Learning How To Live (11/22)
Authors:
jerseystrife ,
alixzin and I
Rating: mild M for some unpleasant adult themes
Summary: Something is terribly wrong with Barney Stinson and his friends have all started to notice him avoiding them. When questions arise, Barney fights to keep his secrets and to keep the life he's grown comfortable with living.
Disclaimer: Sadly, none of us own either of the shows.
Note: A million thanks to
roland44 for the beta.
Previous Chapters: One| Two| Three| Four| Five| Six| Seven| Eight| Nine| Ten
Several hours after rushing Barney to the hospital Robin and Ted were in a conference room with his oncologist, Dr. Oberlin, and an infectious disease specialist. Barney had been immediately admitted and was on IV antibiotics. He was currently unconscious but even if he was awake he would be too delirious to participate in the conversation.
“Okay, I’m going to start with the good news,” began the new doctor. “He doesn’t have septicemia or pneumonia as we initially feared. This is just an isolated skin infection on his leg from where he gives himself injections. It’s the sort of thing that most of us would put some Neosporin on and forget about. The reason he seems so sick right now is because creating a fever is one of the few defenses his body has against infection, what with his white blood cells not functioning properly. Once the antibiotics start kicking, in his temperature should drop several degrees and he’ll be a lot more lucid.”
“So he’s going to be okay?” asked Ted, hopefully.
“We believe so,” Dr. Oberlin answered. “But bear in mind that his immune system has been severely compromised by the chemotherapy. We’d like to keep him here for a week for monitoring and keep him on high doses of antibiotics. Also we’re going to have to stop all the other treatments in order to give his immune system a chance to recover.”
“But didn’t you say it was dangerous to just skip one day of treatment? What will an entire week do to him?!” Robin appeared horrified.
“It’s risky,” he agreed. “But if we don’t do this, he’ll be done in by a simple staph infection. We’re just going to have to take the risk and hope for the best.”
-------------------------------------------------------------
The room was dark and everything was much, much larger than him.
Barney sat up in his bed and realized he was strapped to it. There was no light outside his hospital room door and everything had a layer of dust settled over it. He couldn't even hear the sound of the machines around him; they were all turned off with no power running through them. He was dressed in his pajamas and the straps binding him to the bed looked more like restraining straps used for crazy people in mental hospitals. Wiggling one of his wrists proved that his arm was skinner than it had been when the straps were originally tied to him. He freed his other hand and got out of bed.
The hallways were just as empty and lifeless as his room. He searched nearly all the hallways connected to his and they proved just as deserted. Where was everyone? Had he been forgotten? He stepped into one of the other rooms and when he looked out the window he saw James, Sam and Tom. They were holding each other and crying. Their suits were black and depressing and Sam was hiding behind Tom's legs.
Barney was outside.
No one noticed him when he walked over. The three of them were standing by a grave and it read "Barney M. Stinson" with lots of flowers all around it. It was dated 1996.
The headstone read; "To a Loving Brother, Caring Friend, and Uncle. Too Awesome to be Forgotten".
What?
Suddenly Robin, Ted, Marshall and Lily joined the others. They were grieving over the other Barney as well. They were dressed just as somberly, although Marshall was wearing brown shoes with a black suit (tacky). He looked around but there were no graves mentioning him until he found one a distance away under a tree.
This headstone read; "Barney D. Stinson." Under the name it said; "Almost as Awesome as the Original."
It was just as dusty as his hospital room. No flowers were around it, no disturbed earth near it. It stood apart from every other grave.
No one wanted to remember the imitation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Barney could remember falling asleep to Robin’s story and briefly waking up after feeling extremely over heated under his covers. He concluded he had probably fallen sleep again because of the freaky dream. But he did not expect to wake up at the hospital.
“What the hell?” was the first thing out of his mouth. Ted and Robin, who were sitting by his bedside burst into tears and pulled him into a tight bear hug. It turned out that he'd had such a dangerously high fever that he had been out for almost a day.
He had missed an entire day. An entire day! Barney (and Doogie) had always lived his life as if each day might be his last, that there was an infinite "no tomorrow". Now that this really was the case once again, each and every one of his days became even more important. It was no good to be playing no-day-but-today when he spent one of them in a feverish delirium.
