The patient's skin should be numbed by now, but Marian is uneasy anyway. She squeezes his hand, then pinches his nail. "Hey there?" 

His arm stiffens and then pulls away, not very purposefully. 

Well, SHE would definitely panic if she woke up and felt something digging around in her neck, even if it didn't hurt per se. And his blood pressure is tolerable now. 

"Dr Prissan, I'm going to give him another 2 mg, okay?" And then put the norepinephrine back up to its max rate of 20ml/h, just on general principle. 

Getting blood return from the vein goes uneventfully. Emmy takes her time as she slips the guidewire in, going very, very slowly. 

No arrhythmias! The patient does, however, wriggle a little. 

He gets more propofol, then, this would be SUCH a bad time for him to move unexpectedly. 

The actual placement of the line over the guidewire, flushing the ports, and fastening it in place with a couple of stitches all go without incident. Emmy puts on a dressing, lets out a breath of relief, and then accepts Marian's suggestion that they swap the norepinephrine drip over really fast. 

Not quite fast enough, apparently! Probably all the propofol isn't helping. His blood pressure only goes down to 79/42 before it starts rising again, though. 

Marian looks dubiously at the bags and pumps running the phosphate and magnesium drips. "Uh, can we run these faster if it's a central line? The pharmacy didn't say that." 

Dr Prissan waves a hand. "It's fine. For torsades we push magnesium, right? It's not going to hurt him if it rises a bit faster." 

"...If you're sure." She could call the pharmacy to check...but that would require leaving the room and also speaking to a human on the phone. Marian swaps the lines over to the second port on the central line, then reprograms the rate on the pumps. 

"Oh, right, another litre of fluids? Just saline?" 

"I'll microwave one for you." 

"- What, you can do that?" 

Dr Prissan slips off to wash his hands. "Good work. Let's get an X-ray to confirm placement. ...Beckett, you replaced the potassium already? I saw that was low too." 

Aaaaaaaaah she is considering dying of embarrassment on the spot. "Uh. I meant to but I guess I didn't put the order it." 

Dr Prissan slaps her on the back. "That's because you, miss, need a nap. It's eight-thirty. Go get some sleep, we'll start rounds at ten, deck's mine until then. All right?" 

She manages a weak smile. Her head is, in fact, buzzing with exhaustion. "All right." 

...Crap, what was supposed to happen at 8:30 again...? Right, Chantal needs to go home and sleep, Marian is inheriting another patient. 

There keep being so many THINGS and Marian wishes there would be fewer THINGS. She has to remind herself that she's getting pretty close to the point of being caught up with her admit, and probably in two hours she'll suddenly have zero things for a while. 

For the next twenty minutes, though, there is a lot of RUNNING and getting a hasty report from an exhausted Chantal and hanging a warm bag of saline - which is sure a weird feeling - and then answering the inevitable critical-results call from the frigging lab, because her patient's phosphate levels, while improved, are still only at 1.2, he hadn't gotten much of his replacement yet by then. And his potassium is somehow lower and now at critical-result range, 2.8 - and phew the orders are in, 40mmol over 4h, and the bags are in standard stock in the Pyxis, and she has to find another stupid IV pump for it but there's a triple-pump left in the clean utility. The area by the patient's head is getting really crowded and she should do some IV-pole consolidating soon but it can wait a few minutes. 

The lab tech doesn't mention the blood gas, which, when Marian checks the computer, turns out to be because it's back to only mildly abnormal.

She does get a separate phone call about three minutes later, for a lactate result of 4.4 mmol/L, which is...honestly not even that bad? The guy had been nearly coding like, what, ten minutes before she pulled it. 

She doesn't remember about the repeat blood sugar until 9:05 am, when she's stuck in her other patient's room doing an assessment. Damn it. Why can't she keep track of anything properly today? Probably because she didn't get her usual twenty minutes of making her worksheet for the day on her clipboard, and now she has terrible writing-things-down discipline. 

