rainbowlounge | The Hospital

Entry tags:

roleplay: open

The Hospital

The hospital is sterile and sprawling, its hallways and patient rooms painted a glaring white. The floor is made of something hard and shining, and the lights are that peculiar kind of flourescent that makes everyone look ill.

The first floor consists of the lobby (painted a sickly green), an emergency room, and several surgery suites, all stocked with cutting-edge, even futuristic, technology and supplies. There is a cafeteria, though the buffet line is empty; the only consumables seem to be stocked in a line of vending machines along one wall. There are no stairs, only elevators, to the upper floors, which all consist of patient rooms: made beds, glazed windows, dying flowers, and the hard plastic orange chairs that are a constant in hospitals.

The whole building smells like antiseptic and death.

((Please mark your healthcare professionals as such, and enjoy!))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ivy was pretty sure she was going to get grounded. Like, 95% sure. Her parents might have mercy on her because she'd hurt herself.

And she'd, uh, really hurt herself. Her eyebrows were definitely gone and her hairline had risen a couple inches, and she was pretty sure her hands were burned; it hurt to touch them, anyway, and they were red and painful like a sunburn. She was a redhead, she was intimately familiar with sunburns, and this felt like that only worse.

But her parents weren't around and neither was Aaron-- they'd totally have stopped her from playing with a firework and as it turned out that would have been really smart-- so she went up to the first adult woman she saw, lifted her chin and said, "Excuse me, please. I think I hurt myself."

((Ivy is about eight.))

"Hi, sweetheart." Brenda gave up on the idea of finding Home as a lost concept for the moment. "You look like you hurt yourself. What kind of explosive was it? Oven cleaner counts."

She had four kids and an ex-military husband. Even besides being a nurse, she knew burns.

"I'm a nurse," she continued, "so if we can find a clinic-ish room, I can take care of those for you."

"Um," Ivy said, and bit her lip. Doctors always yelled at her when she told them how she'd been hurt and she didn't really want to be yelled at when her hands hurt this bad. "Do I have to tell?"

Brenda laughed a little. "I'll know how to treat it a little better if you do. Come on, the ER shouldn't be far." She touched the little girl's shoulder. "Besides, I have a lot of kids and a husband, and they've all hurt themselves in stupid ways. I'll probably have heard it before."

"I dunno," Ivy said. "It was really dumb. Promise you won't yell at me? I promise my brother and my mom and dad will even if you don't so you don't have to worry about that."

"I promise," Brenda said, "and if my kids and husband haven't done it, some member of my extended family probably has." Their ersatz family had some really entertaining injury stories, once said injuries had healed.

Ah, and a handy sign at the corner. Excellent, they were going the right way.

"I broke open a firework to see which pieces made it explode colors," Ivy said, frankly. "And I was lighting the bits on fire one at a time. And it exploded. It was for science but it didn't turn out very well and I don't think it's a repeatable experiment."

For one thing, Aaron would kill her. Just flat out strangle her in the night.

Brenda shook her head but, as promised, didn't yell. "Your parents aren't going to be too happy about that," she observed, "and you are an exact reason that parents try to store those out of the reach of children." She shot the girl a pointed look. "My name's Brenda. What's yours?" She considered just how to judge if the girl had also managed to sustain a head wound, given she wasn't sure where or when she was from.

And there were the doors to the ER. She slapped the button to open them and headed on through with the girl.

"Ivy Sophia Hirschfeld-Kendall," Ivy recited dutifully. "Most people just call me Ivy but my mom's totally gonna yell the whole thing. That's how I know I'm really in trouble, if the middle name comes out. Ivy Hirschfeld-Kendall usually means I'm gonna be okay."

She grinned a little at the memory of the explosion, and said, "Mom and Dad do store them out of the way. But Jimmy's parents don't and I swapped him my cookies for the firework. Probably shouldn't have but I do like explosions." Just not quite so up close and personal.

Brenda laughed. "I'd ask what you've learned, but if you're like my stepdaughter, your answer's not going to be the one I'd like to hear." Sam would have at least offered the right one. Dawn would have just gone straight for, 'Not to stand so close when I set it on fire,' according to Bill and Sharon's stories. "In here." She pushed open the door to one of the rooms.

"I learned to practice experimental safety," Ivy said, primly. "Goggles and gloves from now on." She thought about it for a moment, and added reluctantly, "And probably no more fire until I'm grown up and can do anything I want, but that's only 'cause Mom'll make me."

She followed Brenda into the room and, experienced, hopped up on the bed without using her hands. They hurt a little less, she thought, when she was distracted.

"That's better than what Dawn would say," Brenda noted. She stepped over to the sink to scrub her hands clean, then looked back at Ivy as she was drying them. "No fire until you're an adult is a good idea, even if it does make your mom seem like a buzzkill. For one thing, child services can't be called on your mom once you're an adult. Not," she added instantly, "that I'm going to. Like I said, I have kids. Plenty of doctors and nurses would, though." There was also the minor detail about not being able to know when-and-where Ivy was from that threw matters off.

Ivy wrinkled her nose. "Ew," she said. "As if. No way my mom would hurt me, or my dad. No matter how bad I am."

Bradley Spitzer leapt to mind suddenly and she frowned, worried. "They wouldn't go send me to live with my biohazard, would they? He's not my dad anymore, the court gave Dad all those rights. That means I don't have to go live with him, right?"

Well, that was easy enough to parse.

