Monet and Laurie, Monet and Jean, Wednesay Afternoon

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OOC: Backdated to Wednesday due to Life(tm) taking up far too much time. Many, many thanks to Seraph and Cora for their patience.

Monet's health takes a turn for the worse.



Monet was never quite sure how to describe exactly how she'd managed to fall down the stairs later. It was as though she just hadn't seen them. She sat up slowly, vaguely disoriented, and blinked rapidly, seeing double for a moment. "Two Lauries. Isn't one of you enough?"

Laurie's eyebrows raised at Monet's comment, not exactly the most welcoming of statements to be sure. She supposed she couldn't blame the other girl, she had been rather unwelcoming the last time they'd talked. That, of course, didn't mean she felt any need to be friends with the girl, but politeness was not exactly hard when you came down to it.

"Monet, there's only one of me. How hard did you hit your head?" she asked, crouching down to be on level with her where she sprawled against the bottom of the stairs. "Try not to move," she suggested, looking carefully into Monet's eyes. She remembered that they'd said to make sure that the patients eyes weren't...what was the word? Dialated? She needed to concentrate more on her reading material, she really did.

It was a horrible long moment before the Lauries settled into only one girl. "I didn't hit my head. I was just... seeing double for a .... moment. Besides, the beauty of being invulnerable is that it doesn't matter because thing. Hitting it, becomes not bad."

She'd forgotten about the invulnerable thing, but then why had Monet been seeing two of her? Some sort of sickness, then? She knew that Monet had had moments where she seemed to freeze for no apparent reason, could this be a continuance of that?

"I think you need to come see Dr Grey-Summers with me," she said, using her firmest tone, that used on small children and particularly uncooperative patients. She'd been learning it from Amelia.

Monet's vision doubled again for a moment. "MIght be an idea..." She lurched to her feet and the floor moved, tilting wildly, forcing her to throw a hand out against (through) the wall to steady herself. Monet carefully extricated her hand from the wall and tried to ignore the way the floor kept tilting. "Walking? Not so good right now."

Had this sort of thing happened around the time Laurie had first arrived at the school, her reaction might have been one of shock, indeed, it might have even been accompanied with a small scream and a possible swoon. However, seeing as it wasn't, she didn't, and instead she just calculated the amount of time it would take her to get away after she'd informed Mr Marko that there was a hole in the wall of his beloved mansion. She figured she had fair odds, especially if she said it had been something of a medical nature.

"Ooookay, how about you just lean on me and we'll take a nice slow trip? Wouldn't want you to have to face the Wrath of Cain, now would we?" she said, trying to gently steer Monet toward the hallway that would lead to
the stairs down to the medlab.

Monet lent, carefully, on Laurie. "Please don't talk to me like I'm five, 'kay? It's really kind of annoying, instead of being all soothing like you want it to be." Her heart was pounding and her head throbbed in time with it, little stabs of pain. This? This was scarier than trying to ignore it, to pretend that everything that was happening was just a cold. It suggested that maybe, just maybe, ignoring the whatever it was, wasn't going to make it vanish.

"Well, I could always be brutally honest and list everything that unexpected dizziness and lack of coordination could be. Have you been forgetting to eat lately, or perhaps not drinking enough water?" Laurie said, controlling the irritation she usually felt around Monet. It wasn't the other girl's fault, at least not her entire fault that they'd gotten off on the wrong foot. "Any history of diabetes in your family?"

"Yeah, nah. Don't do that. This is bad enough as is." Monet gave a small, worried smile and shook her head. "I don't know. Think maybe one one of my Aunties? And my great-Uncle, whatsisface. Only met him once. I don't know about Dad's side. We never had much to do with his extended family." Monet gave a small sigh of relief as they reached the medlab door. "Is it Jean on today or the evil WitchQueen from the former Soviet
Bloc?"