So Barney tried to make up for his missed time during the following week in which he was once again stuck in the hospital. When his friends visited he was extra peppy, cheerful and talkative. He flirted relentlessly with the nurses and amused himself by constantly second-guessing his doctors and showing off his medical knowledge that was vastly superior to theirs just for the sport of it. When he was alone, he read so intensely that he had to keep sending his friends to the library to bring him new material.
He was constantly being reminded to slow down and allow himself to rest, but the advice was ignored. He was feeling better than he had been in a long time. They were giving him frequent blood transfusions to boost his immune system (something he argued against just for the sport it) and was completely off the chemotherapy; so at the moment he wasn’t feeling any of the symptoms of the leukemia or the treatment's side effects. All he had to deal with was the infection, which really just felt like the flu minus the cough and congestion. It was a wonderful improvement.
Today was his sixth day in the hospital. His fever had finally broken early that morning and he was expected to be going back to Ted and Robin’s place the following day, which will mean having to go back on the chemotherapy. The stress of the thought of more chemo was giving him a pounding headache.
“Die, die, die!” he shouted in the midst of a violent video game with Robin. They were very competitive with each other and he was losing miserably. His fingers had gone numb and were unintentionally slipping off the joystick. He kept hitting the wrong buttons or wasn’t able to make his fingers move to them fast enough. The Doogie in him knew that this was a symptom he should probably be reporting, but Barney decided to just shrug it off as a consequence of being bedridden for so long.
The numbness spread to entire hands and he could no longer keep his hold on the controller.
“I don’t want to play anymore. I think you're cheating,” he declared, suddenly putting down the controller. He didn’t want Robin know anything was wrong.
“Oh come on! You’re just being a sore loser.”
“Am not,” he said, giving her a playful shove with the back of his knuckles.
“Are too,” she reported, shoving him back as gently as possible.
“I’m going to make you pay for that one Scherbatsky!” he yelled jumping up to his feet, with the intention of pouncing on her.
But suddenly Barney couldn’t breathe. He tried taking a deep breath but the air wouldn’t come. He choked and sputtered.
“Barney?” Robin sounded terrified.
He collapsed down to his knees. He managed to gasp in a few mouthfuls of air but it wasn’t enough; he was suffocating. Distantly, he was able to hear Robin’s frantic calls for help and was aware of a gaggle of people rushing into his room.
He began raking his brain for what could possibly be wrong: mesothelioma, pleural effusion, bronchitis, asthma, silicosis, diffuse plural thickening ,COPD, pulmonary edema, broncopulmanary aspergillosis, pleurisy, TB, anaphylaxis, sacroidosis, severe anxiety,
An oxygen mask was pushed against his face.
bronchiectasis, pulmonary hypertension, asbestosis, hypoxima, heart failure, interstitial fibrosis, pneumonia, SARS, shock, alpha1 -antitrypsin deficiency, pertussis, pulmonary embolism, pneumoconiosis, ARDS, adenocarinoma, toxoplasmosis, myocardial infarction, epiglottitis, pneumonthorax, general dying…
--------------------------------------------------
When Robin called Ted at work, she was in tears. He wasn’t able to make out exactly what she was saying, something about a video game and air, but all he needed to hear was the key word Barney and he was racing off to the hospital. He had already missed so much work because of this, by now most of his sick days had been used up on Barney sick days. Thankfully, his firm was really understanding about it and allowed him to do a lot of his work from home.
The scene in the hospital room was far worse than he’d expected. Barney had on an oxygen mask and had another tube coming out of his chest. This one was sticking out of his side, was much thicker and had a clear reddish liquid coming out of it. He was awake, but looked deathly pale. Still he waved and smiled weakly at him through the clear mask. Meanwhile Robin, had a tight hold on his hand and her face was still puffy from crying.
The second he took in the scene his voice stopped working properly. “What happened?” he asked, gruffly.
“He couldn’t breathe. We were just hanging out, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. A bunch of them came in and stuck that thing in him, which started draining all this fluid from his lungs… He was still awake when they did it. They cut into him without any medication or anything…” Ted could tell that Robin was still in shock.
“I’m okay,” Barney assured her, pulling the mask slightly away from his face so he could be heard. One thing that they had found out about him over the past few months was that he had a high tolerance for pain and discomfort. It came as quite a surprise to them; with all his fancy suits and manicures he was the last person they’d expected to be tough.
