After a few weeks, Justin returned to see his doctor for a checkup. His ribs were healing as expected and the pain had gone away almost completely. The pain in his ribs had gone, at least. On a couple of occasions, however, he'd been hammered with a sudden and excruciating headache, worse than he'd ever experienced before. He was outside in the bright sunshine when it happened and he felt like throwing up and dying all at once.
"It sounds like you've had your first migraine," his doctor said.
On the bright side, it was also time to remove his nose splint. Justin certainly looked forward to that, but Dr. Booth made a strange face when he peeled off the tape. "Hmm, what's that?"
"What is it? Is something wrong?"
"Can you breathe in and out for me?"
Justin did as he was told.
"Nothing hurts?"
"Nope. Feels fine," Justin said.
"It's just a bit of a dent."
"What kind of dent?"
"If it doesn't hurt or cause you trouble, then it's probably some cosmetic scarring. Perhaps it will fade in time. Could have been worse, huh?"
"I guess," Justin said. "So, when can I go back to work?"
Justin described his work at the Copper Island Historic Mines. Dr. Booth paid special attention to all of the climbing, hauling, carrying, and tinkering with electrical systems, all the close spaces and heavy loads and tall ladders. Never mind that Justin was a supervisor now and could boss the other guys around to do most of it.
Dr. Booth looked solemn and shook his head slowly. "I'm sorry, you can't return to that kind of work for six months."
"Six months?"
"Even if your body was ready, which it isn’t quite yet, you wouldn't be approved for that kind of work so soon after a head injury and coma. The sudden headaches are worrying. We need to take some time and see how it goes."
Justin felt stunned, much like that time he got zapped on a live wire that Cooper had left connected and told nobody about. How unfair that someone could continue to work while being an ignorant dickhead, but not after a coma.
"But, in the meantime," Dr. Booth continued, "I don't see why you couldn't return to some work by December. Something else, I mean."
"Like, an office job."
"Sure, something like that. But I'm worried about those migraines. Let's test your cognitive function. Do you like chess?"
Justin's cognitive function passed the test just fine, which was a good sign for his brain. Perhaps the headaches were due to sinus damage then. Br. Booth still wanted to observe him for a while longer before he gave an all clear.
Stephanie waited in the lobby to take Justin home since he was not approved to drive a car yet, either.
"How'd it go?"
"So, I guess I got a dent in my face," he said to her, feeling damaged and broken and mostly useless. He'd asked her twice now to marry him, but they hadn't ever gotten as far as exchanging their wedding vows—in sickness and in health—so she would be within her rights to cut her losses and run. He was damaged goods.
"Does it hurt?"
"No, it's okay," he said. "Nothing to worry about. Just ugly, I guess."
"It's not ugly. It reminds me of what you did for me and my children," she said. "It kind of turns me on a little."
"Oh," he said and laughed. "I didn't expect that, but I'll take it."
Justin read a bedtime story to his girls in the dark that night, hoping they wouldn't notice the dent in his face. He had promised them that everything would be completely fixed, good as new, better than ever. They had nothing to worry about.
Like he told Stephanie they had nothing to worry about.
"They went down okay?"
"Yeah, fast asleep. Time to party?"
She giggled. "I love hearing you read to them," she said. "That turns me on, too."
"Hey, I can finally breathe through my nose again. Do you wanna make out?"
"Yes, please," Stephanie said.
He pulled her in for a long, long kiss. This was what he never anticipated he would miss the most when his nose was broken—not smelling, not sleeping with his mouth closed—kissing. Kissing without taking breaks to pause and breathe through his mouth. He wanted her lips and her tongue and her teeth. He wanted to swallow her whole.
But it's a scientific fact that babies have a barometer to tell when their parents want to spend time with each other. After only three minutes, Benji started to cry.
Stephanie exhaled a defeated sigh. "I'll get him."
They hadn't forgotten how intense this stage was with the girls. Soon enough, he would be sleeping through the night, but now he was just six weeks old and six-week-olds cried.
Justin flipped through some late night comedy shows. Eventually, he noticed the stack of mail on the table. Bills. A lot of them.
"Oh, the hospital bills came," Stephanie said.
Justin took a deep breath. "Did you open it?"
"Yeah, I did."
"What's the damage?"
