inkandtime (inkandtime) wrote in solsticerp, @ 2010-08-31 13:23:00 |
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Entry tags: | allie, cordelia, june 22 2009 |
Monday: A Stitch In Time
Who: Allie and Cordelia
When: Early evening (6:00pmish)
Where: The hospital
The day hadn't been going the way Cordelia had hoped, or expected. She'd woken up late for work, burned herself while trying to pour her coffee and then accidentally deleted a file containing personal photos she'd been trying to print out at work. The only bright side she could find in the entire morning was that the photos hadn't belonged to a client, which meant she avoided a stern lecture from her boss. Managing to get through the rest of the work day was a challenge, but she did it somehow, forcing politeness and smiles to hide her crabby mood from customers who came into the studio.
After work, Cordelia headed to the grocery store to pick up some ingredients for spaghetti sauce, thinking maybe she would invite Corwin over some night that week and make him dinner. She would be seeing Noah Wednesday night, but it was always nice to have some excuse to invite company over when you lived alone in a big house. Unfortunately her bad luck for the day didn't stop at five o'clock. After reaching up for a jar of spaghetti sauce, Cordelia's phone began to ring, which startled her from her daydreaming. The jar slipped through her fingers, crashing to the ground and splattering spaghetti sauce all over the shelves, the floor and her clothes. Cursing, she bent down immediately to try and pick up some of the bigger pieces of glass as one of the grocery employees began hurrying down the aisle to help her.
"I'm so sorry," Cordelia began, looking up at the guy in the red vest as she made the mistake of grabbing another piece of glass without looking. It sliced into her palm, causing her to hiss and drop it back to the floor. Blood began to seep out of the deep gash immediately and the second her gaze landed upon it, she felt nauseous. Her stomach churned and she fell back onto her ass, forcing her eyes closed as not to look at the wound. Blood had always done that to her, causing her to nearly faint, or vomit just from the sight.
It took at least two of the employees to help her, and after a lot of arguing, she agreed to go to the hospital to get it looked at. She sat in the waiting room, a thick gauze wrapped around her hand as she waited to be called into a room. There was extreme annoyance with herself that she let such a thing happen. Who in their right mind would try to pick up so much glass with their hands. Really? Now she was stuck in the hospital, pale and feeling sick with no groceries to take home. Not to mention she'd sliced open her hand, which she needed to take pictures. Thankfully it didn't take them too long to call her name, and Cordelia was led to the back where she sat on an empty hospital bed, waiting for a doctor, or someone, to come in and fix whatever the hell she'd done to herself.
Allie liked second shift. She got to sleep in and putter a bit before arriving at work. Unfortunately, the Dragon Lady was not happy to have to wait all day in order to deal with her little underling. Allie found herself punished for this scheduling mishap by having to do the work that registered nurses performed at larger, better funded hospitals. She checked fevers and tummy aches, and dolled out stitches galore. Kids just couldn't seem to stay on their bikes today. Fortunately, Allie liked rubber-facing and joke-telling, and she often had a pocket full of suckers to ease the situation.
She took the chart for a lacerated palm and headed down the exam room to curtain three, where her next guest was waiting for her. At least this one isn't a wailing four year old. "Good evening," Allie said in a chipper tone as she brushed the curtain back. She took in the pretty woman waiting on the bed, her eyes going to the crimson streaked gauze pressed to her hand. "Got a nasty cut I see," she tried to smile reassuringly at the redhead before glancing for a name. "Miss Kendrick?"
Cordelia had been growing a bit impatient with waiting for a doctor, but she kept reminding herself that there was always a long wait in hospitals, and that it was the pain throbbing in her palm that was causing her to feel so prone to irritability. That and her horrendously awful day. She had been staring ahead at the curtain, forcing herself not to look at her bloody gauze, when the curtain was pulled back, startling Cordelia. With her cheeks flushed, Cordy smiled at the other woman. "Yes..." She held up her palm but again, avoiding actually looking at it. "And yes. A spaghetti jar broke and let me have it. To be honest with you, the quicker this gets cleaned up the better it'll be for us both. I'm not very good with blood." Cordelia was guessing that the brunette wouldn't appreciate having a fainting patient on top of everything else she probably had to do.
"Oooh, no," Allie said with a tiny smile. "Well, let this be a lesson to you," she said as she quickly set up the suture table and wheeled over a stool. "Always make your pasta sauce fresh." She looked up to grin at the pale woman. "I'm Dr. Fierro, by the way. Second generation American, on my Italian side. My grandmother still grows her own hot house tomatoes." Once all of her tools were arranged, she offered a hand to Cordelia who didn't look all that steady, even sitting on the bed. "Come on down to this stool, here. I'll have a look and hopefully it's not as bad as you think." She nudged her own stool out of the way to give Cordy room to transfer herself.