Robin’s eye’s filled with tears and it looked like she was going to say something else to Barney. She was interrupted by the entry of the oncologist they were getting to know far too well as of late.
“We’ve figured out what the problem is,” he said, getting right to the chase instead of wasting time with pleasantries. “The blood tests reveal that Barney’s developed-”
“Leukostasis,” finished Barney, his voice slightly muffled through the mask.
“How on earth did you figure that one out?” Dr. Oberlin asked, looking utterly amazed.
“The drainage from my lungs… points to pulmonary edema… the injection the nurse gave me… ten minutes ago was a blood thinner… and the other symptoms I was stubbornly withholding.” Barney had to pause several times to catch his breath.
“Oh kid, you are something else,” Dr. Oberlin laughed, but Ted could detect some sadness behind it. “Never before have I had a patient even remotely like you.”
“What exactly is this?” cut in Robin.
“Extremely high white blood cell count that leads to thickened blood. It can wreak all sorts of havoc on the body but luckily we were able to catch it early.”
“Was this caused by the transfusions and other efforts to boost his immune system?” asked Ted, accusatively. Leave it to a hospital to mess up his medication and almost kill Barney the moment he was starting to do well.
“I wish that were the case. After this happened I called up the lab and had them rush the results from the bone marrow aspiration we took this morning. The results aren’t good. His blast count is the highest it’s ever been. Almost double the amount it was last time.”
Ted grabbed Barney’s other hand and Robin scooted in as close to him as she could. Neither of them were exactly sure what that word meant but they could still understand the meaning behind it. His leukemia was getting worse.
“We’re going to start him on a whole new regime of treatments. It’s going to be far more aggressive than before; we’re going to have to keep him in the hospital for this. And no more of your experimenting, Barney. I don’t care how much you kick and scream this time, if some of your medication is going to cause hair thinning you’re just going to have to accept it.”
Ted’s mind was racing on overkill. Barney was getting worse..... they weren’t going to be able to bring him home for a very long time.... and all this time he had been experimenting with his medication, with his life, all for the sake of vanity. In another situation, in another lifetime, he would have clobbered him.
“Also, I think it’s time to start looking into a bone marrow transplant.”
.
jerseystrife ,
alixzin and I
Rating: mild M for some unpleasant adult themes
Summary: Something is terribly wrong with Barney Stinson and his friends have all started to notice him avoiding them. When questions arise, Barney fights to keep his secrets and to keep the life he's grown comfortable with living.
Disclaimer: Sadly, none of us own either of the shows.
Note: A million thanks to
roland44 for the beta.
Previous Chapters: One| Two| Three| Four| Five| Six| Seven| Eight| Nine| Ten
Several hours after rushing Barney to the hospital Robin and Ted were in a conference room with his oncologist, Dr. Oberlin, and an infectious disease specialist. Barney had been immediately admitted and was on IV antibiotics. He was currently unconscious but even if he was awake he would be too delirious to participate in the conversation.
“Okay, I’m going to start with the good news,” began the new doctor. “He doesn’t have septicemia or pneumonia as we initially feared. This is just an isolated skin infection on his leg from where he gives himself injections. It’s the sort of thing that most of us would put some Neosporin on and forget about. The reason he seems so sick right now is because creating a fever is one of the few defenses his body has against infection, what with his white blood cells not functioning properly. Once the antibiotics start kicking, in his temperature should drop several degrees and he’ll be a lot more lucid.”
“So he’s going to be okay?” asked Ted, hopefully.
“We believe so,” Dr. Oberlin answered. “But bear in mind that his immune system has been severely compromised by the chemotherapy. We’d like to keep him here for a week for monitoring and keep him on high doses of antibiotics. Also we’re going to have to stop all the other treatments in order to give his immune system a chance to recover.”
“But didn’t you say it was dangerous to just skip one day of treatment? What will an entire week do to him?!” Robin appeared horrified.
“It’s risky,” he agreed. “But if we don’t do this, he’ll be done in by a simple staph infection. We’re just going to have to take the risk and hope for the best.”
-------------------------------------------------------------
The room was dark and everything was much, much larger than him.
