PHD #125: A Chip Off The Old Block
A Chip Off The Old Block
Summary: After surviving a triage ranking of Expectant and recovering from an open skull fracture (twice), Ensign Hathor is released from Medical. Sort of.
Date: 1 July 2041 AE
Related Logs: None
Players:
Bia Davis 
Recovery Room!
A much more quiet area of Medical, this elongated room is also lined with beds. Each is similarly outfitted with privacy curtains as necessary and even the paint on the walls has been lightened in an attempt to help lift spirits. Chairs are readily available all over the place so that visitors can pull one up to talk to the patients during their recovery. Near the entrance, visiting hours are posted with a very conspicuous 'No Smoking' sign.
Post-Holocaust Day: #125

We're beyond the sitting in hospital gowns with the sheets up to our armpits. Davis is standing next to her bed, wearing a flower-print sundress. Essentially a thin robe, but much nicer to look at and somewhat less drafty. It fits better than it did when she first retrieved it last week, as if she'd recovered some of the weight lost to coma starvation and antirads. Not that the any of the medical staff thinks that: they've seen her with pins and needles, thread and measuring tape, ensuring the fit of the dress on her new frame. They've also heard the cursing and stifled sniffles from her as something that once came second nature has become a physical therapy requiring effort and focus.

Still, Ensign Hathor is far and away improved from the Crewman Doe that came in during the attack months ago. Gone is the hair that had mixed with the blood and become a scab over her face by the time the triage category of 'the best surgery is prayer' was able to be looked at. It's replaced with an orange puffball of short, wavey hair just begging for gel to turn into a pixie cut. Her speech is accurate and not slurred, though not quite to its pre-injury speed. Charts and records show motor skills and reflexes are improving apace; there is still much improvement left to be had, but medicine has done all it reasonably can.

So, too, has it been exhausted on her memory loss. Indeed as much as any bullet it could be the cause of it. Neurosurgeons are hardly a dime a dozen, after all. There's only so much forensics that can be done on the matter, and it wouldn't make much of a difference, now, would it?

The patient is standing next to her bed, barefoot and doing light heel raises while reading through a worn out novel. The spine is cracked several times through, but the cover just screams 'bodice-ripper.'

Stabilize and pray — and concentrate the medical resources on those whose dance cards don't arrive pre-signed by Thanatos. And then, when the patient can no longer be described as /lingering/, and is instead, inexplicably, miraculously /recuperating/, return those resources to her. All of it takes long enough for her orangey hair to grow out, be shaved away for a second round of surgery, and begin to grow out again.

"Miss Davis." The warm, lazy drawl of Gracious Bia, Interim CMO. She's been 'interim' longer than Davis has been conscious; she may well be 'interim' until the end of the Cerberus. She answers to many names, though 'Grace' is her preferred, and serves as mother hen and occasional taskmistress to Sickbay. She's striding toward Davis's gurney, coffee-coloured eyes crinkled at the edges with a warm and rather marvelling smile. The Medical Department's short on good news, these days. "I wondered if I might take a moment of your time."

"Your Grace," Davis replies in a friendly chirp. Everybody's name gets its own twist from her, sooner or later, and greeting her like a queen in a play on her name is the doctor's. "Oh, yeah! Um, no problem!" the Ensign says, flicking her finger over the corner of a page. It doesn't matter which corner or which page, each of them seem to have been dog-eared at least once, most of them twice. "I know how this one ends anyway," Davis giggles - or rather titters. It's not good cheer, but nervousness. She turns one way to put the book down on her bed, then twists the other to put it on another part of the bed, but ends up tossing it onto the pillow. "Do you mind if I… ?" The girl asks, gesturing to the mattress.

A slight incline of her head, and a light touch of long, worn fingers to her brow, humour glimmering in her eyes. May it please the patient, O Lords. "Of course not. Here." Grace steps up to the side of the gurney and offers her arm out as a makeshift support bar. As helpful as hospital equipment can be, it never seems to have enough handholds. "You're seeming in fine spirits today, Miss Davis. I'm curious how your headaches have been. Your charts show you've made it a fair few days without needing anything heavy." Sickbay has many headache treatments. Some seem to barely work on a hangnail. Others could make one forget they had an icepick stuck in their forebrain.

The young lady offers a flat smile and only lightly rests her fingers on Bia's forearm. They press a little more firmly as she seats herself, needing the assist more than she realized. "Well, I'll always have an excuse when I get married," Davis says with a playful smirk. "But it's mostly around the… you know." She points to the back of her skull, left side. "Bolts or welds or whatever." After a moment with her eyes closed she decides, "That's more like an ache, but not a proper headache. Those um… I try not to pay attention to it. Just when I'm stressed out-" The Ensign interrupts herself with a roll of her eyes and a little chime of a laugh. "Which is like never in here, I mean, I don't mean to say you're stressing me out!"

