Post by Admin on Mar 31, 2016 5:53:20 GMT
Bedside Manner-ish
Postby Jocelyn Nidari » Wed Aug 27, 2008 1:58 pm
Bedside Manner-ish
Ensign Jocelyn Nidari
Assistant Medical Officer
"Seventeen stitches," Jocelyn observed as she inspected a particularly nasty gash in Ensign Clark's arm.
"Stitches? What are stitches?" Rosaline, the nurse beside her, asked curiously.
"Stitches are a somewhat archaic method for closing a wound. You take a specially curved needle and a strong type of thread and literally sew each layer of skin closed."
"Hey!" Ensign Clark blanched and pulled his arm out of her grasp. "You aren't sewing my skin together. What sort of twisted medical facility is this?"
"Calm down," Jocelyn said lightly and firmly reclaimed his arm. "I didn't say we were going to use stitches. I was only commenting on how many your arm would need if, in fact, we still practiced such methods."
"Oh," he relaxed somewhat, but still watched her warily.
"They sound horribly painful," Rosaline commented.
"With the right topical numbing application, I'm sure that the patient wouldn't feel much of anything," she replied, reaching for the deep tissue regenerator. "Now staples... those are another matter."
"Staples?"
"You take a special mechanism," she explained over the Ensign's groans, "and literally shoot a 'u' shaped piece of metal into the skin to hold the two sides of the wound together."
"Fascinating," Rosaline mused as she cleaned the wound between passes.
"Yes, but not nearly as interesting as the types of infections that went along with these wounds. Tetanus, for instance... bacterium that develop in wounds and cause painful contractions of striated muscle fiber. Muscles seize violently and the victims are contorted in unnatural ways for long periods of time."
"What those people must have gone through," Rosaline shook her head slightly.
"Those people? What about me?" Ensign Clark whined.
"You'd be doing a lot better if you'd stop moving."
"Do you know that hundreds of years ago people also experienced a type of cellular necrosis?" Jocelyn continued. "Limbs and especially digits were prone to certain types of infections. Infected portions would slowly decay, turning the living tissue black until it died and eventually fell off. You don't see many cases of that anymore."
"I think I'm going to lose my lunch," the engineer groaned, now a sickly shade of green.
"They even sometimes resorted to amputation," she added.
"That seems logical," Rosaline said as she absently pressed a hypo full of anti-nausea medication to their patient's neck. "It would save the life of the patient provided that they excised all of the tainted tissue before the infection could migrate to the bloodstream."
"Amp-amputation? You are going to amputate my arm?" He sounded frantic.
"Of course not," Jocelyn reassured him. "We have more refined methods these days. Mostly. I'd say at least two-percent of patients with wounds like yours leave medical with their limbs intact."
"T-two percen...," he stammered before his eyes rolled back and he fainted.
"Oh dear. That's the third one today," Rosaline remarked as she fanned his face with a data padd.
"Some people just have no sense of humor," Jocelyn sighed. "He didn't even make it to my grisly descriptions of the twelve major plagues of Sol."
"They can't all be perfect," the nurse teased.
"True," she agreed with a slight smirk. "I suppose that when I find the one who can stomach the plagues, I'll have to think of a way to keep him in sickbay permanently."
"We have those on board already," Rosaline said wryly. "They are called doctors."
"Eh… but doctors are so very dull."
"You are a doctor."
"Yes… but I'm also me." Jocelyn grinned at her companion.
"But...," Rosaline trailed off, regarding Jocelyn dubiously. Finally she offered, "I've been assisting you for far too long today, because that made total sense to me."
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Jocelyn Nidari
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