"If I knew how to make fresh pasta sauce, believe me, I would." She knew how to cook - somewhat - but these days she went more for convenience. Cordelia managed a hint of a smile when the doctor informed her of her Italian heritage. "So then pasta sauce comes as naturally to you as breathing, right? Unfortunately I've got more Irish in me than anything else, which means I can make some pretty awful oatmeal and corned beef." Exhaling a shaky breath, Cordy slipped off of the bed to sit onto the stool that had been pulled up for her to sit down on. She managed to do it without falling over, thankfully. "If you can tell me all I need is a band aid and some ice, I'll honestly love you forever." The last thing she wanted was stitches and a big, ugly bandage.
Allie grinned. "Irish is my other half. My dad's hair is almost as red as yours," She chuckled as she settled onto her bench right across from her patient, a little table pulled between them. "Let's see what we're dealing with," she said, not committing to letting her get off easy. Fortunately, she'd put a large kidney bowl under the table. If it looked like Cordelia was going to yak, Allie thought she could get the bowl up in self defense right on time. Carefully, she unwound the gauze and disposed of it in the bin by her knee. "Sorry if this hurts," she said as she gently had Cordy flatten her fingers out. The wound was still seeping sluggishly so Allie eyed it for dirt, and didn't give Cordy a chance to protest the alcohol swab she got by doing it quickly without warning.
"Irish Italian?" Cordelia's smile came a bit easier, despite the pain in her hand. "That's interesting. So you probably enjoy a lot of alcohol with your pasta, huh?" Yes, she was completely stereotyping, but it was all in good fun, of course. Anything to get her mind off the fact that she might need stitches. As Allie began to unwrap the gauze, Cordy's eyes snapped upward to stare at the bright lights blaring down on them both. Her stomach churned, but the nausea was quickly forgotten at the stinging sensation that shot through her hand and arm. "Christ on a cracker!" Hissing loudly, Cordy's eyes clenched shut. "Damn, that stings..." Exhaling slowly, she managed to open her eyes. "So? Band aid and Tylenol?"
"Hmm, Tylenol yes...band-aid, I don't think so." Trying not to manipulate her hand too much, Allie shifted her body to get a good look at the swabbed cut. "It looks like I might have to put three or maybe four stitches in the middle. The rest I can close up with glue." She carefully set Cordy's hand down on the paper sheet on the rolling table before getting up and going to the cupboard. "So the secret to really great homemade sauce is the time you spend," she said conversationally as she found a vial of the numbing agent she needed and tore open the packet on a fresh syringe. "The longer you can let the sauce simmer, the better it'll be." She returned with the needle full of relief and sat down on her stool. She gently took Cordy's hand again and paused. "Oop, you're looking a little green. Need the pan?"
Stitches and glue... gross. Apparently Cordelia's discomfort was obvious because the woman was asking if Cordelia needed a pan. Shaking her head, Cordy used her free hand to press against her stomach. "I'm fine." Needles and stitches and blood. God, if she threw up in the hospital, all over this poor woman, she'd never get over the embarrassment. "So sauce," she managed, focusing on something that had nothing to do with her bloody hand. "I guess it'd be nice... to make sauce that way... but I'm rarely home. Work and... something resembling a social life, I guess... keeps me away until evening." She was keeping her gaze focused anywhere but where the woman was sitting with her needles and... hospital type equipment. It was ironic, that Cordelia could heal people by touching them, but she couldn't stand the sight of blood, and she couldn't heal herself because of it. It was the only reason she wasn't a doctor right now.
Allie chuckled as she noted the relaxing of Cordy's hand. The local seemed to be doing the trick. "I hear ya. I'm pretty new in town but I don't usually have trouble meeting people. I do have a hard time getting away from the hospital though!" She picked up her suture and began her stitching. "So if I'm going to make sauce, I do a huge pot of it on a day when I'm bumming around the house, doing laundry or whatever. Then I just freeze most of it. It keeps really well. And it's easy to reheat on the days I'm too brain dead to cook or go out to eat. Though you can meet some pretty cute guys at that restaurant near the Marina." It hadn't been that long since she'd asked Noah for an examination. She was sure that wasn't the kind of invitation more guys preferred, however, but she was still dying of curiosity, none the less.
