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

"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."

Which was still very, very strange, but he was hardly a medical expert with tactics he did have experience with, in any case. "All right, if you say so..."

Edited 2013-09-07 22:59 (UTC)

"I do say so," Summer snapped, exasperated. She had just saved this woman's life and this... this man was questioning her expertise and training? She was so sick of that, of being constantly questioned. "I earned my degree. I did my residency same as anyone else. I do my job same as anyone else, I am good at my job and frankly you're lucky you got a pathologist, do you have any idea how few people would know what strychnine poisoning looks like?"

Quite a few, actually, but not immediately, not without consulting the books, and the woman might have died.

"I apologize," he said. "I didn't mean to offend, I just...nothing you're doing is familiar to me, and she's my wife." He took a deep breath. Diplomacy. If what she can do works faster, maybe my people could gain from whatever I can learn here. "I apologize again. Do pathologists specialize in poison?"

"No," Summer said. "Autopsies. But we had a rash of poisonings recently and anyway it's a fairly common cause of death."

...autopsies? He stared at her. "...you take apart dead people?"

"Yes?" Summer blinked at him. "How else would you find out how they died?"

"I...that makes sense, it's just...not typically a specialty where I'm from," he finished, well aware of how weak that sounded.

"It's probably a bit more specialized now," Summer said, as kindly as she could manage. "There's a lot of things we know now that we didn't use to." Like the circulatory system, for example.

...future. Am I in the future? How am I in the future?

...on the other hand, apart from that nasty how business, everything made a hell of a lot more sense with that little tidbit.

"And suddenly everything starts to make sense," he managed to get out.

"It takes you like that."

Summer checked on the woman's pulse and found it, reassuringly, slowing down. "I think your wife will be all right," she said. "I wouldn't... take it as read just yet, but she's responding well."

"Oh, thank gods," he said. Very very carefully, he raised the hand he held to his lips. "It was probably meant for me. She...she must have taken the wrong glass..." Though of course she couldn't have known.

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Re: Patient and Spouse: Sorell and Nida