doctortara | muse_shuffle: May Disc One (Reply)

May Disc One, Track 4. "If something's yours and you let it go // If it comes back to you it was yours all along" (N.E.R.D. – ‘Maybe’)

One week. In one week, I finally marry the love of my life. That means, no doubt, that I’m going to spend the next seven days contemplating the last seven months. I never thought I’d find myself in a position of dealing with not only the happiest moments of my life, but also the most horrific. But that’s exactly what the last seven months have been.

As I sit here watching him sleep peacefully beside me, for the first time in months his face seems void of some of the pain etched around his features. Not that I can blame him. With the aid of some certain little blue pills, things are looking up… pardon the pun. He’s exhausted, but I can’t complain. I love watching him sleep. At least, I love watching him sleep like this.

Just five months ago, I was forced to sit and watch him sleep in a whole different way. A coma. That thing we’re you’re about as dead as you can be whilst somehow holding on to your life. Yeah, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been there. When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I ended up in a coma, but it was no more than a few days while I received the treatment I needed.

With Lachie, no one really knew if he would wake up.

I sat there day in, day out, listening to those monotonous beeps of his life support machine that matched like a married couple to the dragging pumps of the respirator. His heart wasn’t pumping on its own and even then, the blood being artificially forced through it was other peoples, administered to him by transfusions to save his life. He wasn’t breathing on his own, though the rising and falling of his chest made it easier not to think of him as already dead.

But only just.

I was barely hanging on to my sanity by this point. His body was weakened from the shooting and the subsequent surgeries. Time after time, he crashed. Respiratory or cardiac arrest. I still have the images in my head that one night he was clinically dead for over three minutes; Chase was up on the bed knelt over him applying CPR to keep his heart pumping. House had wanted Lachie kept alive so he could figure out why he’d crashed unexpectedly this time when he’d been seemingly getting better. It was horrible. He was kept alive by CPR for over an hour, the machines squealing the whole time. Chase was screaming at House to call Lachie’s death so he could die with a little but of dignity. Any half-way decent doctor would’ve made the same call, but House wouldn’t let it. Sure, it was soon discovered Lachie’s crash was because he’d been exhibiting signs of an allergy to anaesthetic, but that’s beside the point. He should’ve died that night. If Chase had been leading the resus, he would’ve called the death and rightly so. But House saved him, even if it was nothing but pure luck by that point. Any doctor who wasn’t Gregory House would’ve let Lachie go with dignity… myself included.

But I was managing to just keep my head above board as he lay there in a coma. I still don’t know how I did it. At least, until Chase came by and dropped a bombshell on me that just about sent everything already teetering on the edge crashing down around me.

Lachie was against artificial prolonging of life.

To this day, I still have dreams about that terrible yellow form. A legal document signed by Lachie and witnessed and sealed by a lawyer in Scotland declaring that in the invent he was ever on life support, he did not permit his life to be artificially prolonged beyond twelve weeks. It was beside the point the document was drawn up and signed over a year before he met me. It was still binding and legal and all of a sudden, there was a clock ticking away with every beat of that heart monitor.

The days dragged on and he remained deeply in the coma. He was unresponsive to pain, to sound, to any sort of neurological stimuli. We all knew that without that life support, he would be dead. And I was more than aware that if the coma lingered for three months, I’d have to sit there and watch someone turn the life support off and let the love of my life die without question. Every minute that passed, I felt like it was cutting tiny pieces of his life away. Even now, I still can’t remember a lot of the days. By then, they were just melting in together in one long string of pain.

Of course, he’s lying here beside me now in a peaceful satiated sleep and we get married in just seven days. It still hurts to know that I might’ve had to have faced letting him go. But he came back to me. He came back to me and now he’s going to be mine forever.

Maybe… just maybe… things are finally going to be alright.

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