Deer Luhan,

Hospital .  Have I ever mentioned that hospital ?

Leigh

I could actually understand most of what the doctors were saying when I came to.  A little surprised, I opened my eyes to stare.

It was a big mistake.  They really hurt.

My yelp of pain must have attracted attention, because hands grabbed my wrists to stop me from rubbing at my eyes.

“No, honey, leave them alone.  If your eyes hurt, don’t touch them.”

That gave me pause.  After a moment or so, I consented to having my arms lowered, and I inched my eyes open, only to shut them again quickly at the pain.  But I’d been able to get a glimpse of the two nurses hovering over me.

“You’re not Chinese,” I said dumbly.

“No, honey—”

“You’re English.  You’re even speaking English.”

“That’s right, sweetheart.  You were air-ambulanced in from a hospital in Changsha just a couple of hours ago.”

I frowned.  I wanted to open my eyes to give whichever nurse had spoken a quizzical look, but the idea of feeling like my eye was being stabbed again wasn’t really one that appealed.

“Where am I, then?”

“This is University College Hospital, London.  We’d like to get in contact with your parents, sweetheart.  We weren’t given a nearest of kin contact number.”

“My dad’s a doctor.”  I could feel my consciousness slipping.  “Works at Moorfield’s.”

“Can you give us a name, number, anything?  We were asked to contact your family when you arrived, but we currently have no way of doing that.”

I managed to give them my dad’s mobile number.  I wasn’t totally sure if it was correct, because it felt kind of like I was still on very strong painkillers.  Just before I slipped back into oblivion, I heard one of the nurses say to the other, “Her right eye didn’t look at all healthy.  We should probably make sure that gets checked.”

My dad’s voice was the first thing that filtered into my consciousness when I next woke up.

“Morning, sweetcakes,” he greeted me when I groaned and tilted my head to the side, this time remembering not to open my eyes.  “How are you feeling?”

“Rotten,” I grumbled.

“I’m not surprised.  You nearly killed yourself falling out of bed, you know.”

I looked at him in shock and promptly yelped, snapping my eyes shut again.  He smoothed my hair away from my forehead.

“How did you know?” I demanded.

“I’m a doctor.  I can see your medical records, and that was the reason they listed behind putting you into surgery yet again.  You had to get another blood transfusion, Leigh.  What have I told you about exerting yourself when you’re ill?”

I squirmed sheepishly.

“They put you out for a while so they could run some tests,” he added.  “Fortunately all the surgery over in China was well done, so they’re not going to have to open you up again unless you get peritonitis, which could well happen with the amount of abuse your abdomen has been on the receiving end of.  You’re exceptionally lucky you didn’t get any organs removed.  It’s the third time your spleen has ruptured and I gather it was only because of Luhan insisiting that they bothered trying to save it this time around.”

I felt a slight pang at the mention of Luhan’s name.  I’d probably scared the poor guy quite badly.

“Anyway,” my dad continued, “the staff at UCHL said there seemed to be something wrong with your right eye, so they sent you here so we could get checks done on it.  One of my colleagues is waiting because I’m not really supposed to conduct them myself.  Can I let her in?”

“Right eye?”  I resisted the temptation to open either of them.  “But there’s this dark spot floating around in my left eye, Dad, and I’m sure it’s not normal.”

There was silence for a moment.  “That doesn’t sound good.  We’ll check them both, anyway.  Hopefully they won’t both need operating on.”

I was unlucky.  Or possibly lucky.  Depends how you look at it.  At the very least, I wasn’t going to lose my sight.

My dad’s colleague and my dad came back after examining the results, and my dad insisted on telling me personally, since he figured he could be blunt as we were related.  I tried to track him with my eyes, but the numbing drops they’d put in them to take the tests made it a little difficult to focus.

“Your right eye should be relatively easy to sort out,” he said.  “You’ve got two or three tiny chips of something stuck in the gel that’s getting irritated every time you blink or move your eyeball.  Once they’re out, it’ll heal up pretty quickly and the infection will go away with antibiotics.  It’s not advanced enough to put you at risk of going blind, so your vision should return to normal with no problem.  As for your left eye….”  He sighed.

