the road for too long. Even Tyler, after mentioning it, promptly brushed it off as just being on the road and being ready to go back home. But when they had gotten home and gotten a good night's sleep, the stiff neck and headache didn't go away. The headache turned into a migraine, and then it got worse. Tyler had said it felt like someone was squeezing his head with some vice grips, just trying to get it to pop.
But it didn't end there. By their third day home, Tyler might as well have been a vampire with how sensitive he was to light. It didn't take much light to hurt his eyes, making his already horrible headache even worse. That, and he was suffering from extreme fatigue, making it so that he really didn't even want to get out of bed. Jenna wanted to take him to the hospital, just to make sure things were okay, but Tyler refused. He was just a little sick, he said. He must have just picked up a bug while on tour and he just had to wait for his immune system to flush it out, he said. Jenna hadn't been convinced, but when Tyler decided something, it could be hard to change his mind. So she instead stayed by his side and tried to nurse him through whatever sickness he had come down with.
But it was on the fifth day home that everything changed. Josh and Debby were coming over to check on Tyler since they really hadn't got to spend any time with him due to his sickness and they wanted to spend some time with him and Jenna before they left. Knowing they were coming over, Jenna had tried to get Tyler up. At first, he refused. The headache was even worse, he said. Still, she had managed to get him up. But the minute he was out of the bed and standing up, he had rushed to the bathroom and started puking. Jenna had checked for fever only fifteen minutes before, but once he had started puking, she had checked again. This time, she found that he had an extremely high fever.
It had only been fifteen minutes.
She knew then that she had to get him to a hospital. Whatever this was, his immune system was not flushing it out. Not without help, anyway. That was when Josh and Debby had arrived, and they only had to take one look at Tyler to tell it was serious. They agreed to drive him and Jenna to the ER. But it was on the way there that it happened. Tyler had spent most of the ride with his head between his knees, trying to not throw up and trying to avoid the light of day, which was still triggering his headache. But then he suddenly straightened himself up and looked over at Jenna, opening his mouth to say something. Something he never got to say.
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Smithereens {ON HOLD}
Fanfiction{A Jyler Story} "You always told me you'd get beat to smithereens for me. It's time for me to do something for you." It was the most terrifying time of Jenna Joseph's life. Tyler was in the hospital fighting bacterial meningitis, something that he...
