Alice Kennedy (rosemary_thyme) wrote in paxletalelogs, @ 2017-04-14 13:39:00 |
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Entry tags: | marassa jumeaux 1, uke mochi |
i'm goin' to the doctor's on friday
Who: Alice & Laura.
What: Alice slips up and Laura helps out.
Where: Pax elevator, then Alice's apartment.
When: Early evening on April 13.
"I'll be right back," Laura called to someone unseen within her apartment. She closed the door behind her, cutting off the sound of plates and cutlery being set on a table and a small voice asking why cows made milk and not bees. Laura shook her head, smiling, clutching her purse as she approached the elevator. They were out of milk, and it was dinner time; it was her turn to do the shopping this week, and a series of sudden emergencies had kept her late at the ER too often. John's schedule had slipped away from his grasp as well, and now she was fixing the problem, albeit without complaint.
Her eyes tracked up from her phone's screen for just a moment as the elevator doors opened and she stepped inside. She felt a little disconcerted; the apartment complex was large and somewhat strange, but the price had been too good. She told herself that things were still getting settled. Everything would work its way out in due time.
Thumb sliding over the screen to move up the article she was perusing, she didn't even glance up as the elevator came to a soft stop on the fourth floor, dinging and opening to the sight of an overwrought redhead clutching a towel to her chest.
Alice paused when she saw the woman in the elevator and considered her options. She could go right back to her apartment, maybe she was just overreacting with it all, but the throbbing of her thumb--each throb keeping up with her heartbeat--told her that wouldn’t be a good idea. Perhaps she could run down the stairs and get to her car that way, but the quick reddening of the towel she grasped suggested that a higher heart rate may not be the best of things for the time being. The elevator, unfortunately, seemed the way to go.
She stepped inside and moved to the far corner, keeping her eyes politely directed to the sliding doors and trying to blend into the wall so that the woman wouldn’t notice her and her bloody tea towel.
Laura caught the movement out of her peripheral vision and immediately stopped what she was doing. "Woah, hey, what's going on here? With that?" She pointed at the towel, her eyes tracking up to land on the young woman's face, where she instantly registered exhaustion. Laura could quickly put two and two together, but she gave the other woman a chance to explain herself as she slipped her phone into her purse.
Alice looked at the women with wide eyes. Immediately there was a dusting of color on her cheeks, but only there as everything else had lost its color. “Oh, um, nothing,” Alice tried to lie as she held her hand closer to her chest, like a child refusing to show a splinter. “Just…. Just a minor kitchen accident. It’ll be fine. I’m going to get help.” She should have gone to Lucas’ apartment but with the bright blood spilling from her finger she hadn’t thought of it until just now. “It’s… it’s fine…”
"It will be, in a minute. I'm guessing this is your floor?" Laura hit the open door button, and the elevator complied instantly to keep them on the fourth floor. "Which apartment is yours? I need a first aid kit, and we'll probably wanna do this in the bathroom. Lemme guess, trying to handle sharp objects while you're half asleep?" She shook her head, already disapproving. Gently taking the woman by the elbow, Laura brooked no objections as she steered her back out into the hall from which she'd come.
"Look, I'm Laura, I'm an RN, and that is a lot of blood for a small cut. And you're clearly in no condition to drive."
“Four-oh-five,” Alice replied faintly, giving up her apartment number without even the barest fight as she found herself suddenly in the forward movement that Laura created. She frowned and looked at the floor as Laura steered her down the hall, her eyes suddenly burning and wet. She felt like a child getting in trouble over thoughtlessness and as Laura had easily observed, she was tired and always more prone to tears when she was tired. “My… my keys,” she murmured as she pressed her tea towel against her chest and fidgeted for her keys in her purse.
"Sorry," Laura provided, thinking enough to at least apologize before rooting in the woman's purse for the keys to open the door to 405. She steered her inside.
"What's your name?" She asked, trying to keep her present and calm. "I live up in 705, so at least we're only one number and a few floors off from each other. Where's the bathroom?"
“Alice,” she replied, still being led about by the woman. “Um, my bathroom is in my bedroom.” She sniffed and immediately felt ashamed for letting her upset be heard. Swallowing and lifting her chin a little, she tried to get over it and focus. “I have a first aid kit under the sink, in a little red baggie.”