Barney sat up in his bed and realized he was strapped to it. There was no light outside his hospital room door and everything had a layer of dust settled over it. He couldn't even hear the sound of the machines around him; they were all turned off with no power running through them. He was dressed in his pajamas and the straps binding him to the bed looked more like restraining straps used for crazy people in mental hospitals. Wiggling one of his wrists proved that his arm was skinner than it had been when the straps were originally tied to him. He freed his other hand and got out of bed.
The hallways were just as empty and lifeless as his room. He searched nearly all the hallways connected to his and they proved just as deserted. Where was everyone? Had he been forgotten? He stepped into one of the other rooms and when he looked out the window he saw James, Sam and Tom. They were holding each other and crying. Their suits were black and depressing and Sam was hiding behind Tom's legs.
Barney was outside.
No one noticed him when he walked over. The three of them were standing by a grave and it read "Barney M. Stinson" with lots of flowers all around it. It was dated 1996.
The headstone read; "To a Loving Brother, Caring Friend, and Uncle. Too Awesome to be Forgotten".
What?
Suddenly Robin, Ted, Marshall and Lily joined the others. They were grieving over the other Barney as well. They were dressed just as somberly, although Marshall was wearing brown shoes with a black suit (tacky). He looked around but there were no graves mentioning him until he found one a distance away under a tree.
This headstone read; "Barney D. Stinson." Under the name it said; "Almost as Awesome as the Original."
It was just as dusty as his hospital room. No flowers were around it, no disturbed earth near it. It stood apart from every other grave.
No one wanted to remember the imitation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Barney could remember falling asleep to Robin’s story and briefly waking up after feeling extremely over heated under his covers. He concluded he had probably fallen sleep again because of the freaky dream. But he did not expect to wake up at the hospital.
“What the hell?” was the first thing out of his mouth. Ted and Robin, who were sitting by his bedside burst into tears and pulled him into a tight bear hug. It turned out that he'd had such a dangerously high fever that he had been out for almost a day.
He had missed an entire day. An entire day! Barney (and Doogie) had always lived his life as if each day might be his last, that there was an infinite "no tomorrow". Now that this really was the case once again, each and every one of his days became even more important. It was no good to be playing no-day-but-today when he spent one of them in a feverish delirium.
So Barney tried to make up for his missed time during the following week in which he was once again stuck in the hospital. When his friends visited he was extra peppy, cheerful and talkative. He flirted relentlessly with the nurses and amused himself by constantly second-guessing his doctors and showing off his medical knowledge that was vastly superior to theirs just for the sport of it. When he was alone, he read so intensely that he had to keep sending his friends to the library to bring him new material.
He was constantly being reminded to slow down and allow himself to rest, but the advice was ignored. He was feeling better than he had been in a long time. They were giving him frequent blood transfusions to boost his immune system (something he argued against just for the sport it) and was completely off the chemotherapy; so at the moment he wasn’t feeling any of the symptoms of the leukemia or the treatment's side effects. All he had to deal with was the infection, which really just felt like the flu minus the cough and congestion. It was a wonderful improvement.
Today was his sixth day in the hospital. His fever had finally broken early that morning and he was expected to be going back to Ted and Robin’s place the following day, which will mean having to go back on the chemotherapy. The stress of the thought of more chemo was giving him a pounding headache.
“Die, die, die!” he shouted in the midst of a violent video game with Robin. They were very competitive with each other and he was losing miserably. His fingers had gone numb and were unintentionally slipping off the joystick. He kept hitting the wrong buttons or wasn’t able to make his fingers move to them fast enough. The Doogie in him knew that this was a symptom he should probably be reporting, but Barney decided to just shrug it off as a consequence of being bedridden for so long.
The numbness spread to entire hands and he could no longer keep his hold on the controller.
“I don’t want to play anymore. I think you're cheating,” he declared, suddenly putting down the controller. He didn’t want Robin know anything was wrong.
“Oh come on! You’re just being a sore loser.”
“Am not,” he said, giving her a playful shove with the back of his knuckles.
“Are too,” she reported, shoving him back as gently as possible.
“I’m going to make you pay for that one Scherbatsky!” he yelled jumping up to his feet, with the intention of pouncing on her.
But suddenly Barney couldn’t breathe. He tried taking a deep breath but the air wouldn’t come. He choked and sputtered.
“Barney?” Robin sounded terrified.
He collapsed down to his knees. He managed to gasp in a few mouthfuls of air but it wasn’t enough; he was suffocating. Distantly, he was able to hear Robin’s frantic calls for help and was aware of a gaggle of people rushing into his room.
