Chapter 4 Doc
DOC
I smiled softly as I watched Anna chase Brutus around the corner. I shook my head as a small chuckle bounced up my throat. Man, sometimes when I wasn’t careful and I caught Anna at just the right moment, I swear I saw my sister. Grown. Happy. With friends and a purpose.
Something sharp pulled through my chest and dragged me back.
“Come, Miss Eliza—”
I turned to reach for my patient, but I saw nothing except bare bones steps behind me. My eyes darted around, my head on a swivel as I searched for the shock of blonde hair that belonged to her.
“Miss Elizabeth?” I asked as I bolted up the stairs.
I took them two by two before I finally caught a hint of a shadow turning the corner to the left.
Fucking hell, how long was I standing on those stairs by myself?
I heard her grumbling as I rushed down the hallway.
I grabbed the corner and took a hard left, watching her lumbering form come into view.
I watched her knees buckle.
“No!” I exclaimed.
I moved like lightning. Like a bolt of electricity had surged through all my veins at once.
“Damn it,” I grunted as I swept her up just before she collapsed to the ground.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she grumbled. “I’ve got it. I’m almost—”
“Hush,” I said as I scooped her into my arms.
I drew in a deep breath of relief when I felt her tumble toward my chest. Her hair blanketed my shoulder as she mumbled and grumbled like a grumpy little caterpillar, but I chose to ignore it. She was in pain, and I lost myself to my memories on the stairs.
I called it even in my head as I nudged the door of her bedroom open with my hip.
“Home sweet home,” I said as I walked over to the bed.
I walked over to the side of the bed that was mussed about and I laid her down. It didn’t take me long to shimmy her shoes and socks off. She flopped onto the pillow, her eyes already growing heavy as she yawned.
“You should rest, Miss Elizabeth,” I said as I pulled the blanket up over her body.
“I’m not a child,” she muttered.
“I know you’re not,” I said as I tucked the blanket all around her body. “But you’re incredibly injured and still healing. You shouldn’t be walking as much as you are with Marla.”
She scoffed. “You said I needed to take daily walks.”
“Walks,” I said as I perched on the edge of the bed, “not marathons. You still need to be in this bed more than you need to be on your feet.”
“Whatever.”
She turned onto her side, and hearing her grunt and groan made that same place in my heart ache.
If I was bedridden due to some shit I had no control over, I’d be pissed off, too.
I hated being still. I hated not having something to do.
My mind constantly needed occupying, whether it was with a book, or someone’s medical file, or even just some video—
An idea slammed into my head. “Miss Elizabeth?”
Her voice was low and mocking. “Yes, Mister Doctor?”
I had to suppress a chuckle as I reached out and smoothed a random stray hair off her forehead. “Want me to bring up a gaming system to hook up to your television?”
And that was when I saw her slowly turn to me.
“What kind of gaming system?”
“Got a team,” she said.
“Coming,” I said as I started a dead sprint. “You need a large shield.”
“Oh shit,” she hissed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, that asshole’s got a rocket launcher.”
“Mounting over the fence now. You’re up the hill?”
“Yep, in the shadow of the water tower.”
“How many in the team?” I asked.
“Got two that are together, and a straggler who’s creeping around trying to find me. Don’t know if they’ve hired an NPC, or if it’s another team trying to third party whoever finds each other first.”
My character I controlled busted through the doors of the building. “Just gotta get through this—fuck!”
“Coming!” she exclaimed.
Hooking up an Xbox to her television and getting Fortnite going did wonders for her spirits.
She went from grumbling at me like an old fogey to working in tandem with me to get to the finish line.
Granted, Fortnite wasn’t some grand adventure or something.
We couldn’t use our personal accounts because of everything going on.
But with how Ranger had my place locked down, guest accounts were something we could at least indulge whenever we needed a moment away from reality.
“One down!” Miss Elizabeth exclaimed.
“Did they go straight down?” I asked as I jumped out of a hiding spot and shotgunned someone in the face.
“Whoa! Where the hell were you hiding?” she asked.
“This little porta-pott—”
“No!” she exclaimed.
I watched one of the players pop up and give me a shotgun straight to the back of the head.
“I’m down,” I said.
“Coming, coming, coming.”
The nape of my neck heated. Nope. No thoughts were going there.
I watched as her character vaulted over a ledge and rushed around a corner before the duo bared down on her.
