OCTAVEUS
WHEN I woke up, I was lying in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar people around me. I was being restrained by something and I looked to my right, where a sympathetic-looking male nurse was injecting a needle in my elbow bend. He injected the sedative before I could react and my eyes closed once again.

When I came to again, I was definitely being restrained. There was a breathing mask over my mouth and nose and a thick tube-like needle in my wrist, injecting a dark red liquid into my veins. My arm was pinned to my hospital bed by a cream-white plastic band, and I was now wearing a white hospital gown (which I did not enjoy). My body felt weak and my head was swimming. My eyes felt heavy. I tried to sit up but someone pushed me back down gently.
"Hold on," an unfamiliar voice said. The voice belonged to the male nurse that had sedated me before. "Your body needs to replenish your blood supply after the surgery." He reached out to readjust the breathing mask on my face but I flinched away from him a little bit. I don't know why, but he seemed much different from the other nurses. He was wearing a blue doctor's mask and a hairnet to keep his sandy hair out of his face, the hairnet looking more like a blue shower cap than a hairnet. It hid both where his human and Choronus ears would be. He pulled his hand away when I flinched.
"It's alright," he said, slowly extending his hand toward my face again. This time I tried to stay as still as possible while he readjusted the breathing mask, even though I felt like flinching away. He unlatched the plastic band that was holding my arm to the bed and then helped me slowly sit up. Suddenly pain burst through the fuzz of drugs and I keeled over sideways, my vision swimming dizzily. The male nurse caught my shoulders before I fell and leaned me back against the headrest and pillows of my hospital bed. My eyesight blurred with pain and I resisted the urge to cry out.
"Shh," The male nurse lightly put one hand on my shoulder. He picked up a small remote thingie attached to my bed and pressed the red button. "Shh, you're going to be alright." I felt my claws slide out of my fingertips and the nurse's hand on my shoulder tensed. I looked at him; he looked calm enough, but in his eyes I saw fear. Now I knew what was different about him; he was a human. I tried to speak, but my throat burned with pain.
"Shh, I know," he said. "I know, you weren't expecting. . . someone like me."
I finally got over my surprise and watched him. He had light brown eyes and tan skin, there were crinkles at the sides of his eyes from smiling a lot. His hair was close-cropped and sandy brown as far as I could see. I wanted to say something, but I couldn't speak through the pain in my neck.
The male nurse comforted me until Talon came. He was wearing blue scrubs, a label on the breast pocket of the shirt stating his name. I'd never actually seen him in his scrubs before; usually he wore casual clothes when he came to see me in the infirmary. He came over to me and gently put his hand on my neck.
"How much does this hurt?" He asked, lightly putting pressure on the wound. Well, he didn't actually put any pressure on it, it just hurt like he had. My face twisted in pain and I felt tears well in my eyes. Talon looked at a monitor thingy next to my bed-- I think it monitored my level of pain; the line on the screen had shot upward dramatically since Talon put his hand on my neck wound.
He said something to the male nurse and the nurse went and grabbed a syringe from the cabinet over the sink in my hospital room, then filled the syringe with some sort of clear medicine and handed the filled syringe to Talon. "Hold still for a second," he said, unwrapping the bandages around my neck. "This should ease the pain better." He injected the medicine into the wound, but the pain reliever didn't have an immediate effect like the other ones did. Then, all at once, the pain reliever kicked in and I couldn't feel the pain. (Well, the physical pain, at least.)
"Do you feel any pain?" Talon asked, lightly placing his hand on my neck, and I shook my head. He nodded.
"Make sure you rest," he told me. "Even after the transfusion your body is still low on blood. If you feel dizzy or anything tell your nurse." I nodded an okay. "Good. I'll be back to check on you before lunchtime, don't try to move around too much, just rest."
Talon and the nurse- whom had told me to call him Cecil- started talking, most likely about me, but I didn't really care. I fell asleep again after a while; well, either that or I passed out, I don't know which. Either way, I woke up in pain. I was still drugged so I couldn't do much more than grimace.
Thankfully Cecil saw the line on my pain monitor spike and pressed the red button on my remote again.
Later that day, after noon, Talon woke me up and told me that I was going to get another blood transfusion around midnight. When I asked why they didn't just do it all at once he replied, "We needed to find several donors to replace the amount of blood you lost." He put on some hand sanitizer before putting on a new pair of latex gloves. "The good news is that you have a common blood type for your breed so it wasn't too hard to find donors. The only hard part was finding someone with the nutrients you are lacking at the moment that was willing to donate so much blood for you."
I nodded.
God I hate this. I could barely do anything for myself; sometimes I couldn't even move effectively without help. And I was in constant pain. I just couldn't feel it through the numbness of the pain killers. At one point I had asked Talon how much blood I needed replaced; he said the first transfusion they could only get a donor for two pints. This one was for three.
I slept for five hours straight after Talon had informed me of the second surgery. Talon had to wake me up around 11:30 to give me a sedative and make sure it was working before the transfusion.

After I woke up at about three in the morning after the surgery, I was surprised to find that the dizziness had gone down a lot. Cecil was there, as he always was, and there was another tube in my wrist connected to a gallon-sized bag half full of dark red liquid.
"Good news," Cecil came over to me while I sat up. He was holding a roll of fresh gauze and bandages. "Your infection has gone down dramatically and you won't need any more blood transfusions."
"Thank God," I said, smiling a little. Not that I know the feeling of 'happiness,' but that news made me feel better emotionally than I had for a long time.
The next few days went by fast. Talon came in to check on me every day. I was finally able to eat again, and I was hungry. All. The. Time. Whenever I was awake, I was eating. Soon after I had gained back ten pounds that I had lost to starvation, Talon told me that I was being moved back to the choroni infirmary for the last few days before I was released completely. And, I can't believe I'm saying this, I could not wait until I was allowed to go back to school. Jesus Christ that sounds so unnatural. But school was the only place that I could see Drew. And I am not ashamed to admit this, I love him more than I love anything else.

Sorry for the crappy chapter ending. I couldn't think of anything else to end with.
Thanks for sticking with me anyway!
- Snake Eyes