"It was mostly covered by insurance. Thankfully, because whoa—good thing we're in a low tax bracket."
Stephanie still hadn't said a number.
He picked up the bill and looked himself. "Holy shit."
She was right, it was a good thing they were in a low tax bracket. They only owed five percent for a copay, but that five percent was huge. Fourteen days in the hospital, nine of those in the ICU.
"The price you pay for not dying," he said.
"Well, I'm glad you didn't die," she said. "I would have paid a million dollars if I had to."
Stephanie bounced the baby and Justin added and subtracted numbers in his head. Any other time, it would have been no problem. But they'd just paid her lawyer for his work on several different cases. They'd just paid the hospital for a complicated childbirth. They'd just paid their mortgage, too. Stress bottled up inside Justin's brain. He should have told his doctor that there was nothing wrong with his brain apart from stress. Plop a stack of medical bills on your coffee table and you'd get a migraine, too!
"The price you pay for not dying," he said.
"Well, I'm glad you didn't die," she said. "I would have paid a million dollars if I had to."
Stephanie bounced the baby and Justin added and subtracted numbers in his head. Any other time, it would have been no problem. But they'd just paid her lawyer for his work on several different cases. They'd just paid the hospital for a complicated childbirth. They'd just paid their mortgage, too. Stress bottled up inside Justin's brain. He should have told his doctor that there was nothing wrong with his brain apart from stress. Plop a stack of medical bills on your coffee table and you'd get a migraine, too!
"But it's okay," Stephanie said. "You know, when you were asleep, Bryson told me to tell you that he wanted to pay the bill when it came."
"No, we don't need him to pay our bills for us."
"Why?"
"Steph, I’m not taking money from Bryson. I mean, it's nice of him to offer. I appreciate it. That much money is probably nothing to him, a drop in the ocean. Bryson probably spends that much money on his toilet paper."
"So why not let him pay it?"
"Because I never married Keri to get at her money. That's not what I was doing."
"I don't think he assumes that at all. Did Madison say that?"
"She didn't have to say it. The point is, he helped me enough. I'm twenty-six fucking years old and I don't need everybody's parents bailing me out all the time."
"I'm sorry, Steph, I didn’t mean it like a bad thing."
"You made it sound bad."
"It was different when you did it."
"Different how?"
"Because you needed it. Because you were in a hard situation and you needed help."
"And you're not in a hard situation? You don't need any help?"
He didn't say anything. He saw himself digging a hole, and he didn't want to offend her any more than he already had.
"Anyway," she continued. "I didn’t take money from my parents, I borrowed it. And we paid them back. You said everything was okay at the appointment today. What aren't you telling me?"
"I can't go back to my job," he told her.
"I know, not yet."
"Not for six months. But that might as well be never because they'll replace me by then. They'll have to. I wasn't even there a year yet, they're not obligated to hold it for me. That Adventure Mining Experience was my idea, and now I won't even get to work on it, much less lead it. I don't know what I'm going to do next."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"No, I'm sorry, Steph. I know it would be so much easier to ask Bryson for the money, but I can't do it. Not unless we lost every last cent we had and sold off everything we owned and maxed out all of our credit cards and really needed some help or else we’d die. Then I’d ask, because I’m not going to put my family out on the street. But we’re not there yet. I don’t think."
"So, you can't work and you won't take money from Bryson, either? I don't want you to ask. But you can let me take care of you, because we're a team, right? We take care of each other, right?"
She stared at him, waiting for only one right answer.
"Yes, darling," he said with a smirk.
She nodded. "Okay then. Sharon keeps calling me about how busy she is. She says that I can come back to work whenever I'm ready. She says there's so much work to do with the holidays coming, and she got some new catering contracts, too. There's plenty of work. We wouldn’t need to borrow from Bryson."
"But you're still on maternity leave. You should get to finish your maternity leave."
"But you're still on maternity leave. You should get to finish your maternity leave."
"I’ll be okay if you’re here with Benji. I won’t be sad. He can have some special time with his daddy. I'll pump some milk for him, other moms do it all the time. Will you let me take care of our family for a little while?"
This was different from borrowing from their parents, maybe. He still didn't feel great about it, but Stephanie would be his wife some day. As soon as legally possible. They were supposed to take care of each other. It was natural.
"Okay," Justin said. "Only for a little while though."