I watched as her little hands clicked around on the controller, her little tongue caught in between her lips as she concentrated on avenging my little animated character.
Who was apparently dressed as a red pickle.
“Yes!” she hissed as she lifted her controller into the air in triumph. “They’re dead. Where are you?”
I used my controller to shuffle out of the corner and she came over to revive me.
“That was some serious shooting,” I said as I looked over at her.
She peeked back over at me with a light in her eyes that I hadn’t yet seen. “Thanks for bringing this up, Doc.”
I just shook my head. “No thanks needed, Miss Elizabeth. Mindsets are incredibly important when healing. Our brains hold more control over our bodies than we’d like to think.”
“Oh?” she asked as she turned to me a bit. “How so?”
“Well,” I said as the game shot us back to the lobby, “there are a multitude of studies that we’ve done on the brain, most in the last decade, that have proven that mind over matter really is a thing.”
She tilted her head. “I’m not following.”
“Take, for example,” I said as I set my controller down in my lap, “cancer patients. If you’ve ever watched a documentary on our medical field, or even just a medical show, you’ll see at least once where a doctor is doing their damnedest to lift their patients spirits during hard procedures.
Sometimes you’ll even encounter moments where an adult has a moment of dread before a surgery, and so the surgical staff will change the date of the surgery just because of the mindset.
And that’s because we’ve been able to prove that in a stressful-enough situation, the brain will actively attempt to cut itself off from the body in order to save itself. ”
Her jaw dropped open. “You’re fucking kidding.”
I shook my head. “I’m really not. We’ve been able to prove that, given a scenario where the brain feels like the body is going to be too much of a burden, we’ve been able to record moments through brain scans and wave charts that, yes.
There are moments where the brain actively works against the body if it feels the body has become a burden.
It’s the dual dichotomy of the body having its own immune system and the brain having its own immune system. ”
Her eyes bulged. “The brain has a what now?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said as my hands came into view, moving the way they always did whenever I sank myself into a rant.
“The blood-brain barrier is nothing more than the brain’s immune system.
That’s why, when doctors talk about medications, it’s important for those meds to get past that barrier.
Otherwise our body’s immune system will simply filter out the medication before it can do anything good for us. ”
She blinked at me. “That’s the wildest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“The body is, in my opinion, the last true wild west we’ve got.”
“I thought that was Alaska.”
We stared at one another for a moment before laughter bubbled up the back of my throat.
It burst from her lips just as it did mine, and the sound of our intertwined giggling cemented itself into my memory.
I wasn’t sure why my brain actively tried to hold onto every single memory with her that I could.
But it was good hearing her laugh instead of hearing her scoff.
I’d have to do some research on that, though.
My brain was way too focused on her whenever I was around her.
“Oh, Doooooc!”
Anna’s sing-song voice was the only thing we heard before Miss Elizabeth’s bedroom door slammed open.
I grinned. “Anna. You know you need to knock before you whip doors open.”
She leaned against the doorframe and waved her hand dismissively through the air. “Brutus needs you, Dee.”
I nodded as I slid out of the bed. “Let him know I’m coming.”
“Sure thing!” Anna chirped as she backtracked down the hallway.
“And knock on doors before you open them!”
“Okay, Dad!”
I rolled my eyes, even though a chuckle left my mouth.
I swear, her and my sister would’ve been great friends.
“I’ll be right back, Miss Eliz—”
I turned to face her to let her know that I’d be back, only to see her turn off the Xbox. My gaze flickered from the screen to her before I watched her slide beneath the covers.
“Miss Elizabeth?” I asked.
“I’m tired,” she grumbled from beneath the blanket. “I’m going to take some pain meds and sleep.”
I thumbed over my shoulder at the mounted television. “I could come back and we could—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I watched her hand creep out from beneath the blanket long enough to reach for the water bottle I placed on her nightstand.
She fumbled with the liquid pain reliever and I watched both of them disappear before my very eyes.
I stood there for a moment, listening to her chug and guzzle.
She slid her hand back out from beneath the blanket, the liquid medication a bit lower and her water bottle half-chugged.
“DOOOOOC!” Brutus bellowed from somewhere downstairs.
Anna’s giggle filtered down the hallway. “Told you!”
And even though I found myself torn, I couldn’t leave my brother hanging.
“I’ll come check on you after a while,” I said as I inched toward the door. “Sleep well, Miss Elizabeth.”
I tried not to take it personally that she didn’t respond.