Her patient is sleeping peacefully, temperature now up to a whopping 32.7 C with the bag of saline half-emptied into his jugular, blood pressure finally back to borderline-high and doing somewhat less of the straggling-up-and-down thing. 

There is now well over 400 ccs of urine in the bag, going by the fact that it's overflowed the separate hourly-measurement compartment with the graduated markings. 

The blood sugar comes back at 82. 

...The problem with being a disorganized and sleep-deprived mess today is that now Marian has to rack her brain to remember the details of Emmy's contingency order. It was...more D50 for him if his blood glucose was below 90? She thinks it was 90 but maybe it was 80. 

The problem is that she's pretty sure asking Dr Prissan will get her a blank look and a "don't bother", because 82 is technically a normal blood sugar, Emmy just had an intuition that this patient might do better if they nudge him higher. And it's...actually weird, she thinks, that his sugar didn't rise more from having a bunch of dextrose pushed directly into his veins. It's as though he's...depleted, or something. 

She takes a few deep breaths, and then grits her teeth and puts in the verbal order under Dr Beckett's name and the time as 8:00 am, and then grabs another amp of D50 and pushes it into the extra port on the line running the saline bolus. 

At which point she can't stick around to watch its effects because she wasn't DONE with patient #2.

Ma'ar drifts. 

He half-surfaces, sometimes, when there are voices, and odd rumbling-ish noises nearby. There are bright lights too. He wishes the lights would be less bright, or at the very least that he could roll over and bury his head in the pillow, but he's stuck in this position, both tied down and too weak to move much. 

He feels better, though. His head doesn't hurt nearly as much as before. He can feel the ache of bruises when he pays attention, but it's not bothering him a lot. The pain in his throat is the worst part, now, and he eventually summons enough awareness to explore with his tongue.

No obvious injury, but there's a THING in his mouth again. It's making him gag. 

Marian isn't there. No one is in range of his Thoughtsensing, actually, though that's not saying much; even with the improvement in his headache, he knows that he's barely succeeding at stretching his Othersenses to cover a few feet. He must have been very badly hurt by - whatever happened, before, the memories are blurred.

Conserve his strength, he remembers, and he tries to rest. 

Marian's feet hurt, but maybe the Ritalin is taking effect? She's tired, but she's not at all sleepy. Her eyes feel glued open. 

Her second 'easy' patient is less easy than Marian might have hoped. The lady is, in fact, perfectly stable, but she's a lot of work, she's had diarrhea twice since 8:30 am and she's diabetic and on about eight different cardiac meds. 

It's not until 9:30 that she remembers the X-ray order for her patient. Come to think of it, she doesn't think they ever got one for the intubation either, whoops. Really she should stick an NG tube down him first, so they can confirm placement for all three at once. ...Wow that's so many tubes. It's pretty standard for her patients but every once in a while she remembers how surreal this must be for non-medical-professionals. No wonder her patient is so freaked out and confused. 

She checks both monitors, then jogs over to the supply room to get an NG tube. Maybe she's just put in an order under Dr Beckett's name; Dr Prissan gets annoyed about being bothered for super-standard orders like that. 

Ma'ar is trying to be good and rest, despite the various discomforts making themselves known - on top of everything, he has a muscle cramp in his calf and can't manage to shift his leg quite enough to relieve it. 

And now something is making noise and it's nearby and won't stop. It's an incredibly irritating sound, too. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. 

He extends his Othersenses, wincing at the sharpening band of pain around his forehead. No magical signature. He can't sense any mage-work at all, in fact. 

Is it dangerous? Or some sort of warning-of-danger? Ma'ar doesn't know and he feels incredibly helpless. Trapped. He's been trying very hard not to panic about being tied down, but it's a lot harder when there's a danger-alert screaming nearby. 

Oh, oops, sounds like an IV pump is unhappy. Marian speeds her pace, groaning - she doesn't think the norepi should be out but it'd be bad to leave it paused... 

...oh good, it's just the potassium, and she pulled all four bags so she can go ahead and just swap it over. 

Her patient's eyes are open; he seems to be looking around, trying to follow the sound of her footsteps.