"Dr Voght is a perfectly nice woman," Laurie replied, tone amused. "But luckily for you, she's not on duty." Laurie, while she didn't think Dr Voght was that bad, was aware of how she tended to be toward patients. Not the best bedside manner in the world.

"So it's Jean? ...good." It was, sort of. Monet bit her lip and sat down to wait.





Sitting here, in the medlab, made things seem so much more ...real. She'd shooed Laurie away and now it was just her and Jean. "I." The words dried up in her mouth and Monet had to force herself to speak. "Ithinkthere'ssomethingwrongwithme." The tiles on the wall over there were interesting, easier to look at than Jean. She concentrated on them.

It took Jean a few moments to work through the rush of words, but it would be easier than trying to get the worried seeming girl to say it again, she thought. "Can you give me some specifics?" she asked, looking concerned. Given Monet's general approach to life, if she was admitting something was wrong, it must be really wrong.

"I've had a headache ever since I got into the fight in Afghanistan. And my co-ordination is bad. I keep dropping things. It's like my hands don't work. I'm seeing double, too. Not all the time, but some of it. And I just fell down the stairs, because I didn't see them. That's when Laurie brought me down here. I think that's it." Monet bit her lip and studied her hands.

Oh, that could be... potentially very bad. Sounded like nerve damage through and through, but Monet was nigh-invulnerable... Hard to get that sort of damage from an outside source. "Did you hit your head in Afghanistan?" Jean asked, just to be sure.

Monet shook her head. "No. I got hit by a psi blast but I was fine after that. It started later on. Maybe... a day later? Two days?"

A psi blast? Hmmm. That could conceviably cause complications if it were odd, like Betsy's psychic knife, but finding that out would take a fairly intense mindscan. Best to rule out the purely physical problems first. "All right, let's run a couple of basic tests." Pulling out her little pen light Jean held it in front of Monet. "Can you track the light, please."

Monet nodded and obeyed, meekly watching the light.

Jean took Monet through a number of nerve response tests, occasionally asking a few questions for clarification on the girl's symptoms and, though she expression professionally neutral, she was getting more and more concerned. Finally, the last test she could perform without rolling out the big machines done, she set her pen down on the exam sheet and pulled a chair over, so she could sit and talk with Monet. "Monet, we're going to have to run an MRI, there's no question. The thing is, right now, most of the possibilities for what could be causing this, I'm not really qualified to diagnose or treat. I'm a generalist, and you really need to be talking to a neurologist. And I'll be straight with you, most of the options were looking at right now are not very good. Your brain's not receiving or sending signals properly. There are other possibilities, but I want you to be aware, the worst case scenario right now is that it might be cancer."

There's a moment when it's almost like she's watching Jean from a distance and it takes effort not to zone out then and there. "Oh." Monet scrubbed her hands through her hair and drew a deep breath. "Do I? I mean, are there. Can they? They can fix this, right? They can make it not be that?"

Monet's question, and her tone of voice, almost broke Jean. "They can say with more certainty than I what it is. And they can talk with you about treatments and prognosis if it is cancer, or for whatever the problem is." Reaching over she laid her hand on Monet's. "I'm going to send you to a hospital in the city - they have one of the top neurologists in the country on staff and he'll take care of you. Do you want me or someone else to come with you?"

Monet shrugged. "I... don't know? Can I get back to you on that? I think I need to sit for a bit, first and things." To her horror, a couple of tears slid down her cheek. Monet wiped them away with the back of her hand. She was Monet St Croix and she did not cry in public.

"That's fine," Jean said, her voice still gentle. "You can avail yourself of the premises for a bit, if you'd like; sit, think, that sort of thing." She didn't add 'get composed', because this was Monet and she wouldn't appreciate the offer, or the need for it, instead she went on, "Or you can think about it elsewhere and get back to me whenever you've processed a bit more."

"Ta. Look, I think I'll go think it over. Can I get back to you?" (Please?) She came off as almost as calm as normal.

"Of course." Normal or not, Jean definitely wasn't going to push now. "Take all the time you need."