"Hain't nothing to apologize for," Grace assures. She doesn't presume to take a seat on the gurney, but she lingers at the edge of it, her hands lightly curled against the lowered sidebars. "It's hard to say for certain when those aches will go away. Sometimes the body's terrible stubborn about remembering old pains. Other times, you wake up one day and it's like it never was." A touch of reassuring smile, there, as if she's certain that's how it will be for the Ensign. "You've been doing so well for yourself this past week that I was wondering if you felt ready to finish your recuperation in the berthings instead of penned in here."

Davis listens to the explanation patiently. However many times she's heard it before, she only remembers half of them still. Nothing between the attack and her most recent surgery is forthcoming to the girl. That may be for the better. The hope that one day things could be 'normal' for her is something she grabs onto with a wishful squeeze of Grace's fingers. Before answering the question, however, she gives pause to mull it over. With eyes upturned and a corner of her lip nipped between her teeth Davis thinks aloud. "Well… I will miss how much privacy I get here." The opposite corner of her mouth is bitten, and her eyes drift to that side of her face as well. "But it kind of smells like an old folks' home here." A brief moment with eyes closed, then she slides onto her feet and claps her hands. "BO and morning breath, here I come!"

"You're still welcome for Friday Night Cookies, Miss Davis, fear you not." It's been a tradition of Grace's for as long as she's been aboard — every Friday night, just before the graveyard shift, she appears with a plate of fresh-baked cookies for the staff — and those patients able to eat them. They've gotten simpler and simpler as the weeks drag on and the galley's ingredients get more and more basic, but they're still there, metaphorical rain or shine. "Just don't let the other pilots on, or I won't even have a plate left by the time they're done rolling through." The wishful squeeze is returned with the firm, warm squeeze of her own, before she steps away to collect a small handful of printouts from her clipboard, and leave them upon the gurney. "If the berthings seem unrestful to you, you're welcome to return here for the rest of your observation, of course. Hain't no shame in that. I've made you a list of suggested exercises and duties, here-" A gesture to the printouts. "-what you can follow. If all goes well, you'll be back on light duty by next weekend."

Cookies: the mere mention of which makes her grin. "Why thank you," Davis replies, looking up to the doctor's eyes. She takes the printouts, giving them a quick flip through. Mostly for social show, she's no speed-reader and never was. "Thank you again, Grace," she says, rolling the papers up into a tube. "I think I'd like to help. With the cookies, I mean. Um, if, you know, there aren't too many cooks in the kitchen," she adds, nipping her lip once more.

It's a lot of information. Lists of exercises rated by difficulty and exertion, lists of possible symptoms and side-effects of said exercises. There's probably a list of lists in there, somewhere. Grace's eyes again crinkle at the edges as she inclines her head in a nod. "I'd love the company, Miss Davis. The Galley's terrible quiet at twenty-two hundred. Hain't been anyone else what might marvel at an entire cargo bay full of sugar before now, neither." She must be joking. Mustn't she? An /entire/ cargo bay? They're massive. "Do you have any questions before I see to your paperwork and send it along to Captain Sitka and Major Hahn?"

With an impish snicker Davis leans in close and stage-whispers, "Maybe I oughtn't, then, we'll be out of sugar in a heartbeat." A quick wink and she's leaning back, looking over the last page of the printout. "I don't believe so, Your Grace. I mean, like, most of them I'd need a prophet for. Will I get better," she says, her canter slowing by degrees and eagerness fading in like measure. "How long will it take. Did everyone I love die, and was it quick." That was a bad idea as it makes her cringe before the words have finished. She holds up a hand for time, grief twisting her fingers as surely as if it had her by the nose. Davis siffs, once, and sets her face right. "I do have one question." Extending a digit to her skull she asks, "Do you still have it?"

It's not until Davis sniffles and recomposes herself that Grace offers out her hand to give the Ensign a gentle squeeze to her near shoulder. Sympathy's a tricky thing to offer, at times. Sometimes all it does is spill more grief out. "Given all you've been through? Hain't no doubt in my mind that you'll be right as rain the very moment you're able. Asclepius hain't one given to see someone through this far and turn aside the last few steps." Another gentle squeeze, before she moves away. "I'm afraid we don't, Miss Davis. It would have been disposed of not long after you first went in to surgery." She avoids such phrases as 'biohazard' and 'incinerated'.

"(Dyammit!)" is hissed in a distinct whisper, the flash of anger unmistakable. It fades with the return of reason, the emotional moment just that: A moment. "At least now I don't have to worry about fading that dye job out, hmm?" Davis offers, making the best of the situation. "Thank you, Doctor. Honestly," and she says it earnestly, setting the papers aside to reach for the other woman's hand with both of hers. "I'm alive, and I shouldn't be. Whatever you did to make that happen, you must have been blessed or possessed by the Lords."

Another gentle squeeze with Grace's warm, worn fingers, eyes full of sympathy and that curious, marvelling warmth. "Hain't nothing we did what you and Asclepius didn't agree on seeing through, first, Miss Davis. But I'm powerful happy to see you so well again. Come you this way, and we'll get your paperwork cleared away." The downside of recuperation — regaining the authority to sign one's own forms.

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