"If he doesn't have legal rights, then you don't have to even see him." Brenda found lidocaine gel to get started with and pulled on a pair of gloves. "Biohazard. I like that." She'd have to share it with Liz; she'd approve.

She turned and pulled the stool over with her foot. "Hold out your hands, okay? This is going to numb them. Then I'll examine them better. So why is he bad enough to be called your biohazard?"

Really, she was just glad the hospital had lidocaine gel. It'd be hard to get even a smart, good kid to sit still for burns to be examined without them being numbed.

Ivy held her hands out obediently and braced for a sting. "Because he sucks," she said. "He tried to make my mom not have me, and then he ran away when I was a baby. And Mom said he called her lots of names, too. I don't remember him but I know he's awful."

Mostly, granted, because she'd been eavesdropping. And once because she'd been so sad and so afraid, and her daddy had held her and told her nothing was wrong with her, nothing at all, it was all her biohazard. And she believed what Dad said, implicitly.

"Dad's the best dad ever though," she added, positively. "I'm so glad Aaron shared. Aaron's my brother. I mean technically my stepbrother or my half-brother or whatever but he's just my brother really."

"Well then, I'm glad you have both of them." Brenda smoothed on a dollop--that was the technical name for it--of the gel, gently, over the back of Ivy's hand, then palm. "My kids think their stepdad's the best dad, too, so yours has competition." She grinned at Ivy to take away any sting from her words as she gently worked the gel around one finger at a time. "I called Dawn my stepdaughter earlier, but that's only because she was fourteen when my husband and I got married. She's the same age as Sam. I adopted her when my husband and I got married. Aaron's older than you?" She switched to Ivy's other hand.

"Yup," Ivy said. It didn't actually hurt that bad, and her hands felt cool when the gel was on them. Kinda nice, actually. "Five years. He's way nice, too, he lets me hang out with him and Jay sometimes and he walks me home from school." She couldn't quite remember when he'd started that, maybe sometime after the whole Incident with Ellen, but she hoped he never stopped. "He lets me win at Monopoly too. He thinks I don't notice but I do."

Clearly Brenda's kids were wrong about their stepdad, but Ivy let that go. She could be generous in victory.

"My dad adopted me," she added. "When he married my mom. It was my birthday present for being five."

"Aaron sounds great," Brenda said with a smile. "And that's an excellent birthday present. Tell me when your hands are numb. I'm going to do your face now." She suited actions to words. "There's five years between Dawn and Sam and Karen, then five more between Karen and Zach. It's a big age difference, but it works for us. It sounds like it works for you guys, too. Did your mom adopt Aaron?"

Ivy shook her head as much as she could without messing up Brenda and the cool gel. "No, Aaron's mom is still around. She's nice. She let me and Aaron stay at her house once when Mom and Dad had to go out of town really quick." She had to close her mouth then for her chin, but after that she went on. "I don't think she likes kids a whole lot 'cause she didn't like it if I got noisy, but I know she really loves Aaron." Ivy smiled, a little bit because of the gel, but she wanted it to be bigger. "I'm glad he has a mom, it means I don't have to share mine. Did your husband adopt your kids then? Like my dad adopted me?"

Brenda smiled a bit at the idea of Ivy not having to share her mother. "If he lives with you a lot, isn't that a little like having to share your mom?" She smoothed the gel over the last bit of Ivy's cheek and sat back. "No, he didn't adopt them. Their dad still has rights." Much as Brenda and Bill, not to mention the kids, hated that particular fact. "If we can ever get his rights terminated, though, Bill wants to adopt them. We talked about it before we got married. How do your hands feel?"

"Numb," Ivy said, and then sputtered a little indignantly. "So are my lips! Gross." But it was better than hurting, she had to admit.

"Anyway, no. Mom is Aaron's stepmom, but she's my mom and nobody else's. It doesn't count as sharing. I hope your husband can adopt your kids soon. It sucks not having a real dad. Even if you have to share him when you get him."

"Time to get those burns cleaned, then." Brenda stood and stripped off her gloves, then mixed up water and hexochlorophene in a basin and brought it and cotton over to set down by Ivy. New gloves, then time to tend her hands. "And it does suck, yeah." She sat again, dipped cotton in the solution, and wiped it along Ivy's hand just hard enough to dislodge anything that might be embedded in the burns. She was numb; she should be fine. "Dawn's already okay with sharing her dad--they mostly already call him 'Dad', and he is in the important ways--and I think she'd be even more okay with him adopting them. It was her idea that I adopt her."

"That feels weird," Ivy said, and it did, all pressure but no pain or any real feeling. "Like at the dentist. Dawn sounds smart." She thought about it for a moment and then asked, "Is she thirteen? Does she like boys? Would she like my brother?"

"It's the same thing as at the dentist, just without a shot." At the question, Brenda laughed. "Dawn's sixteen now. She does like boys, but I don't know enough about your brother to know if she'd like him. Probably, though. He sounds like a good kid. Just a little young for her." More cotton, other side of her hand. "Now, I do have a thirteen-year-old niece, and she also likes boys. Girls too. Where are you from, Ivy?"

"New York City." Now that her hands didn't hurt, Ivy could watch what Brenda was doing. Cleaning, it looked like. "Does your niece want a boyfriend? I don't," she added, "boys are gross, but Aaron's not gross. He'd be a really good boyfriend."

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers

Re: Nurse Practitioner: Brenda (Young) Meyers