"Great, that's great," Laura replied, steering Alice in the direction of the bedroom. "Let's keep that levitated, OK? Does it hurt? Can you tell me what you were doing when you did it?" Soon enough, Laura had Alice sitting on the closed tank of the toilet, and had the towel-wrapped hand on the counter next to the sink. She ducked down for a moment to dig through the cabinet near the floor for the first aid kit; unless Alice had actually amputated her own finger, Laura believed she could deal with it here at home. At the very least, she could get her together and then drive her to the closest ER for more precise attention, if it was warranted.
Setting the first aid kit down on the counter, she gingerly started to unwrap the towel. The wound looked worse than it actually was, but still quite awful at first glance. The tea towel was all but ruined, the blood thick and red and soaking through it, and her thumb didn’t look much better.
Straight across the pad of Alice’s thumb was the clean cut from a knife. It was as if Alice had been trying to chop up her thumb rather than the walnuts for a baking recipe. When she originally cut her thumb, Alice had run it under the water to get away the bits of walnut that had managed to fall into the wound, but the water only seemed to make the blood flow faster. Now after being wrapped in the tea towel, it had filled within the wound but a prominent slab of thumb skin was still easily seen.
Alice let out a weak sound at the sight of it and turned her gaze to the ceiling where she starred as she furiously blinked back tears. “Um, it does hurt,” Alice answered Laura’s earlier question. “And I cut it while I was chopping walnuts. The knife and everything is still in the kitchen. I didn’t do anything to the wound, just ran water over it then grabbed my purse when it didn’t seem to let up with bleeding.”
Laura hadn't looked away from the sight; she'd seen worse, of course, but despite that, years of training kept her eyes focused on the issue at hand. It looked like Alice had nicked a vein, enough to cause the torrential bleeding. If she'd run the cut under hot water, that certainly wouldn't have helped matters either.
"It's going to be OK," she started. "It looks like you cut yourself pretty deep. It was a good idea to clean the wound, but that might've also sped up the bleeding. You're gonna be fine, though," she added, trying to make it explicitly clear that there was nothing to worry about. "We're gonna clean it and get you bandaged. I've got some special glue that's gonna work like stitches so you don't have to go to the hospital." She wouldn't be the first person to turn someone away from getting much-needed medical care, but Laura was also a firm believer that frequent fliers and smaller injuries had no place in either an ER or a hospital. It was easy enough to deal with them at home, if people only had the training.
Beckoning for Alice to rise, she brought the woman to the sink and warned her that the soap might sting a little; basic antibacterial soap wouldn't cause more harm, and Laura did a quick but thorough job of ensuring she wouldn't get an infection. Then, after letting Alice sit again, she took some toilet paper and pressed on the elevated wound with her fingers.
"We're gonna wait for about 15; that should at least slow if not stop the bleeding entirely, OK?" She tried a softer smile. "So what were you making?"
“A chopped walnut coffee cake,” Alice replied, still keeping her gaze elsewhere than at what Laura was doing to her thumb. She just didn’t want to acknowledge the cut, the memory of the slab of thumb meat was still way too fresh in her mind’s eye. “And you were right, I’m tired. I just… had to try the recipe. I need to think of some new stuff for my shop--I own a bakery--and yeah, I know it’s a stupid excuse.”
She blinked rapidly, her eyes fresh with tears again. How the hell was she going to be able to bake if she had a bum thumb? The thought only made her eyes water more. She had too much to do to be slowed down by a nasty cut to her hand.
Laura's smile shrank a little, and she looked back at her watch. She switched hands, looking at the wound under the toilet paper; the red blotch didn't seem to be getting bigger, but they still had 10 minutes left and she'd rather err on the side of caution. "Might be easier to think of things after you've had some sleep, you know," she offered, knowing she was being hypocritical. At least her sleep habits had gotten a little better after Anaise's arrival. "Wait, are you the woman I spoke with on the message board? Gosh, I'm sorry that I'm just realizing this now... I go into autopilot sometimes."
She shifted in her stance, feet splayed shoulder-width apart as she found a more comfortable position; her brow furrowed as she struggled to recall memory. "Rosemary and Thyme on the Balboa Peninsula, right?"