He began raking his brain for what could possibly be wrong: mesothelioma, pleural effusion, bronchitis, asthma, silicosis, diffuse plural thickening ,COPD, pulmonary edema, broncopulmanary aspergillosis, pleurisy, TB, anaphylaxis, sacroidosis, severe anxiety,
An oxygen mask was pushed against his face.
bronchiectasis, pulmonary hypertension, asbestosis, hypoxima, heart failure, interstitial fibrosis, pneumonia, SARS, shock, alpha1 -antitrypsin deficiency, pertussis, pulmonary embolism, pneumoconiosis, ARDS, adenocarinoma, toxoplasmosis, myocardial infarction, epiglottitis, pneumonthorax, general dying…
--------------------------------------------------
When Robin called Ted at work, she was in tears. He wasn’t able to make out exactly what she was saying, something about a video game and air, but all he needed to hear was the key word Barney and he was racing off to the hospital. He had already missed so much work because of this, by now most of his sick days had been used up on Barney sick days. Thankfully, his firm was really understanding about it and allowed him to do a lot of his work from home.
The scene in the hospital room was far worse than he’d expected. Barney had on an oxygen mask and had another tube coming out of his chest. This one was sticking out of his side, was much thicker and had a clear reddish liquid coming out of it. He was awake, but looked deathly pale. Still he waved and smiled weakly at him through the clear mask. Meanwhile Robin, had a tight hold on his hand and her face was still puffy from crying.
The second he took in the scene his voice stopped working properly. “What happened?” he asked, gruffly.
“He couldn’t breathe. We were just hanging out, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. A bunch of them came in and stuck that thing in him, which started draining all this fluid from his lungs… He was still awake when they did it. They cut into him without any medication or anything…” Ted could tell that Robin was still in shock.
“I’m okay,” Barney assured her, pulling the mask slightly away from his face so he could be heard. One thing that they had found out about him over the past few months was that he had a high tolerance for pain and discomfort. It came as quite a surprise to them; with all his fancy suits and manicures he was the last person they’d expected to be tough.
Robin’s eye’s filled with tears and it looked like she was going to say something else to Barney. She was interrupted by the entry of the oncologist they were getting to know far too well as of late.
“We’ve figured out what the problem is,” he said, getting right to the chase instead of wasting time with pleasantries. “The blood tests reveal that Barney’s developed-”
“Leukostasis,” finished Barney, his voice slightly muffled through the mask.
“How on earth did you figure that one out?” Dr. Oberlin asked, looking utterly amazed.
“The drainage from my lungs… points to pulmonary edema… the injection the nurse gave me… ten minutes ago was a blood thinner… and the other symptoms I was stubbornly withholding.” Barney had to pause several times to catch his breath.
“Oh kid, you are something else,” Dr. Oberlin laughed, but Ted could detect some sadness behind it. “Never before have I had a patient even remotely like you.”
“What exactly is this?” cut in Robin.
“Extremely high white blood cell count that leads to thickened blood. It can wreak all sorts of havoc on the body but luckily we were able to catch it early.”
“Was this caused by the transfusions and other efforts to boost his immune system?” asked Ted, accusatively. Leave it to a hospital to mess up his medication and almost kill Barney the moment he was starting to do well.
“I wish that were the case. After this happened I called up the lab and had them rush the results from the bone marrow aspiration we took this morning. The results aren’t good. His blast count is the highest it’s ever been. Almost double the amount it was last time.”
Ted grabbed Barney’s other hand and Robin scooted in as close to him as she could. Neither of them were exactly sure what that word meant but they could still understand the meaning behind it. His leukemia was getting worse.
“We’re going to start him on a whole new regime of treatments. It’s going to be far more aggressive than before; we’re going to have to keep him in the hospital for this. And no more of your experimenting, Barney. I don’t care how much you kick and scream this time, if some of your medication is going to cause hair thinning you’re just going to have to accept it.”
Ted’s mind was racing on overkill. Barney was getting worse..... they weren’t going to be able to bring him home for a very long time.... and all this time he had been experimenting with his medication, with his life, all for the sake of vanity. In another situation, in another lifetime, he would have clobbered him.
“Also, I think it’s time to start looking into a bone marrow transplant.”
.