I got nervous.  My dad didn’t normally do sighing.  This probably meant things were bad.

“The dark spot is because you have a detatched retina.  How long do you reckon that spot’s been there?”

I shrugged helplessly.  “I’ve been high pretty much permanently since I’ve been stabbed, but I think somebody said something about me hitting my eye when I got thrown down the stairs, because the only other eye injury I remember having is the one just before I got sent back here, and the spot was there before that.”

“D*mn.  That’s over a month.”

I looked at him anxiously.  “Is that bad?”

“Yes.”  He turned back to the notes his colleague had taken.  “What’s worse is you probably aren’t going to have much of a clue as to whether or not it’s got worse compared to when you first noticed it, so we only have the tests to go on for rate of deterioration.”

“De… what?”

“Basically, we have no idea how quickly your eye is going to get worse unless we decide to leave it for another week before checking on it again, but I’d rather not do that because it would be best to make sure as far as possible that this isn’t permanent, and at this late stage, full recovery is questionable.”

My heart sank.

“Your vision’s still relatively decent, from what we can make out, though the numbing drops don’t exactly let us tell accurately because you couldn’t focus your pupils properly for a standard eye test.  No matter.  We’re going to be operating immediately – I just need to find another eye surgeon who’s experienced in reattaching retinas, because that’s usually me and I’m not allowed to operate as you’re a family member.”

I gulped.  It seemed like the only appropriate response.

“Your mum’s going to lose her sh*t,” he added.  “I don’t think I’ll tell her until everything’s over.  She doesn’t yet know you’re back – it’s for the best.”

It took two full days to get everything sorted, and I stayed in hospital during that time because I wasn’t entirely stable.  Dad also thought I shouldn’t be moving around too much.  They dug out the tiny fragments of what turned out to be part of my phone screen on the evening of the day they’d given me the eye tests, an absolutely terrified student doctor being the one to actually carry the operation out, and Dad pulled some strings and got me the nicest ward in the place for free.  He called Mum that evening anyway and told her I was back in the UK, but banned her from coming to see me until she was sure she was completely calm, as I’d been through far too much surgery recently and apparently didn’t need any more wounds added to the tally.

In the end, she showed up just after my big eye operation, apologising profusely for not coming earlier but still practically blowing steam out of her ears before she told me I was grounded for the rest of the year for going abroad like that.

“And you are never speaking to those boys ever again,” she added with the mother of all glares after my dad and I had finished pointing out that ending up in Korea was completely not my fault.

“She might even have had a chance at getting them to believe she wasn’t Luhan if you hadn’t hit her with that plate,” my dad had reasoned, reminding us all that the manager who’d originally taken me had thought I was just drunk and concussed.

I would have rolled my eyes at her, but the left one was still numb and completely blurry from the operation, and the infection was still going strong in the right one, which made it painful to move.

“She’s just worried,” Dad told me after she’d kissed me goodbye before scarpering to get to her job on time.  “Time to put your head down, or the gas bubble is going to cause problems.”

Dad was completely unsurprised when I came down with peritonitis three days later.  I got whisked across from Moorfield’s to Churchill’s in a cacophony of sirens and some really cool flashing lights, where they checked me for appendicitis (which I didn’t have, though it was probably about the only thing that wasn’t wrong with me) and then realised they were going to have to operate rather than just treating me with antibiotics and anti-fungal shots because my peritoneum was damaged and the infection had hit it quite badly.  It still meant another fortnight in hospital, though, because I still needed all the antibiotics and stuff, and unfortunately the emergency surgery caused problems with my recovering eye, which meant that rather than fifteen minutes of every hour spent lying flat on my front to make sure the gas bubble remained stable, I had to spend forty-five minutes of every hour like that.  It turned out to be exceedingly uncomfortable because I’d apparently re-cracked some of my healing ribs when I’d fallen out of bed back in Changsha.  That went on for the full two weeks, too, and I was still in hospital, getting seriously gr