A Morning in Sickbay (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 06 Aug 2012 @ 10:03pm by Commander Andreus Kohl & Lieutenant Kiri Cho

2,297 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 01 - Project Sienna
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 4, Sickbay
Timeline: MD 08 - 0155 hours

[ON]

There were bodies atop every single biobed lining the bulkheads in Sickbay. For now, for just right now, every one of them was a living, breathing, heart-pumping body. It probably couldn't last, though, because there wasn't a doctor to go around for every biobed. At least, not anymore. Ensign Andreus Kohl stepped away from one such biobed. He giggled faintly at something the Emergency Medical Hologram had said in seriousness. That something wasn't worth repeating, because it wasn't funny outside the context of Kohl's sleep-deprived giddiness. Kohl hadn't been prepared to be assigned to Beta shift, nor to be up half the night with patients on his first day aboard. It was eating away at his professionalism, to say the least.

Kohl padded towards the cabinets near Sickbay's entrance. He was able to fake a sense of purposefulness to his strides, but he was taking them more slowly than he had been doing an hour ago, or even half an hour ago. He wanted to get away, but there were still patients being brought in only now -- stubborn crewmen who had been fulfilling their duties while their guts were falling out. And so the only solace Kohl could find was the few seconds of quality time he could take alone with the steri-field generator. There was one built into the counter top, and he ran his hands through the cleansing radiation field. He had done away with surgical gowns some time ago, and his uniform jacket was mercifully clean of any blood, except for right around the cuffs of his sleeves. There was blood on his hands, but, fortunately, it was only literal blood. Not metaphorical.

Kohl looked down to the carpeted deck beside the cabinets. That was where he had crouched when the Klingons had invaded Sickbay. Right there. He had fully expected to die there. He had fully expected to become a murderer there too. Unexpectedly, neither had happened. Kohl didn't know what to think about that. He did the only thing he could do, the thing he was good at, and he looked away. He turned his head to look in the opposite direction and he saw a young Trill walk in from the passageway. She was shorter and slighter than Kohl, her hair very straight and very dark against her pale skin.

"Ensign. Hi. Uhm," Kohl said to her, as if he didn't know what he was supposed to say. For a moment, he couldn't remember his triage protocols and he blinked quite a lot. Earnestly, Kohl asked, "Can I help you?"

Kiri was in a similar daze, she had only two or three hours of sleep in the last two days, that included the battle and her attempts to work since then. Only when things had finally died down into a numb calm did Kiri even consider trying to find herself help. Now her shift was over she slowly found her way to sickbay, nursing her left arm. It had been exposed to a considerable electrical discharge that had blistered and burned the skin from her finger tips to shoulder. Since she had been using it despite that most of the blisters had popped, weeping down her arm and sticking the fabric of her uniform to her. She'd forced her way through the pain, making things far worse for herself, it seemed like she'd lost some motor control in the last few hours.

Deep bags under her bloodshot eyes almost looked like bruises, her skin had taken on a similar bluish-green tint. When she first heard the words the came as if she was under water, barely audible. Acting as if she was stunned she looked at him, not quite focusing for a few seconds before a rough idea of what he might have said came to her. Having not had anything to drink Kiri's throat was bone dry as she tried to reply, "I, um," Gulping hard almost pushed tears out of her eyes, "Do you know if, there is a medical officer that isn't too busy?"

"I, in fact, am a medical officer," Kohl said, "Nurse Practitioner Andreus Kohl." He flattened a clean palm against his chest by way of introduction. All the while, he studied the irregular movements of Kiri's eyes. Without even looking, Kohl told her, "I can't offer you a biobed that isn't too busy, but you're on your feet. We should be able to manage. Can you tell me where it hurts, Ensign?"

Again Kiri took longer than normal to answer, her brain stalling on the way, trying and failing to meet his eyes. She didn't realise how hard standing still had become, forcing her to take a step closer to him, "I have, electrical burns, on my left arm." Most of the damage was hidden under her chard uniform, only her blistered and raw hand was exposed as an obvious injury when she moved her arm.

Kohl put a hand behind Kiri's right shoulder, and he guided her to the other side of the cabinets. There was some clear floor-space there, where he had crouched to wait for the Klingons. Standing there, they would be well within reach of medical supplies. "Firstly, how long ago did you burn your arm?" Kohl asked, mounting concern in his voice. "Secondly, have you taken any medication for the pain yet?"

Kiri was too tired to shy away from it touch, it still send a shiver through her body though. Being lead was fine, being touched by strangers wasn't, whoever they were, it made her uncomfortable. Her answer came slowly still, "Around four hours ago," The second question actually made her arm hurt quite a bit. Shock and being too focused on her job had stopped her even really looking at her arm. Her brain had numbed the pain to protect itself, now there was no need, it started to flood back. Wincing she added, "I haven't taken anything."

Reaching for the upper cabinet, Kohl tapped the square contact on the panel and the panel slid aside. He prepared a hypospray with bicaridine for the pain, and another with corophizine to fight any infection contracted during the last four hours. "Do you know if you have any allergies to medication?" Kohl asked. He looked away from his work only long enough to see if Kiri would make eye contact with him.

Kiri shifted the weight on her feet, doing her best to stand still, "Sulphonamide, I can have a cytotoxic reaction." Her eyes met his for a moment, still holding her arm she watched as he worked. If she was more careful this wouldn't have happened, "Sorry for the trouble."