"I've always heard being a doctor or nurse was a tough job. Other than for the obvious reasons, it's got to be pretty time consuming too." Cordelia breathed in and closed her eyes, thankful that her hand was numb enough that she wasn't feeling the needle too much. "I never considered freezing sauce. I'd probably dump the extra in a Tupperware and put it into the fridge. Though it goes bad a lot faster that way." She was just babbling now, but it was better than sitting there in silence and grimacing. At the mention of the marina, Cordelia's lips twitched and she opened one eye enough to look at Allie, deliberately ignoring what was going on with her hand. "Yeah, I've noticed that too. Well... cute guys at the Marina, not necessarily in the restaurant." Though she'd met Noah on the beach, but he lived at the Marina, so to her it still counted. "I've got a date-type thing there later this week. Are you done yet?" Cordy asked, closing her eye again as a dull ache began to throb in her hand. "I'm hoping you're maybe a super stitcher."
Allie chuckled, head bent over her work. "I'm good, but not that good!" Still, the gash only really needed four stitches. She dabbed a bit of the glue into the edges and firmly smoothed the rough edges. The whole thing didn't take too much longer and soon Allie was peeling open a fresh pad of gauze and wrapping the hand in a neat little fingerless glove. "Ok, so here is what I need you to do, Cordelia. Give that glue some time to really set, try not to get this hand wet for about twenty four hours." Allie's turquoise eyes found the redhead's gaze. "I'll write you a prescription for a mild antibiotic just in case that glass jar wasn't as clean as we'd like but I think you'll probably be ok with whatever over the counter headache meds you have. It'll take some of the distracting throb out of the cut." She gave Cordy a smile as she gently set the girls hand back down and stood up to leaned back to make a note about the prescription for the desk nurse. "If you notice that the swelling around the gash doesn't go down in a day or two, or you experience more pain, please come back and see me, ok?" She didn't think it would end up being a problem for Cordelia, but you never knew.
The silence was rough, and Cordelia wanted to just start yammering away to fill it so she wouldn't concentrate on what Allie was doing to her hand. It didn't hurt too badly, but there was discomfort. As long as she kept her eyes away from what was happening, Cordelia figured she could get through it without yakking. "Okay... dry hand for twenty four hours. Antibiotic. Gotcha." Releasing a slow, steadying breath, Cordelia's gaze shifted to watch Allie. "Thanks a lot. I'm going to do my best not to be back here, no offense to you. I'm not a fan of hospitals." Who was? Blinking, she realized she probably ought to check on the antibiotic. "I take medication to sleep... the antibiotic won't affect that, will it?"
Allie paused. She didn't think that there were any sleep medications that would be complicated by the antibiotic. Still, some sleep-aids could lower the immune system. Depending on the one that Cordy took, Allie thought she might increase the strength of the antibiotic. "What sleep medication do you use?"
Plenty of people used them. Allie herself had considered her little bottle of sleepies to be a lifesaver during her years of school. She had a tendency to get so tired that she couldn't sleep. It was never pretty.
"Dalmane," Cordelia told her, making a mental note that she actually needed to get a refill on her prescription. "I've been able to take other things with it, except other sedatives, obviously." She just didn't want something like an antibiotic to lessen the effect her prescription had on her when it came to sleeping through the night. Cordelia was not a fun person to be around when her insomnia kicked in. "I would rather just take Tylenol if there's a chance this stuff could give me problems."
"Oh no, you should be ok. The antibiotics won't interfere with that at all. Please do take Tylenol for any pain. It'll do the trick. And as I said, if you notice any signs of infection, come on back and see me in the clinic here and we'll go from there. I'm sure it'll be fine. The stitches will dissolve on their own and you'll be right as rain." Allie swept the curtain back and pulled her prescription pad from the pocket in her white jacket. She jotted down the name of the pills in a decidedly un-doctorly neat hand and tore it off. "Here you are," she handed the sheet over and also gave Cordy one of her simple white business cards. "You are free to go."
Taking the paper, Cordelia smiled and slipped off of the hospital bed. She still felt sick to her stomach, but her hand wasn't throbbing as horribly as it was when she arrived. And hey, she hadn't fainted or thrown up, so that meant it was a successful hospital visit. "Thanks." She used her good hand to dig into her purse, pulling out a business card of her own, with her name and studio on the front. She offered it to Allie. "If you're ever in need of a photographer... give me a call. I give discounts to the doctors who know what the hell they're doing."
Allie took the card and smiled. "You know, I almost turned down UCLA's pre-med offer when I was in my last year of high school. I wanted to go to NYU for photography." She chuckled and shook her head. "I don't regret my choice but sometimes I get all wistful about it." Her pager went off in her lab coat pocket just then and Allie dramatically rolled her eyes. "Take care of yourself, Cordelia, ok? I hope to rest of your day gets better from here." With a smile, she turned and headed back toward the clinic and possible case of burst appendix.