Halloween. The one night a year you can actually make use of your talents in special effects makeup and not have people look at you like you’re insane. So of course you go all out every year. You’ve dressed up as a mermaid and given yourself scales and gills, you’ve dressed up deer and given yourself antlers. This year you were tired of choosing the cute costumes.

You never join your friends at the Halloween parties to bring someone home, most years you’re the designated driver, and just because all your friends are going cute and sexy does not mean that you have to. So this year you go all out with gore.

You manage to thrift a wedding outfit for cheap and you spend weeks making it look torn and bloodied to look like you’ve been stabbed. Hours before the party you start your makeup. First you make yourself look perfect, like you were actually getting married then you spend the next few hours messing yourself up accordingly. You mess your hair up so it looks like it was just messed up in a scuffle, you splatter blood to look like it was flung off a knife, and you add a few bruises here and there to look like defensive injuries.

It looked amazing, positively disgusting. You were proud of your work and your friends' reactions when you picked them up made you feel even better. The party went well, it always does. You watch over your friends to make sure they don’t do anything particularly stupid while mingling and making conversation. When your friends were finally ready to leave it was two in the morning, it was dark, and they were absolutely wrecked.

They all stumbled to your car - clearly incapable of walking in a straight line - but they did make it in and buckled up entirely unscathed. Maybe that is why you didn’t bother to watch where you were walking. You, the entirely sober friend, managed to trip over a headstone decoration. Your friends were rightfully very concerned but you didn’t trust them to make it home by themselves so you drove them all.

It took a while, almost an hour. At first you thought you were fine. Your wrist didn’t hurt that bad and you were sure after icing it you’d be right but as rain. You couldn’t be more wrong. As soon as you got back to your car after walking your last friend inside your wrist started the throb. You had just been ignoring it very well while you had other people to worry about.

It doesn’t take you long to figure out that your wrist had somehow swollen to almost double its original size without you noticing so you were certain it was broken. You planned on going home, taking off most of your makeup, and changing before going to the hospital. Those plans were quickly ignored when just holding your steering wheel made you feel like cutting off your own hand would hurt less.

By the time you got to Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre you were blinking away tears and admittedly a little dizzy. You hadn’t eaten anything since dinner and it’s now past three in the morning. Combining that and the intense pain radiating from your wrist is not great. You stumble into the emergency department, looking and feeling way worse than you actually are.

It’s Halloween, they're busy. You had hoped to slip into the bathroom to try and remove some of the makeup before signing in. Those hopes are squashed when Dr John Shen sees a supposed attempted murder victim stumble in. He rushes over, shouting out orders for a crash cart and for someone to get you on a damn gurney.

“You’ll be okay. Alright? I’ve got you, just stay conscious.” Shen tries to reassure you as you suddenly find yourself laid on your back. He flipped into fix it mode too quickly to notice that your wounds have a few odd seams and that the dried blood is just one or two shades too light.