- OPEN SCENE -
{Sati is lying in a hospital bed, looking fragile and stunningly beautiful without any makeup on at all. A tall man in a doctor's white coat is standing over her. He has caramel-colored skin, high cheekbones, blue-green eyes and buzz-cut dark hair.Sati's eyes flutter open.}
Sati (with a slightly dry throat that gives her a husky, sexy voice): What happened? How did everything go?
Doc: You gave us all a scare there. You're going to be fine now, though.
Sati: What's going on?
Doc: You're in hospital. I'm Doctor Avery, remember?
Sati: I remember. {Pause.} How's my mom?
Avery: Your mother's fine. The transplant went successfully, and she's eating and walking around a little bit. Her gastroenterologist said he's fairly sure that in a month or two, primary sclerosing cholangitis will be a thing of the past for her. {He smiles.}
Sati: Wha- walking around? I thought she was supposed to take it easy for a couple days?
Avery (with a serious look on his face): Well, you see, you've been out of it for a couple weeks. The operation was on the 15th of March, and it's now April 3rd. You've been very sick.
Sati: What happened to me?
{Avery sits on the side of the bed.}
Avery: There was a problem with the surgery. Your mother's part went just fine, but you sustained a tear in your inferior mesenteric artery when we were detaching the part of the liver we were transplanting, and you nearly bled out. We gave you a transfusion, but the shock from it sent you into a coma, and you've stayed like that for some weeks. We weren't quite sure why. Everyone's been praying for you to wake up.
Sati: Three weeks...I thought I looked thinner.
Avery: You look lovely.
Sati: Can I see my mom?
Avery: She's asleep right now, she has to take regular naps. But she should be waking up in - {looks at watch} - about ten minutes. I'll bring her right in when she wakes.
Sati: Thank you, Doctor Avery.
{Avery takes Sati's hand.}
Avery: We've all been really worried about you, you know. Your family, of course, but me as well.
Sati: ...You?
Avery: Yes. I've been coming and sitting with you after work for a little while, just hoping that you'd wake up.
Sati (blushing, with eyes downcast): ...I don't know what to say. {Looks up and puts a hand - the one without the IV - to Avery's cheek.} The whole time I was asleep, I felt...safe. Like I wasn't alone. I think that must have been your presence, Doctor Avery.
Avery: {Leans closer and looks Sati deep in the eyes.} Don't you think it's time you called me Jackson?
Mom: San? Honey, are you awake?
{Sati wakes up.}
Sati: Dammit, Ma, I just gave you half my liver, and Jackson Avery was just about to kiss me, and you pay me back by waking me up?
- END SCENE -(I should mention, before anything else, that I know perfectly well that the inferior mesenteric artery is nowhere near the liver, and I have NO idea why my brain put that in there - both I and Dr Jackson Avery are too well-educated to make that mistake.)
Dreams when I'm sick, and particularly when I have a high fever, are extraordinarily vivid. Mine are vivid most of the time anyway, due to the high proportion of time I spend in REM sleep (I wrote about this in a note about two years ago, I'll try and either find the link or make a separate post another day), but fever dreams are extremely so. They tend to be either really really bad, really really good, or just so out there and WTF that I don't even bother trying to work them out. I've been coping with yet another bout of otitis externa - and a particularly bad bout this time - for about ten days, and a high fever for maybe five days, and during that time I've been swinging between sleeping eighteen hours a day (because my body's trying to repair itself) or not at all (because every time I move and / or touch the ear the pain wakes me up, and I am not a still sleeper).
Wow, wasn't that a convoluted paragraph? :P
So anyway, the night before last - or maybe it was last night; somehow I seem to have lost a period of about 24 hours, including Tuesday evening and night, and Wednesday morning and afternoon - I dreamed about getting shot, and dying, and wandering around in a place that was all misty and I couldn't find Curt, and then making a bargain with God, and coming back to life, and finding out that (perhaps as part of my bargain?) my ex-boyfriend Richard had died in the same shooting. Horrible stuff, although Curt did tell me he loved me, which went a little way (like, a teeny weeny way) towards cancelling the bad stuff.
