rainbowlounge | The Hospital

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roleplay: open

The Hospital

The hospital is sterile and sprawling, its hallways and patient rooms painted a glaring white. The floor is made of something hard and shining, and the lights are that peculiar kind of flourescent that makes everyone look ill.

The first floor consists of the lobby (painted a sickly green), an emergency room, and several surgery suites, all stocked with cutting-edge, even futuristic, technology and supplies. There is a cafeteria, though the buffet line is empty; the only consumables seem to be stocked in a line of vending machines along one wall. There are no stairs, only elevators, to the upper floors, which all consist of patient rooms: made beds, glazed windows, dying flowers, and the hard plastic orange chairs that are a constant in hospitals.

The whole building smells like antiseptic and death.

((Please mark your healthcare professionals as such, and enjoy!))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Poison? He was lucky, then; there had been a rash of poisonings recently and Summer was familiar with the symptoms of a lot of them.

"Okay," she said, "how long ago did she drink it? And what symptoms does she have?" She was already taking the woman's pulse-- considerably faster than normal but regular, which probably ruled out arsenic and definitely ruled out ethanol and other depressants. She'd thought maybe just a bad batch of wine, but clearly not.

Practical questions--good, good, that cut through the panic. "About...about a half-hour ago? She...she started shaking, she was hurting, I could tell she was hurting, we've been married ten years now." And he was starting to slide into panic again. He took a deep breath, trying to force it back. "I could tell she was hurting."

Edited 2013-09-07 02:12 (UTC)

"Shaking?" Seizures? "Did she vomit at all?"

The woman was beginning to have trouble breathing, so Summer didn't bother to wait for the answer. She turned until she spotted a gurney, then wheeled it over, fast as she could. "Help her up on this, quickly, we have to go to the ER."

Every hospital had an ER. This one would too. She hoped.

ER? What?

"Y-yes, a little," he said. Where were they?

Still, this woman seemed to know what she was doing, and maybe Nida would do better on the moving bed. She was gasping for air now and then she started shaking again.

He held her close, willing the seizures to stop so he could move her and the strange red-haired woman could fix her.

"Strychnine," Summer said, and helped him get the woman onto the bed, then pushed the man gently towards the head of the gurney. "Push," she instructed, and grabbed the front bar, pulling with all her strength. If this hospital made any sense at all the ER would be down and to the... there was a sign, to the left.

He could feel his face draining, but he pushed anyway, because that made as much sense as anything.

Strychnine--he knew that one. He knew several poisons, of course he'd been trained to immunity with the ones where that was possible, only he couldn't think, because Nida...

Yes, yes, strychnine made sense--it made people start shaking and then they died.

"Please don't let her die," he said.

Summer didn't answer; she needed all her breath for the run. Down the hall, to the left, thank goodness they were on the same floor because the elevator would almost certainly take too long. Half an hour... a lot of it would already have been absorbed. This woman needed activated charcoal, anticonvulsants, an IV, intubation...

Intubate first, she decided, breathing was most important. Then the charcoal. Anticonvulsants next, to calm her down, keep her from hurting herself, and then she could worry about liquids. Into the ER and sweeping past the patient rooms, into a surgical unit, and there was a ventilator. Summer brought the gurney up short and jumped for the tube.

What the hell was that?

"What are you doing?" he asked, starting to panic again. Yes, this infirmary was...very strange, full of strange things, and none of them looked like mage-craft, but none of them were familiar either.

And she seemed to know what she was doing but what was she doing, anyway?

Edited 2013-09-07 02:29 (UTC)

"Intubation," Summer said briefly, "helps her breathe, now hush, I need to work."

Shit, she'd have to do the charcoal first or else she couldn't get it past the tube. Charcoal first then, and there it was, well labeled and up front. This hospital must deal with a lot of poisonings. Down her throat it went (thank God she could still swallow) and then the tube followed-- Summer slapped the ventilator's on-switch, and relaxed when the woman chest began to rise and fall, steadily and evenly.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. That's a start. You can talk now, it's less urgent."

Edited 2013-09-07 02:33 (UTC)

"What did you put into her?" he asked, cursing himself that he hadn't been able to intervene before this woman had maybe possibly hurt his beloved wife.

Just because it was less urgent didn't mean Summer could stop working. She went to the cabinet and began a search for intravenous anticonvulsants. "An activated charcoal solution," she said, absently. "And an endotracheal tube."

"Charcoal, to help her breathe?" That made absolutely no sense. And 'activated?' How did one activate charcoal?

Summer glanced over her shoulder at him as if he were an idiot. "Charcoal," she said, slowly, "to absorb the strychnine. The ventilator helps her breathe." Ah, there were a few options-- she grabbed the first one that looked likely and picked up a syringe.

That made a hair more sense than charcoal for breathing. He'd never heard of it for absorbing poison, but charcoal was sometimes used for something involving absorption or filtering and groundwater...

All right. She did know what she was doing, though sticking pipes into Nida still worried him, and gods alone knew what she was doing now. "And the needle?"

"Anticonvulsant." She filled the syringe, tapped it and got rid of the air bubbles, then found a vein in the woman's elbow--thank goodness the woman was so pale, not like the people who lay in the tanning beds all day, but that was a whole other rant-- and administered the drug.

...oh, the man would probably want to know what it did, and if he was silly enough to think charcoal helped with breathing... "It will stop the muscle spasms," she added.

"Oh. Oh, good." The shaking was the worst of watching it, at least now that her eyes weren't flared open in agony. "I...I shouldn't have snapped at you, I apologize, and thank you, for helping us." If the charcoal and whatever the woman was giving Nida to stop the spasms worked the way she said it would...

Well, as alarming as her methods were, diplomacy was clearly called for here.

Edited 2013-09-07 03:04 (UTC)

Summer eyed him curiously, then decided he meant it. "Your apology is accepted," she said, "though not necessary. I'm only doing my--" not her job, her job had no living patients-- "my duty. As a doctor."

Time for the IV now. Just fluids for the moment, though if the seizing didn't stop she could add another drug.

"I...think we were somehow transported very far away," he said, slowly. "I'm completely unfamiliar with your methods. May I take her hand, or will that be in your way?" It killed him to ask, but...well, he had enough experience with doctors to know that it was better to do so anyway.

"You may take that hand," Summer said, and pointed to the arm she hadn't stuck with a needle. "I need to put an IV in and I need her arm for that."

"An IV?" Either another tube, or another needle--probably, if she needed the arm long-term and didn't tell him to just wait a moment, a tube. "What comes from that tube?"

He slipped over to Nida's other side and took her hand, as gently as he could.

"Rehydration liquids," Summer said, catching the correct bag and hanging it on the stand. Explain, her boys reminded her gently in her head, and she went on, "With any luck they will help to flush the poison from her system."

The concept itself made sense, but...

"How can that go through her arm?" he asked, bewildered.

Summer froze in the middle of preparing the needle and stared at him.

"It... it goes through her veins?" she said, hopelessly at a loss. "It... the blood carries... it just does!"

That still made no sense, and he wasn't sure he trusted her to do it if she couldn't explain, like she had the other things. "It can't go in another way?"

"It could," Summer said, and set the IV quickly, before he asked another question like that and destroyed her concentration entirely. "This is quicker."

Re: Patient and Spouse: Sorell and Nida

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Re: Patient and Spouse: Sorell and Nida