Taehyung is impatient.

He is also a patient -a terrible one too.

Ask every nurse and healthcare assistant who has walked by his bed space in the past hour because they will all agree. Dr. Kim Taehyung is annoying, intimidating and whiny. A God in the orthopedic realm but a breathing bag of shit in a hospital gown.

That rhymes but that is not the point here.

The ward he had been moved to earlier was dark, save for the bright corridor overhead lights, the constant orange call bell alarms, and the flashing blue emergency bells beyond the safety of his four bedded cubical.

It was dark here in his quad but it wasn't dark enough.

"Code blue, he's crashing! We need a crash cart in here!" a person shouts and Taehyung sighs as he listens to the sound of people running down the hallway because that's what he should be doing right now, running to that code.

He feels his pulse quicken at the thought. "I shouldn't be here."

A nurse runs into their quad carrying a torch. She shines it on everyone in her hourly headcount, checking that everyone's okay but she falters at the sight of Taehyung staring at her blankly underneath his reading light before hesitating and then, scurrying off.

He then watches her leave, a shit-eating smirk drawn across his lips.

There's something oddly refreshing about being a patient. It's a new perspective. He can hear everything the nurses are talking about at their station and every conversation down the hallway. It makes him feel queasy about the number of times his colleagues have talked crap about a patient, he wonders if they could hear them too at the time.

The thought makes him feel like shit.

Because from the faraway bed he's sitting in, he can hear the startup sound of a defib at the end of the ward, how could his previous patients not hear their conversations.

In the opposite corner of his room, despite everything, he can hear a patient snore.

He can hear the distant beeping of an IV machine and the sobs of whom he presumes are family members but they could be nurses too ...who really knows.

What he really knows, however, is that the nurses are frustrated. And if they aren't frustrated at the patients, it's definitely at the interning medical doctors who have given them nothing but grief.

"You're in the hospital, you've had a heart attack and we need to monitor you," a nurse whispers to the quiet patient beside Taehyungs bed. He listens to her talk to the doctor. "His conditions getting worse. His cardiac biomarkers are through the roof. I think we need to do an angiogram and get him a stent or something. I can't keep providing 1 on 1 care, I've got 8 other patients to look after ...and this isn't ICU. We just aren't staffed well right now. What are we going to do?"

The doctor sighs. "There aren't any beds down in the cardio ward, I don't know what to do. What would you do Nurse Joy if you were me?"

"I would hope that my years of study and practice would've provided me with enough knowledge to know what to do, come on." 

"Please don't say that. I don't know what to do. What do I do? Help me." 

"You're kidding?" She sobs. "Sehun, you need to do something. You're a doctor, just pull some strings and send him downstairs."

"You're assuming I have strings to pull, I'm an intern."

"I don't care what you are, you have the ability to pick up the phone and call that department and tell them to take the patient. If I did that, they'd laugh at me. Don't make me do everything when I know you'll take the credit for it later if I'm successful. Call them. Do something. Don't be that intern who does nothing."

Taehyung feels her frustration vicariously before reaching towards the curtain. He grasps onto the fabric before pulling it out the way. "Dr. Sehun, send the patient to the cath lab say it's urgent. They work by triage too. Once he's down there, they have to accept him. So, get him out of here and stop pissing off my nurses when they should be discharging me instead."

He pulls the curtain back in place without saying another word. They whisper between each other before Dr. Sehun leaves, presumably to call the aforementioned department.

And then he smiles when he hears it. "This is Dr. Sehun, the general medical house surgeon. I'm sending a patient to you for urgent stenting, everything you need to know ...well, the nurse in transit can tell you."

Nurse Joy walks past his bed, she smiles Taehyung. "Helping me won't get you discharged faster Dr. Taehyung but thank you." 

"I tried. I'm just happy to help." 

She bows. He then watches her leave too. "Sehun, give me the notes, I'll take him down right now."

"Good ...um thank you Joy... I won't be that intern who ...well, you know takes the credit. Let's work well together because we have a lot of work to do here. Don't let them keep you, come straight up okay? I need you."

She laughs, so does Taehyung. "Sure, Dr. Sehun. I'll be back."

"Good because I have a feeling our febrile man is septic and I'm going to need help." 

She sighs as she comes back in to take the patient away. 

Taehyung gets excited at the premise of a patient with septic symptoms. "Put him on IV fluids. Antibiotics. Oxygen and chart paracetamol and ibuprofen. Get blood cultures and bloods. Do a septic screen Sehun!"

Sehun looks at Taehyung before walking away and ignoring him. Yeah, Taehyung hates being the patient.

