Wall Padding

Posted on Tue Jun 15th, 2021 @ 8:27am by Lieutenant Avira zh'Kenarh M.D. & Chief Petty Officer Manishie Karalo

Mission: Mission 4 - Eden
Location: Sickbay, Deck E
Timeline: Day 166 17:30
Tags: monthly challenge
1318 words - 2.6 OF Standard Post Measure

The doors to the sickbay closed behind the last nurse departing, like so many evenings leaving the Andorian Chief Medical Officer alone in the Atlantis' sickbay. The lights were low to simulate the evening, keeping everyone's biological clocks aligned with duty hours. It helped people be more productive during the day, happier as well. It was a policy implemented by the morale officer. She looked over at the morgue, remembering the autopsy she had to conduct on the aforementioned Morale officer. A knot started to form in her stomach and there was a sensation of helplessness starting to wash over her.

Avira shook her head a bit, she had only been referring to him as the victim and the morale officer. It wasn't really fair to him and his legacy to talk about him like that but if you're cutting into someone it was never a great idea to be emotionally invested. It had crossed her mind as some of the officers on the ship had sought to reach out to her more. With the loss of her old boss, she was the only real capable surgeon left. She would be expected to operate on every single one of them, and knowing the universe it wasn't unrealistic to think that at some point during their journey back to Earth she'd be forced to. The idea of this alone sent a shiver coursing over her spine.

Knowing all of that, the diagnosis from her genetic profile had really hit hard. It put her on a clock to either find a cure or to train her successor. Ten years, by her best approximation. Back on Andor, there would be medicine to prevent rapid deterioration, it would still result in quite a bit of physical pain and deterioration of her fine motor skills but it was livable. Out here, in the void, no treatments to be found, ten years. Those were her prospects. It started to dawn on her that this was a hereditary disease and suddenly quite a few things started to make sense about her home situation. Her father must've been in a lot of pain, even while medicated.

She quickly grabbed the PADDs on her desk, and started to put them away frantically. She tried to focus on where to put what, putting everything back in the right place. Hiding the PADDs as she was trying to hide the pain that was bubbling to the surface. She didn't want to think about her home, about her youth, about her father. She didn't need to feel sorry for him, or to try and justify the way he had treated her and her siblings. That wasn't going to happen. Not today, probably not ever. She had made the decision to keep her distance from her father, to stay disconnected from the youth that had formed her. As she was pushing the PADDs in their designated drawers she dropped one, and she felt a wave of anger boil up in her that she hadn't felt in a long time.

It all stemmed from a feeling that it wasn't fair, that the universe was a cruel mistress. It had not a single care for your feelings or ambitions, it flung you 100 years from home without a second thought. It left you stranded without a familiar face, a debilitating neural disease, and then expected you to go around cutting into your dead colleagues to try and determine what made them dead. She noticed that she was squeezing down hard on the last PADD she had picked up, her knuckles a light blue from the pressure, the screen distorted by her application of force. She saw the name at the top of the autopsy report, displayed in the top left corner right above a picture of Aurelius Davis, Lieutenant, 30 years of age.

And that was it.

In a violent outburst, she threw the PADD across the room right into the wall next to a biobed. The recycled materials that the PADD was comprised of didn't take kindly to that level of abuse, some of the outside casing shattering, the glass of the screen immediately bursting into a thousand tiny pieces.

"Is this a bad time?" Manishie stood just inside the double doors of sickbay, that quietly closed behind her with a soothing hiss. This had been the second time that she had walked in on the doctor while she was clearly in distress. She couldn't even imagine the pressures of being the Chief Medical Officer on a vessel like this. Starfleet had recruited her on the basis of her experience on Earth as a police detective and the Enterprise had proven that those kinds of skills were needed a lot more than they had at first anticipated going into the stars. But to be a doctor on an alien vessel and then forced into the position of leading the department, she could forgive some of the emotional outbursts she had witnessed from the Andorian.

Avira her antennae stood up straight as she took a deep breath in through her nose, "sometimes equipment just needs to learn it's place." She walked around the desk and ignored the mess she had just made. She did her best to appear more relaxed, as if her feelings and anger had just passed by, but that of course wasn't the case, and her antennae more than anything else gave away her still agitated state.

"I can come back later," Manishie offered in a soft-spoken voice, a conscious attempt to come across as non-threatening and friendly.

"No need, what can I help you with? Your ankle giving you trouble? Something about the report?" Avira tried her best to divert the attention away from her emotional state, from the thoughts that had spiralled into the angry outburst, and focus it on the reason for Manishi's visit.

Manishie nodded her head, "I had a couple of questions." She was holding on to her own PADD but after seeing what Avira did to the one she most recently held she was a little hesitant to hand it over. She had painstakingly personalized it, making sure everything was in exactly the right place and accessible to her quickly and easily. She felt it was a good idea to focus on one thing at a time and walked up to the point of impact of the PADD, she saw a tiny dent in the bulkhead and her mouth fell open slightly, there must've been a lot of force behind that throw, "let me help you." She knelt down and started to gather the large pieces of glass.

"Leave it, I'll clean it up in a minute, I don't want you to cut yourself," Avira stepped closer and squatted down herself, now picking up the casing of the back of the PADD. It was probably unusable. She'd make sure to get it back to Ops or Engineering of whoever fixed those sort of things. They couldn't be wasting resources, even with the ship they were shadowing at the moment.

Manishe looked around and found a tray to put it on, to help carry it out to the recycling unit, "it's no problem, plus if I get cut I couldn't be in a better place for it to happen." She looked over at the Andorian doctor and gave a meek smile.

Avira placed the tray with broken pieces on the nearby available biobed, "So, questions?" She hoped Manishe would just not pry and leave her to handle her emotions as she seemed fit.

"Yeah, just a couple of things I'd like clarified, some new developments, that sort of stuff," Manishi explained as she followed Avira back to the desk where the Chief Medical Officer sat down behind a pile of medical reports, "and then, maybe we can do something not murder related?" She gave a warm and friendly smile that she hoped was inviting for the doctor.

 

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