Chapter 46: Nurses came in every hour to check her ୧( ˵ ° ~ ° ˵ )୨
The following morning...
Leo didn’t sleep. He sat in the uncomfortable armchair all night... Every twenty minutes, the blood pressure cuff on Sarah’s arm would automatically inflate...
Nurses came in every hour to check her vitals and the IV drip; their gestures were efficient, Leo would nod to them, his eyes filled with exhaustion, before his attention returned to Sarah...
He spent the dark, early hours of the morning on his iPhone. He read everything he could find about dilated cardiomyopathy, about the tests she would undergo, about the realities of the transplant list. He learned about ejection fraction, the measurement of how much blood the left ventricle pumps out with each contraction. A normal heart was 55% or higher. He wondered, with a knot of dread in his stomach, what Sarah’s numbers would be...
He read stories from other patients, their experiences a mixture of fear and hope...
He learned about the strict regimen of post-transplant life...the dozens of pills a day, the frequent biopsies, the constant risk of rejection...
The more he read, the heavier the weight in his chest became, but he didn’t stop. Knowledge was the only weapon he had against the overwhelming sense of helplessness towards Sarah’s case...
When the first orange and red light of dawn filtered through the window, Sarah moved around slowly. She opened her eyes and looked at him, her expression cute and sleepy...
"Babe, you’re still here," she whispered, looking at him.
"Told you I wasn’t going anywhere," he said, his voice rough from lack of sleep. He stood up and stretched, his back aching from the night spent in the chair...
"Did you sleep at all?" she asked.
"A little," he lied though...