-

They say that it takes years to learn about the body and decades to learn how to coordinate medical judgment. Taehyung disagrees with this, however. Doctors follow their gut instincts and they depend on nurses for their primary assessments, their attentive monitoring and people skills.

Doctors are also good at asking for help, which Taehyung is very good at doing.

"Can someone please help me?" he says. 

"Taehyung, give me a moment please!" a nurse shouts back, just as frustrated as he.

A student nurse pops her head around his curtain, she smiles nervously. "We'll be with you in a second ...we're just finishing up... on something..."

"I'm just saying..." He frowns at the poor girl. "...no need to be so nervous with me."

She smiles hesitantly before disappearing again.

Taehyung frowns harder.

The nurses in charge of caring for him are all weirdly on edge in his presence. He could feel it whenever they took his blood pressure, whenever they asked him how he was feeling and whether they checked his temperature but the desperate desire to be discharged overpowered any curiosity to ask just exactly what they were thinking.

If it wasn't because he was a medical doctor it was probably just gossip they'd heard from within the nursing grapevine. And lord knows how small the nursing world really is.

"Look, I'm okay, honestly!" he shouts out, forcing himself to sit up. He thrashes his legs about in the sheets in a show of agitation, the other patients look on in curiosity. He swings his feet out from the sheets to dangle them over the edge as he contemplates just running out, they'd never catch him in time. "Someone, just discharge me already!"

"They're all busy, just stay in bed." a patient huffs.

Another one adds. "If he wants to go, let him! He looks fine to me too! He's taking up a bed, send him home! "

The ward did actually look busy from where he sat. Nurses were running off their feet as bells were going off all over the place but it was still a far cry from the disaster downstairs. The disaster; a place where he knew he needed to be.

He strains, searching for the call bell in his blankets to yet again, nag the nurses. "Where's that stupid thing?"

A nurse pops into his cubicle, checking on the IV fluids now running on the new cannula in his left hand. "Taehyung, what are you doing?"

He stares at her like a deer caught in headlights as he drops the call bell back into his sheets.

"Ah ...nothing."

"Yeah sure, you were doing nothing!" the huffing patient shouts out. "That boy is a pain in the ass, you better let him go for a more deserving and appreciative patient!"

She rolls her eyes. "Guys, please, get some rest. The moon's still up!"

"He's not wrong you know. When can I go?" he asks, looking up at the nurse. "I'm in no pain and I've passed flatus ...and I've peed. I'm not in pain ... there are no antibiotics ...as far as I know, I'm hemodynamically stable ...why am I still here?"

"We will be able to rest if this goof shuts up!"

Inflating his cuff, she ignores everyone as she waits to record his blood pressure. He watches her face, one eyebrow cocked as she sighs. "Are we waiting for my blood pressure to come up? Is it up? I've been drinking!"

The machine clicks with a result. The nurse's expression drips away, suddenly replaced by a smile as she removes it from his arm. "It's up, let's finish the rest of the bag and I'll talk to the doctors."

Lifting his hands together, he rubs them as he pleads. "Please, I shouldn't even be here and I'm tolerating oral fluids. They need me down there."

The nurse snorts. "Trust me, in your condition they don't want you down there."

He raises his voice as she tries to leave. "But Dr. Y/N is down there and she needs me-

"-I don't want to know about you and Dr. Y/N," she shouts back, brows pressed and arms crossed over her chest. "It's all anyone can talk about around here other than this stupid mass trauma event. I am a nurse and you are my patient, just act like one, please." 

"With all due respect, I am a doctor too-

"No, don't talk to me like that. You trying to intimidate my staff to get discharged will not help your case or your career in the long run. We will remember you as the asshole moaning patient trigger happy on the call bell, now shut up and sit tight, it's for your own sake that you remain here. Let us do our jobs."

"But-

"No buts Kim Taehyung." 

His cheeks turn a watermelon kind of pink as she leaves a wake of laughing patients.

"That will teach ya!"

Another grumpy patient adds. "Never mess with an overtired senior nurse, she might give you a fleet enema!"

"He looks like the type to enjoy it."

"You're very right Riley, he does look a little anal."

"George, you need to whisper, you could hurt his feelings."

"I doubt me calling him anal would've rectum haha, get it, rectum because it sounds like wrecked him."

The nurse stomps back into the quad, "All of you, shut up and go to sleep or I'll give you all fleet enemas."

The room falls into an awkward silence before Riley whispers to George. "Maybe she's the one who enjoys them." Taehyung rolls his eyes before falling back into his sheets.

It really was going to be a long night.