"Until you're all better and not a day before," she said. "Now come here."
This was different from borrowing from their parents, maybe. He still didn't feel great about it, but Stephanie would be his wife some day. As soon as legally possible. They were supposed to take care of each other. It was natural.
"Okay," Justin said. "Only for a little while though."
"Until you're all better and not a day before," she said. "Now come here."
He laid on her chest, his ear pressed to her heartbeat. She kissed the top of his head where that migraine never quite materialized. Like magic. The baby breathed steadily behind them and did not cry.
"I'm happy," she said. "Are you happy?"
"You're the only thing I have going for me, Steffie. You and the kids. Everything else kind of sucks."
"You thought you'd have your own company, a million dollars, and a yacht by the time you were twenty-six?"
"Yeah, kind of. And maybe a vintage Ferrari 250 convertible in red, too."
He felt an inaudible soft laugh rise in her chest. "Well, don't give up just yet," she said. "You're still twenty-six for seven more months."
—
notes: Justin doesn’t know it yet, but this story is much more gameplay inspired than it might seem. In a few different ways. It’s a gameplay opportunity that I’m seizing based on their current story situation. Justin’s knowledge aspiration requires him to reach level 3 of 3 different careers. Time to begin something new! He just doesn’t know what that could be just yet. ;)
He is disappointed though. For one, now is not a good time to have to go job searching! For two, he did grow to enjoy that job at the mines. The historical and mechanical parts of the work really interested him, and he liked his boss, and he enjoyed becoming a supervisor so he could boss around that asshole Cooper.
Also, I will now share the results of Justin's injury roll, which was rolled at the time of his injury.
So, as his roll of fate has decreed, those scars on his face may lighten over time, but they will never completely go away.
Could have been much worse, of course.
Then, the migraines!
I actually made this trait with another sim in mind, so I may not make him keep this one forever. He's just my guinea pig for now.
You really do devise the most diabolical ways to torture your sims-- migraines are heartless!! This was a pretty heavy dose of reality. The part that hit me the most was Justin not wanting to take Bryson's offer and expecting to lose his job. It is very realistic for a man his age to feel that way and yet I feel so worried for their financial future. I'm sure he'll find a way to support them though, he's such a go getter, and Stephanie is awesome with her job too.
ReplyDeleteI am bad, lol! But here's the thing—I know so many people in real life who suffer from terrible migraines (and other assorted things), and these sims never deal with anything like that. TS4 sickness is a joke, and the negative traits are few and far between. I'm thinking about another trait about grieving, because that's another thing that sims don't experience—long term grief. Ugh. After the 2-day moodlet is gone, it's like it never happened at all.
DeleteJustin is prideful, but he is also very responsible. He has five people to take care of now, including himself. I have to sympathize with him, though, being the kind of person in real life who DOES NOT ASK FOR HELP, lol! It must be easier to be the other kind of person who does ask for help. Being a parent changes things though. Stubborn pride only goes so far when you think about what will happen to your kids. Justin won't let anything bad happen to his family, even if that means sucking up his pride and asking for help at some point. We'll see.
Serious question: How is Stephanie doing physically? After *I* had a whole PPH/endometritis/blood transfusion fiasco, I definitely could not have been working at a bed and breakfast 6 weeks postpartum. And I spend the first month doing NOTHING. I wasn't driving back and forth and sitting in hard hospital chairs for hours on end on behalf of my wounded fiance.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we need a post for Stephanie's 6-week checkup wherein Inara tells her to slow the fuck down before her uterus falls out? :p
Granted, this is 2084, not 2016, but you CANNOT tell me that women's health will have advanced faster than plastic surgery for men's poor widdle faces. Telepathic aliens I can believe but not THAT.
*I spent
DeleteBRB, must wear the cone of shame for that typo.
Sojourner, the current political client doesn't bode well for any progress in women's health even in 60 years. Hopefully the trend and the legacy of this current administration won't last a decade but your comment just really sparked my anxiety about women's health.
DeleteI KNOW RIGHT. I have one kid who's on the autism spectrum and one who's female and apparently a really large number of people think that neither of them deserves comprehensive and affordable health coverage. Three cheers for modern civilization.
