Visiting a new sickbay

Posted on Sat Mar 4th, 2017 @ 8:44am by Captain Enalia Telvan & Lieutenant Ian Dodger

Mission: Refit Rondo
Location: Sickbay

It had been a few days since the Hera had been made completely livable again during the refit and Enalia Telvan had heard a rumor that the new sickbay had been finished and her new Chief Medical Officer was aboard and in that new sickbay.

That's what brought her to the entryway of sickbay, only to be blocked by a crate of some sort with Breen markings on it. She wasn't sure what it was, but it was bound to have something to do with cold things, judging by the frost on the top.

"Doctor Dodger?" Enalia called, moving around the crate towards the office area. "If you have a moment, I'd like to discuss a few things with you."

Ian looked up from what he was doing to the looming form of his new captain, setting down the tricorder he'd been fiddling with and rolling down his sleeve over the biosynthetic arm he'd been fitted with soon after coming aboard the Hera. "Oh, hello Captain... Telvan." He said, ducking his head and standing to greet her. He shouldn't be on duty so soon after losing his arm, but he'd insisted. For many men, the feeling of doing something constructive was a mechanism for coping with loss. "I think I can scrounge up more than a moment for you. What brings you here?"

Enalia smiled politely and took a seat across from Ian, relaxing into it in that special way that experienced captains always seemed to do. She hadn't wanted to disturb him - heck, she didn't even expect him to be aboard yet. But here he was, already diving into his work. "Mostly just a social visit. I wanted to see how you were doing. Is your new arm working well? Are you settling in ok? What's in that Breen crate? That sort of thing."

Sitting back down again, Ian pressed his wrist PaDD to his sleeve, the backing of the device making a tiny hiss as it adhered itself to the fabric like a commbadge. "I'm settling in, as you could probably tell." Because of the added clutter, no doubt. He spared a glance down at his arm and gave a minute shrug. "It itches. Rather terribly, like I've been rubbing it with mosquitoes and poison ivy." He had stayed aboard the Katana until his staff and the few patients they'd been brought had been evacuated to the Hera, but the real reason he'd been wounded was that he'd then run back to his quarters to save his cat. "But it functions as well as the biological arm did. Now it's just a matter of calibrating the neural interface to get rid of the static. As for the crate? That's a, um... Soda jerk with integrated ice cream maker." His cheeks took on a slightly lavender hue as he confessed this -- his hobbies always seemed to come off a little childish to career fleet officers.

Enalia's eyebrows raised in surprise at the mention of ice cream. "Then I think you'll be a very popular person aboard the Hera. When you get a chance, look over Aewia Larani's file. She was involved in an Intel operation that went south and we had to rescue her from a Romulan prison. Unfortunately, they practically lobotomized her prior to her rescue so she often acts like she's six years old. And she loves ice cream."

"Well, we all scream for ice cream, or so they say." Ian said his brows knitting a little as the captain told him about Aewia. "I can give it a look." Naturally, he felt compassion for the woman, even if the thought of having an adult be childish in his presence was disconcerting. He got along fairly well with children in small doses, but always felt a little baffled about how to relate to them. Probably the side-effect of having never had much interaction with them, even when he was a child himself. "And, of course, she's welcome to all the ice cream and soda she wants when I get everything set up." Secretly, Ian was just slightly paranoid that the systems failure that had destroyed the Katana had been the fault of his previous ice-cream maker, and as such, had bought from a different vendor this time. But there was no escaping Breen cryonics -- thy were the best at chilling ice cream to just the proper temperature for creaminess without too many ice crystals. "There have been great strides made in the field of neurological repair using cultured stem cells in a biomimetic gel, but repairing the brain doesn't bring back everything that's been lost." He murmured regretfully.

"Indeed it doesn't. She's regained some of her telepathy, but her mind and most of her memories are gone. To make matters worse, her parents passed on while she was incarcerated and her only living relative is aboard the Hera." Enalia thought about it a moment and glanced back to the Breen crate. "The auxiliary medbay office should have enough room and a good adjustable power tap if you want to convert it into a cafe of a sort. I can ask the refit team to lend a hand as well. Might as well use their industrial replicators for new furniture while we can."

"That's unfortunate indeed. Is... she considered to be mentally competent to make decisions on her own behalf, or is she a ward of her relative?" Ian asked, trying to be as delicate as possible when wording it. Being the ship's doctor, the question was an important one. Although medical propriety was no longer the fuel of a cottage industry of parasitic lawyers, Starfleet did maintain a rigorous medical ethics review process; one he did not wish to run foul of.

"She's well enough off to live on her own but her sister has to confirm all of the more important decisions. She has moments of clarity where I think she understands more than you or I about things, but most of the time, she's like a twelve year old girl." Enalia explained. "And I think her empathy is returning thanks to a clever procedure Starfleet Intel recommended. What it's taken to rehabilitate her borders on outright genetic manipulation, but the specialists in your department as well as your predecessor have been careful to go slow and only try to bring her up to the level she was at prior to her mission."

Ian frowned a little more and nodded slightly, his mind rattling off the sorts of treatments that were effective in cases of traumatic brain injuries. The Vulcans, in particular, had psionic treatments that could restore knowledge, but not personal experiences. Betazoids probably could, too, but he tried to maintain a distance between himself and psionics. "Yes, and Intel has made some rather cutting edge technology available to this ship, stuff that I have had to sign confidentiality oaths to be able to access." Which scared him shitless considering that it could mean a significant term in a penal colony, or another twenty years in Starfleet if they weren't happy with his use of it. "But I don't wish to treat any patient unless there is a need and a desire for treatment."

"I completely agree," Enalia replied. "And yeah, we have a lot of new tech at our fingertips. We could grow a Khan Singh or a Julian Bashiir in your labs with all that we have at our disposal. Scary thought, isn't it?"

"Oh, not quite so scary. Anyone can do it with our present level of non-spook technology." Ian mused with a smirk. "Except that most Federation cultures have had similar experiences to Earth's Eugenics Wars, and most of them know better." He tapped at his wrist PaDD a few times to refer to some texts he had stored. "And every medical school worth its salt spends at least a semester drilling into your head the evils that unethical medical practices can do to a world."

"Can most cultures do it in about two weeks?" Enalia asked bluntly, before suddenly standing. "Sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything." Turning to leave, she reached into her pocket for a small black box. "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that you're out of uniform. Congrats, Lieutenant." With that, she set the box on the doctor's desk and again made ready to leave. "If you'll excuse me, I have some inspections to look over."

Ian shrugged. Was the captain bragging about that ability or cautioning about its potential misuse? He wasn't sure, but he had no intention of misusing the ship's resources to create some sort of hybrid monstrosity. He looked at the box she set on his desk and picked it up, opening it up with a deft thumb. "Did I offend you, captain, with my "spook" comment?" he asked curiously. "I didn't mean it as a pejorative."

The full Lieutenant pips inside the box twinkled out at the Doctor as Enalia replied. "I'm very hard to offend and if you had, I wouldn't have just given you that. Spooks and spook pilots are a breed apart and we tend to keep to ourselves I sometimes forget there are still normal people in this world."