Alice’s eyes widened a little. “Oh my god,” she said with a sigh. In normal circumstances, she would blush and immediately go into business mode. But these weren’t normal circumstances, but she did manage to look Laura directly in the eye. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize it was you. Yeah, that’s my bakery. Ha… welcome to the neighborhood, I suppose. Is it often that you’re saving your neighbors in elevators?”
"You're the first," Laura replied with a laugh. "I try not to bring work home with me. I was actually running out for milk..." She checked her watch again, noting another few minutes passed. "I'm glad I ran into you instead of you trying to drive one-handed to the hospital. I get it if you don't wanna say anything, but is everything OK? You look exhausted."
“Oh, um, everything is fine,” Alice replied and frowned, realizing she didn’t sound very convincing. “I mean it though, nothing bad is going on in my life or anything like that. I’m just busy. Very, very busy. And I’m sorry I interrupted your milk run. You can have some of mine if you need it, I have a lot because of baking and all that. Payment for this. Or! Or I could actually pay you for helping me. I’m really sorry about all of this. And when you’re at home no less, having to deal with a bloody thumb, ugh.”
Laura waved her free hand, then checked her watch once more. "It's not a big deal. It sounds more like you need to get some more rest. Doesn't help anyone when a thumb turns up in one of their cakes, right?" She counted down the last few seconds, and then checked the wound once more. The bleeding had stopped, mostly, and Laura handled it carefully to ensure she didn't accidentally jump start it again. She put Alice's hand down on the counter and started rifling through her purse, eventually pulling out a small, elongated blue triangle that looked like a regular container of glue. She twisted off the top and started carefully applying it to Alice's wound.
"We'll put a bandage on top of this, and you should have complete use of your thumb by tomorrow, but you're gonna want to take it easy," she offered, recapping the glue and waiting a moment to make sure it was completely dry. Then she went into the first aid kit and removed a simple Band-Aid, gently wrapping that around it. She glanced back at Alice's face. "How you feel? Queasy at all? Does it still hurt?"
“It just throbs,” Alice said with a sigh, looking at her thumb with a frown. “For all the baking I do, I rarely cut myself up. It’s happened before, granted, but it never gets less… gross. I have complete appreciation for the job that you do.” Alice looked up at Laura and offered her a less strained smile. “But seriously, can I give you some milk so you don’t have to go out? I’ve held you back long enough as it is.”
Laura shook her head. "No, it's fine. I'd have to go back out anyway because it's my week for grocery shopping, and John gets antsy if he doesn't have coconut milk to make his morning smoothies with," she half-joked. She adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder, giving Alice another critical look over. "I want you to go to bed, though, OK? As long as there's no burners or anything on. I'm not a doctor, but nurse's orders. You need rest."
Alice gave a nod. “I’ll put the food away and go right to bed, I promise.” She got to her feet and smiled. “Thank you, really. I’ll be getting to bed a lot faster thanks to your help than I would have if I made it to the ER. I really appreciate it.”
"You're seriously welcome. I'll try to swing by in a few days to see how you're doing, and to make sure your cut didn't get infected," Laura replied. No matter where she went, she always did this -- bending over backward to make sure everyone else around her was happy and healthy. She didn't mind it in the slightest. "I'll just show myself out, but you know where to find me, right? 705. Here, I'll just give you my number, too." She dug into her bag, pulling out a pad of paper and a pen, jotting down her cell. She offered it out to Alice, with a slight smile and a rib-prodding joke. "Don't cut that up, OK?"
Alice managed a dry laugh that was dampened by her embarrassment. “I’ll try not to,” she replied, holding onto the piece of paper with her other hand. “Thank you again, and have a good night, alright? I’m off on Wednesdays and usually here by mid afternoon. You can always stop at the shop if you’d like as well.” She followed Laura out all the same since the kitchen was near the entryway.
"I'll try to," Laura replied. "I do still want some of those pastries." With a final nod and a smile, Laura made her way back through the apartment and out the door, heading toward the elevator. She pulled out her phone and sent her brother a quick text -- running late, ran into a patient in the elevator, will explain later -- before jabbing the elevator call button to resume her impromptu journey.