DeleteGRRRR :-/ grimace
DeleteOr I should just opt out of the Justin/Steffi storyline for a while on the grounds that I have enough PTSD triggers as is. :\ On the plus side, I am highly amused by the prospect of explaining Sims blogs to my therapist (who is old enough that his doctoral dissertation was saved on punch cards).
ReplyDeleteI did the best internet research I could afford to spend doing on a blog story, and what I found was that preeclampsia typically resolves itself within a couple weeks after the baby is born. She was treated for infection, and the story went that her hemorrhaging took a good turn. If you recall, after her birth, her doctor said this: "Your family are worried, but you didn't almost die. It was very serious and it could have taken a bad turn. We're glad that it took a good turn instead."
Delete(Full disclosure: I had a bit of hemorrhaging with my son's birth, too, but it didn't progress much further than a lot of uterine massage and very vigilant nurses. So it can take a good turn sometimes. It is possible. I'm very sorry that your recovery didn't go as easy. I suppose I ought to add "complicated childbirth" to my triggers list!)
Another thing: Stephanie is high on a kind of induced euphoria right now, since Justin didn't die and after being told they were certainly done with Jeremiah. She is just happy right now, and that state of mind is driving her. Will it last? Maybe, maybe not. Will she burn out? Maybe, maybe not. Will it all hit her hard six months down the line? Maybe, maybe not. Will her uterus fall out? I'm not planning it, but who knows, lol! ;)
So, considering a positive postpartum recovery, I don't think there is anything unheard of about a woman returning to work at 6 weeks. In fact, I think that's about the going rate in the USA at the moment. Not ideal, perhaps, but certainly not impossible. And, although I didn't declare so in the story because it was getting long enough already, she won't be dumped into it doing 60-hour weeks right at the start. It might be another 4 weeks before she's working even full time.
Storytelling is about making decisions and enacting the most realistic consequences for those choices. I can make anything happen, really. I could have decided, way back when, that Stephanie never succeeded in leaving Jeremiah and that he took her away to South Carolina (that actually happened in one of the earlier drafts of this story). I could have decided that Stephanie died in childbirth. I could have decided that Jeremiah actually killed Justin in that fight, or that he succeeded in abducting Willow and drove off with her to Mexico and they never saw her again. I could have decided to give Stephanie a difficult recovery at the same time that Justin is having a difficult recovery. But I decided that those things wouldn't happen, that other things would happen instead, and now this is the road we're on.
I still have more decisions to make about the hardships they'll face and how they'll deal with them, and whether they'll succeed or fail.
It ends up coming down to what story I want to tell and how I want it to end. This particular road leads us in a direction that I want these characters to go, and I believe that it's the truest road they could be on according to their personalities and experiences. I could certainly consider taking them down another road, but it would end up somewhere else, and do I want to do that?
I am sorry if this storyline is difficult for you. I understand if you need to take a break. Please take care of yourself. And I am also amused (and somewhat delighted) at the idea of you talking to your therapist about my story. :D
Next, on Postcards from Sierra Nova, "will Stephanie Nova's uterus fall out??" These comments grabbed my heart but that part made me laugh.
ReplyDeleteSojourner, I hear you. The thing about these sims stories, and Laura, yours in particular, is that in creating them and in reading and identifying with the characters, they come from who we are or they become part of who we are. I also had hemorrhaging with my youngest daughter, and the midwife told me not to try to have any more children, but it had an outcome like Laura's, and was better with uterine massaging by the next day. (Thankfully!)
The state of postpartum care and family leave is another one of my soapboxes right now so I'll end this comment without going on a rant.
However, Stephanie and Justin have been in life-threatening crisis mode, and having gone through that myself with traumatic death, I will say my experience was that you do whatever you have to do and then there is fall-out later, which, if you are lucky, doesn't involve the detachment of major organs. In my case, we are still working through fall out 11 years later, but I am grateful and have hope, and for that, I can't express how happy I am to be in that place, yet respectful that others have different experiences. I pray that this comment is helpful and at the least, not disrespectful to your experience, Sojourner.
Well, I got maybe 4 hours of sleep last night thanks to a kid with a sinus infection (I feel for him but why can't he get the kind of sick that makes him sleep more???) so I can't engage coherently with this topic today.
ReplyDeleteI think we can find common ground in agreeing that fundal massage is the pits, though.
Losing sleep is the pits too. I hope your son is better soon and you all get some rest!
