Of course, she wouldn’t. She was his angel, and she was nothing if not loyal. “Did you sleep?”
She glanced at the floor, then back at him. “As much as I could.”
Matt’s brow creased in worry. That wasn’t good. She needed her rest, and that chair looked terribly uncomfortable. “Do you work tonight?”
“Nope! Not until tomorrow.” She leaned in and pressed a sweet kiss to his forehead. “I’m going to stay right here with you.”
“Okay.” He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Rosie asked gently.
“Call Bruce. I can’t work.”
“When the doctor comes back in, we’ll talk to him about when you can go back.”
“Livvy?”
Rosie sighed and shook her head. “I left her two messages, the last one with the hospital information. I guess I better alert the squad, now that they’re all awake, so she gets the news fromsomeone.” She began to type furiously into her phone.
When she was done with that, she brought him his phone. He unlocked it and walked her through emailing his advisor at Virginia Tech to explain the situation. The dining services had brought him cereal and milk for breakfast. He ate that, as best he could, but he wasn’t up to much more. When he finally decided to turn the television on over his bed, the doctor came back.
“Hi Matt, I’m Dr. Rossetti, your interventional cardiologist.”
“Hi.” The doctor was maybe in his mid-forties, with long black curly hair that was gray at the temples.
“I just wanted to come in and explain what happened last night, in case you don’t remember, and what we did.”
Matt nodded for him to continue, and gripped Rosie’s hand.
“You’re okay discussing it with her in the room?”
“Yes.” Rosie was a nurse, he wasn’t worried.
“So, one of the long-term risks of your condition is narrowing of the arteries, which is what happened to you last night.” Doctor Rossetti pulled out a diagram and handed it to Matt. “What we had to do is called an angioplasty and stent placement. Basically, we went through the femoral artery in your hip with a tube called a catheter, went up to where your arteries had narrowed in your heart, and inflated the balloon at the end to push a mesh tube into place to hold the artery open.”
Matt felt a little queasy looking at the drawings of the procedure. He passed the paper to Rosie, who wisely hid it from view.
“We’re going to keep an eye on you for twenty-four hours, just to be sure that you don’t have another incident. But you’ll be able to go home tomorrow.”
Rosie asked questions for him, especially regarding work and school. He’d be cleared for light duty after a week, and then after that it could be six weeks before he fully felt like himself again. The doctor said to call with any chest pains. And he’d have to follow up with the doctor so he could check that the access site was healing.
Shit. This wasn’t going to go away. He looked at Rosie in a new light. She was so calm, professional.Of course she’s calm, she does this for a living.What would she miss if they stayed together?
Could he pass this on to his kids?Theirkids? Rosie didn’t deserve that. But he couldn’t ask while she was there.
“Do you have a cardiologist in Baltimore?”
“No, I haven’t had time to find one.”
“Your records came through this morning. I’m going to insist you get one. Given the potential for complications from your transposition, you need to be following up with one regularly.” The doctor patted him on the shoulder. “For now, though, rest up. You need it. I’ll be rounding tomorrow as well.”
“Thanks, Doctor!” A cheerful Rosie waved as the doctor swept out of the room. “What do you feel like watching?”
“Nothing,” Matt groaned. “I just want to sleep.”
“Okay.” Rosie ran her fingers through his hair. Her soothing touch only made him feel more guilty for getting sick in the first place. “I’ll shut the blinds and turn the lights down for you.”
He nodded as he pulled the blanket up. The pain in his chest had faded, but it was replaced by a different one. Matt had been born with a broken heart. It had never really hit him until now. This whole thing reminded him too much of the night of his father’s heart attack.