For a heartbeat, Kohl eyed her puzzlingly because of that statement. He dismissed it, though, by saying, "Oh, you're no trouble at all." As he applied each of the hyposprays to her neck, Kohl said, "I wouldn't say I'm thankful for your burn, but if you weren't here right now, Starfleet wouldn't let me come aboard this marvellous starship. There'd be no need for me. I'm here for you." Kohl took up a pair of scissors from the cabinet and, without warning, he began to cut into Kiri's left sleeve above the shoulder. He cut into her uniform until he could see where the burn tapered to an end. Kohl said, "I want you to tell me when the pain goes away."

Trying to put what he said together Kiri looked puzzled, after a while it made sense later at the time she was lost. What took her off guard was the cutting of her uniform. While she knew that it would likely happen she wasn't expecting it yet, nor was she comfortable that it was a male doing it. All that was taken away though she saw the blackened and oozing shell of her skin. Her eyes were wide and fixated and with each beat of her heart the pain seemed to throb less and less. Her focus was on the damage to herself though. She'd never been hurt this bad before, it was scary. Finally the pain gave way to itching, like needles under her skin. Eyes still firmly on her arm she answered very quietly, "It's mostly gone."

"You may want to look away before this next part," Kohl said, cautioning her. He could see her physiological signs of discomfort at his treatment method, but he paused only a couple of seconds to let her decide. That was all he could offer her. She could complain about his methods later, if necessary, after her burn was all gone. Having a patient --having his own patient to treat rather than a surgeon to assist-- it gave Kohl a second wind. Once the left sleeve was completely separated from Kiri's uniform, Kohl firmly rolled it down the length of her arm. At first, it came away easily, but then he was ripping it out from where it had fused into her burned skin. Kohl hoped Kiri hadn't been bravely lying about those pain killers, because he couldn't stop now.

As he removed the sleeve the rest of the way down her arm, Kohl advised Kiri, "I'm going to inject nanites into your left arm. They are specialized nanosurgeons programmed to assess and repair any damage to the nerves in your arm. Do you have any objections?"

Kiri wasn't able to look away, she was transfixed in dull horror at it. While there wasn't much pain, she could feel the hard skin moving against the extremely tender layers below. It was like watching someone peel a banana, or skin a rabbit. It didn't seem as if it was actually her arm, that it was someone else's that she shared nerves with. If it had been her normal skin, she'd be trying to hide it by now. Her eyes didn't flinch and barely blinked as she watched, still struggling to stay standing on the spot. When the question came it worried her quite a bit. Because of where she had grown up Kiri was wary of technology at the same time as her personal embrace of it. Speaking in a soft rasp she answered, "How long, will they be inside me?"

"About--" Kohl started to say, but then he shook his head. He gave Kiri a once-over with a medical tricorder, and wished he had an entire sensor-cluster to study her better. "I can't say with any certainty. A few hours, maybe? It depends on the extent of your nerve damage, and when we have medics available to remove them from your body." He stepped away only a couple of paces to access a locked cabinet. From inside, he retrieved a prepared hypospray filled with nanosurgeons. Using his tricorder, Kohl initialized the nanosurgeons and he began a diagnostic on them. When he first set to his work, he asked Kiri, "What are you called, Ensign? Tell me about what you do aboard Galileo..."

If it was just a few hours, that would be okay. It was the idea of having something else living inside her with no control over it was a scary one. Right now it seemed scarier than having a scarred arm for the rest of her life. Her weight shifting from leg to leg, really she wanted to sit down but she wasn't in control of this situation. Instead she answered his questions, her breath feeling funny on her now exposed flesh, "Ensign Cho, Science Officer and Sensor Specialist." Her whole body starting to go rather numb, she was starting to feel rather weak, standing up was getting harder. Forcing her eyes open wider she turned to Kohl, "Is it bad?"

"Bad is too relative a term to be meaningful," Kohl said in something of non-response. "If you keep hydrated, indulge in long nights of sleep, and re-condition your hand, your body should recover on its own. I'm just going to make it happen faster." Kohl smiled at her, when he pressed the hypospray to her burned forearm and he injected her with the nanites. Noting Kiri's uneasy posture, he stepped away long enough to steal a chair from the Chief Medical Officer's office and he rolled it over for Kiri. "What does a sensor specialist actually do?" he asked to distract her from any worry about her arm.

Kiri felt a little more at easy with his words, medicine other than a short course in first aid at the academy and her biology studies that tended to be cell sized and smaller was an unknown to her. Very gratefully she took the seat as her legs started to feel like jelly. Her breath was starting to get shorter, as if she'd been running rather than walking. Still she tried to answer his question, "I identify sensor readings that the computer cannot, as well as interpret, its readings and discover new ones." Now she looked down at her chest, rather confused over it. Her breathing, matched with how tired she was. Looking to Kohl she seemed rather scared, "Some thing's wrong."

"What do you--" Kohl started to ask, but he was interrupted by an alarm on his tricorder. The operational controls for the nanites were pushed aside on the tricorder's display when it alerted him to Kiri's already-low blood pressure dropping dramatically, while her pulse was speeding up. That with the low body temperature, and it was looking like hypovolemic shock. Kohl cast a glance over his shoulder, but the ICU was still packed. He took Kiri's good hand to help her up and lead her away. "I'm going to find you that biobed after all!"


[OFF]

To be continued!


ENS Kiri Cho
Science Officer/Sensor Specialist
USS Galileo

ENS Andreus Kohl
Nurse
USS Galileo

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