Today, though, I got the treat of Jackson Avery, so I guess it balances out. :D Although my ratty mother went and woke me up right before we got up close and personal.
Dreams are funny things for me. My bad dreams are fairly unpredictable - they may be precog, they may be a manifestation of subconscious worries, they may be random crap that means very little. Very rarely, they may be memories. You'd think that any nightmares I have would be about the rape or any of the various other bad things in my past. But it's only once in a blue moon that I dream about Obie, usually when I've been spending a lot of time in London. I've had more nightmares about LOML sleeping with a friend of mine than I have about Obie. My bad dreams tend to be more global, and usually apocalyptic.
Good dreams, on the other hand, never fail to fall into one of several categories:
a) The ones where I'm with a guy I really like, whether real or celebrity or fictional character, and we're blissfully happy and in love;
b) The ones where I get to save the world, or some small part of it;
c) The ones where I'm married with kids - which I believe are precog dreams, but I'm not entirely sure.
Category C is really an extension of category A, so if you believe in dream analysis, there are really just two main things that I crave in life: true love (or my idea of true love, which may or may not be realistic and attainable) and the chance to be a hero. I mock myself quite often about these two things, because they just seem so cheesy, like something you might hear at a Miss America pageant. "What do you want out of life, Sati?" "I want to be loved, and I want to help others."
Yet am I right to tease myself for this, or am I being too hard on myself? A lot of the time I think that these are two things that most of us want. Love, well, that's a given. We all want to be loved. Being a hero? That's a harder one, but in truth, I think that most of us have hero-complexes. It's why we love movies so much. It's why sci-fi and fantasy books sell so well. It's why the paranormal, as a subject for literature and television, never loses its appeal - because it offers an arena where the battle between good and evil can be fought in a very literal sense. In today's world, few of us are able to be heroes in any kind of flashy way, unless we go into medicine or the emergency services or the military. And from what I understand, a lot of people who do go into those fields soon become jaded, and focus more on the ones they couldn't save than the ones they did.
Wanting to save - or even improve - lives doesn't concern me too much. It seems like a very natural thing to want to do, and I'm convinced that most of us are just the same as me in their wish to help others. It's the reasons behind this need that worry me a little. Why is this need to save, this thing that in my teens I mockingly called my catcher-in-the-rye complex, so strong? Why is the one thing, aside from love, that I want enough to dream about on a regular basis? It would be so easy to cast these concerns aside and tell myself that I'm just a totally awesome person, but there are days when I wonder if it's not hiding some darker desire, some need to be indispensable to people, to have everyone around me adore me. Is it about some lack of self-confidence that makes me want people to lean on me, so that they never kick me away? Am I just such an attention whore that I need everyone I know to love me? Do I use this love-everyone-help-everyone policy as a way of distancing myself from the people who love me, so I don't have to risk rejection? Is my Tommy Jay right, when he says that I'm happy sharing myself as long as it's on my terms? Does my tendency to play the benevolent goddess around my friends have anything to do with my name, or is that just a weird coincidence?
Of course, as I said, there's also the possibility that I'm just really freakin' cool.
*rolls eyes*
:D
This post didn't really have a point. I have no answers, just more questions. And I don't want to you to think I'm anguished about this stuff - I am what I am, for better or for worse, and most of the time I'm pretty darn happy with the person that I am. The fact that I think self-reflection is often helpful and always interesting doesn't change that happiness. Really, this post was for me, rather than for an audience, and you're just here watching me put my thoughts on paper. Tired, feverish thoughts at that.
It's getting late, and I need sleep if I'm not to lose a whole other day and sleep right through till Friday. So I'm off, to eat some brownie and play a couple minutes of Pokemon and then catch some Zs. If I'm really lucky, maybe I'll save a whole bunch of kids from a serial killer and win myself a night in bed with Agent Derek Morgan.
Sweet dreams.
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