DeleteOh, clever way to work his LTW into the story (it's too confusing for me to call them aspirations, lol). TS3 has a similar one but it's always struck me as one that might be difficult to write into a story. But this really works.
ReplyDeleteLucky roll for that injury - Justin should be grateful to be alive, really! But hopefully he isn't tortured by your migraine trait forever either. ;)
Onto the story part of this. I have to admit, I really wish Justin could have swallowed his pride and taken the money from Bryson. Bryson wouldn't miss it and Justin refusing it did kind of put Stephanie in a position where she has no choice but to go back to work. I feel like she'd do it whether she was truly ready or not, both because she has to and because she wants to support Justin. :\ So that really worries me.
It's fair enough to think of them as LTWs. They are sort of both. And that one is very difficult to make sense of in most stories. Except, like Justin's situation, when someone is pushed out of a job by no fault of their own, but even that is hard to write in unless it happens naturally. Also, as a knowledge aspiration, I could see it working for someone who was very curious but also very indecisive and sort of non-committal. I have a book character who would suit it really well because she keeps changing her mind about what she wants to do with her life.
DeleteJustin really does not feel good about letting Stephanie go back to work. He never intended to force that idea—he was opposed to it and he told her so, although not very forcefully because she seemed insistent upon it. If she's insisting that she can do it and wants to do it, how can he put his foot down and say no? He's especially careful about being too controlling with her, considering she's been through that before with Jeremiah. He doesn't want to be that kind of guy. But he'll worry about her, of course. And if she even feels the least bit burnt out or tired, he'd ask her to stop and they'd find another way.
Honestly though, part of the blame belongs to Sharon, too. There is a bit of pressure there because Sharon really needs Stephanie back, at least part time, or else she'd have to find someone else. She's not demanding it or anything. Obviously Stephanie can say no if she wants to. But saying no means that Sharon needs to fill the role with someone else. Sharon has big plans in the next few months and she needs someone. Steph and Justin have their personal traumas to deal with, but the rest of the world keeps turning, you know?
Sharon is truly not a terrible person, though, so I have confidence that Stephanie will be taken care of and only asked to do what nobody else can do instead. I've mentioned that Sharon has another girl now to help out with the cleaning and basic hotel stuff. But there are a lot of gourmet dishes on the menu that nobody but Stephanie can make, not even Sharon. In fact, I'm really at a shortage of good cooks everywhere in my towns because most of my sims never get past level 3 in cooking, much less into the gourmet track!
So Stephanie has that on her mind, too.
Then they might end up getting help from Bryson anyway, because he obviously knows that nobody brought him that bill to pay—or else he will know it in a few weeks' time. I have to wonder how he'll feel about not being asked for it?
Whew, long reply, lol! Thank you for reading and giving me so much to think about! :)
Laura, you should open a chef's school so you can have a few sims who can cook well!
DeleteMy useless sims have TWO universities to attend to study culinary arts if they wanted to, lol! So I have Selena out in Sierra Nova/Catalina at uni for culinary arts right now, and then poor Sophie Phoenix in Potomac Heights who is 65 now and not allowed to retire. Ashley Deppiesse and Janie Trudgen, obviously, but they own their own places. Aliyah can cook a little, but she already has a job. April, too, but she's doing her own thing with her ice cream shop.
DeleteMaybe my schools should sponsor a chefs camp in the summer to get the younger kids interested before they decide on other things. I can't see the job prospects for skilled chefs ever becoming truly saturated in my towns since new restaurants and markets pop up all the time.
I love that we have so many different skills in TS4. It makes their talents truly unique when they do excel at something, it makes them all feel different from each other, but it also means that talented and skilled sims are very rare.
That's a good way to look at it... I do really appreciate the wide variety of skills in TS4 and I hadn't really considered how it adds to a sims' uniqueness. I am excited about the parenting skill and the character values or traits they say a child can get through being parented. That is cool.
DeleteI'm glad that everything will be okay for Justin in the long run, even though he can't work and will need to find a new job. It's funny that it is actually gameplay inspired! Poor guy. Sucks for migraines on top of it all, but fits with a head injury too. Ugh on the hospital bills, I can understand why Justin doesn't want the financial help, but it puts everyone in a hard situation.
ReplyDelete