Holly Cassandra Strange ✴ Princess Aurora (ihateneedles) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2010-08-18 11:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | dinah paulson, holly strange |
Who: Holly Strange (and a brief Dinah cameo)
What: An overview of Holly's time in the hospital
When: Wednesday afternoon, August 18 2010
Where: The clinic Topher works at in Seattle
Warnings: Mentions of depression, drug withdrawl and suicide
The detox took six days. For six days Holly was in complete hell. At first it was just the sweats. Holly would wake up in the middle of the night with a start, sweating buckets and shaking from head to toe. Nothing she did could get her body to stop, convulsions wracked her body and all she could do was hold herself until they quieted enough for her to go back to sleep. Or until morning came, whichever happened first. Chest pain, stomach pain. She started experiencing what the doctors called delirium tremens. She couldn't eat, and what she did try to eat she immediately threw back up. She ran fevers, she became so disoriented that sometimes she didn't know where she was. When her body wasn't working over time, it completely shut down for many hours at a time. One day she almost slept for nearly twenty-four hours straight. They said they'd move her as soon as she was better, as soon as she wasn't so sick she'd get moved to another ward for all the people who were on watch during the daylight hours. People who needed to be watched because the doctors didn't trust them not to hurt themselves. No matter, it made no difference to Holly where she was.
When she wasn't so focused on physical pain, she thought about her mother. She thought about her brother and her sister, and Oliver. Most of all Oliver. She'd royally screwed things up, but she didn't blame him for leaving. She actually judged him a little for not leaving sooner. If her current state was any indication, she was completely worthless. Why she was even fighting to get better, she had no idea. The last week hadn't even seemed real to her, it didn't matter how much pain she'd gone through, in some ways she was as numb to it as she was to everything else. Was she still real? She couldn't feel it. Maybe this is where all the numb came to die. Holly couldn't pin point when exactly she'd started going down this path. Whether it was the first time she saw Topher taking a beating by their dad so he wouldn't turn around and start hitting her and Tawny. Or the first time she'd smoked pot, or maybe it was even as simple as saying that it was when she was diagnosed with narcolepsy at the age of twelve. Holly's life had always been a little off kilter, and she'd always been just a little bit fragile, starting from the complications of her own birth. No wonder her family had always treated her like she was constantly in danger of teetering.
Whenever it had happened, Holly had been on a downward spiral ever since and even she hadn't seen it coming. Not until that night over a week ago when she'd knowingly tried to end her life. The only reason she hadn't completely collapsed before this was because of Ollie. He had made everything in her life better for a little while, she hadn't needed anything else as long as she had him. Or so she thought. In the end even he hadn't been able to keep her from the inevitable. The look on his face when he came to see her in the London hospital still haunted her, and where she now huddled in her new bed Holly shut her eyes tightly against the image. It wouldn't do any good to dwell on that now. Oliver was gone. The only guy she'd ever loved was gone, her mother was trying to kill her, she hadn't seen Tawny since that second night in the hospital and whenever she was completely alone in this room Holly visibly broke. It was only when Topher came to see her that she even attempted to put on a brave face. Her brother already had so much to deal with, and Holly only hated herself that much more for putting him through this.
It was the middle of the afternoon and Holly's room was dark, it was always dark. As a side effect of the withdrawls she was so sensitive to light that they had to keep her lights dimmed if not completely shut off at all times, and the curtains were always drawn. When she wasn't consumed by an irrational anxiety that made her fearful of anyone that came into the room she was lost in various bouts of depression. Another side effect of coming off all those drugs the doctors told her but Holly didn't care. She didn't care what they told her as long as they left her alone. It hurt too much to even sit up most of the time so she spent a good portion of every day curled up on her side like she was now, huddled beneath blankets and trying to forget that the world existed. Everything hurt too much when she thought about him, even after he'd left her Ollie could still make everything feel more tangible. She had to stop thinking about him, and she tried her damn hardest. And Aurora certainly couldn't reach her. She would hum and sing in Holly's head all day long and Holly barely acknowledged it, barely even heard it.
The only indication that Holly was still presently there was the slight flicker of her eye lids when she heard the door open and a now somewhat familiar figure came to sit on the chair by her bed. A pretty blonde intern who had been coming in to check on Holly for the last few days, her name was Dinah. Holly didn't mind when she visited. Dinah knew her brother and somehow that was a comfort to her. "You're looking better today. There's some red in your cheeks," the woman said and Holly responded by making eye contact with her. It was true, Holly wasn't nearly as ghostly pale and clammy as she had been the day before, or the entire week before that. But that didn't mean anything, that didn't mean that she was alive. "I told Topher that I've been talking to you. I think he'd like it if we talked some more." Dinah was a bit odd, but Holly liked her. She made sense in a way that didn't make very much sense at all, but her smile was like being enveloped in the warmest hug she'd ever felt. "Would you like to try talking today?" That heavy weight on Holly's chest was slowly beginning to lift.