Topic: What a tangled suture we weave

Spider Savaris

Date: 2009-03-12 10:39 EST
Emergency Room lobby, Riverview Clinic. 12 March, 2300 hrs

The drow managed to shake one last yawn out of his system as he left the physicians' locker room. The white coat was a standard hand-me-down from hospital supply, seeing that he had left his somewhere else, in another time. Nothing bearing his namesake across either breast. Then again, when scrubs were the usual attire of the department you worked in, stitching was more handy when it was in a patient, not your garments.

The nurses at the front desk settled into their chairs, scrub doctors running to their positions as the "ball buster" shift was about to begin. It was still just before the weekend. Maybe his first night would prove to be nice and-

"We've got one here!" The racket sounded as the paramedics wheeled in the gurney echoed through the lobby. Spider, happening to be in the right place at the wrong time, closed the distance and led the gurney through. "What's the case?" The drow asked.

"11 year old male, possible compound fracture in his left leg. Mother says she was getting him ready for bed when he wandered onto the second-floor balcony of their house. He climbed over the railing and fell onto the street below, right in front of an oncoming carriage. Horse got spooked and stomped on his leg." Spider nodded and looked down at the child. Several packs were around his left leg, one or two of them already having blood threatening to leak through them.

"Too risky to transfer him to one of our beds, we'll have to treat him first in this one." The drow seized an empty exam room and curtained it off. A quick wash of hands before he slipped on a pair of exam gloves, moving down to the child's injury. The packs were carefully moved away, revealing a bone tapering off to a broken jagged point, sticking through the middle of the ventral portion of the leg. "That's a compound fracture alright....upper portion of bone protruding out, large in size.....looks like his tibia, cross-section fracture through the middle of it. This bruise, though..." He referred to the vaguely horseshoe-shaped dark blue mark up closer to the knee. "It's not where the protrusion is located. Kid must've done the initial fracture when he fell off the balcony. The horse stomp probably what forced the loose portion through.....Nurse! Wheel in the x-ray. We need a better look at the damage below before we open his leg up."

Spider Savaris

Date: 2009-03-18 23:12 EST
Emergency Room OR 4, Riverview Clinic. 12 March, 2310 hrs

"Hmmm..." He traced a finger around the fractured bone, now viewable on the machine's viewscreen. "Just as I suspected. The good news is that the upper tibia is still attached to the knee cartilage. We should be able to move the fracture back into place and reanneal the two halves. Is the anesthetic ready?"

"Yes doctor." The nurse nodded. "50cc of lidocaine. We also have general on hand if the procedure requires the boy to go unconscious."

"Only if this operation is extremely out of procedure. Let's hope it stays textbook." The drow motioned to the surgical technician on call, blue latex replacing ebony around his digits. "We'll need to make a large enough incision to flex the upper tibia back into the cavity. Scalpel." The instrument was placed in his hands and drawn down a three-inch length of the leg. Inside for all the room to see was the lower end of the leg bone, still in the place it was grown into.

"Forceps." The curved tool was slid over the exposed tibia. Carefully, the drow let his wrist become loose, flexing the bone back into its home. "There...it's back where it should be. Let's make sure it stays that way. Clamp." Pulling the splintered ends closer to one another, he then picked up the annealing gel set out earlier and dabbed it over the point of breakage, like a sculptor smoothing out the knicks in an unfired pot. The clamp was removed and the ends held true to one another. "That'll be a couple weeks, but the bone marrow will take care of that. Sutures." The thread was weaved under and around the epidermis, sealing both the incision and the injury shut. "Vitals?"

"Pulse is 70, BP 115 over 80, doctor."

"Nurse, transport him to post-op and fit him for a sling. Overnight observation. The day doctor will probably fit him for a cast tomorrow." A sigh escaped him as he stripped off his gloves, tucking one inside the other before dropping them into the biohazard receptacle. He strolled on back out to make the necessary notes to the charts, but his hand didn't even get a chance to reach for a pen.

"32-year-old female!" The paramedic called out as Spider and the staff members present circled around the gurney. "She was complaining of pains to her lower right abdomen when we arrived. Her pulse was 90 when we found her; it's now at 120. She also coughed up bile on her way over, but we were able to keep her throat clear with suction."

"Miss?" Spider's hands carefully reached for the addressed region, lightly tapping. "Does it hurt when I-" The woman's cry at the motion of fingertips cut off his question. Not that he had to ask anymore.

"Appendicitis. Bile indicates possible rupturing....she requires immediate extraction of her appendix. Prep her..." He was about to ask her to grab a physician when a question popped up in his mind. "Just who is on staff tonight?"

"Besides the nursing and technical staff" You."

"Wait....where's the rest of the surgical staff?"

"We have one currently down with the flu, another on vacation, and our residents are attending a seminar out of town this weekend."

Well....he thought. This wasn't in the brochure, that's for sure. "Right....wheel her to operating room 2 and prep her. Get a trach kit ready as well. I don't trust her airway not shutting down again during the operation..."

Star Runner

Date: 2009-03-19 11:51 EST
Irukans don't really sleep, nor do they dream. It had to do with the fact that Irukans, much like the terrestrial dolphins which they resembled, their breathing response was completely voluntary. They had to actually think to take a breath, and that meant that the brain could not fully subsume into sleep. However, their brains needed just as much flushing as any other species that required sleep. What this meant is that only one half of an Irukan's brain was 'asleep' at any time they rested. Tonight, the part of Star Runner that was awake was working on paperwork.

She was floating in the waters of her quarters aboard the Ambrosia, the hospital ship in orbit of Rhydin. Before her were multiple holographic screens made of focused and echoing soundwaves projected from emitters in the walls. Star used her sonar to interact with the display, making notations to a patient case file here, adding final touch-ups to an implant design there.

Star's personal dataspace was hooked into the Riverview computer network below, and that was when the ship's AI flagged a particular patient entry, a new display echoing in front of everything else. The staff rotation at the Clinic was lacking any surgeons aside for the ER doc Spider, and an appendicitis case had just been logged as prepping for surgery. Thankfully all the nurses at Riverview had been trained to log basic details on every patient that came through the doors, and the file had been sifted by the Ambrosia for Star's attention.

Still, it took almost ten seconds before Star fully became aware of the significance of the alert, and by that time the other half of her brain was wide awake. "Abyss....I need to remind rotation staff that I *am* a surgeon too! Ambrosia, prep the Mobius link for transit." A confirming sonar pulse reached her as she was donning her usual harness, as well as the bulkier surgial rig. The rig fit over her back and sides, and was fitted with multiple robotic arms and surgical implements, and all of it was protected by an energy field to keep the surfaces sterile.

When she was 'dressed', Star swam up to the door and out into the corridor, righting herself as the gravity flipped. Diving into the aquatic tubes that ran through the ship, she easily moved with the current that flowed aft to the Mobius bay. Already the platform was energized, and the monitor showing the plantside platform showed that the rings were already in place and awaiting transport. Swimming into place, she listened as the rings closed and the whine of energy built to the pitch that almost made her skull ache, right before the transit gate opened. For the space of time transit took, two points in space kilometers apart suddenly became one and the same. The event horizon of the Mobius gate connected the ship and clinic's platforms as Star rode the percieved tunnel.

The rings were parting the moment her platform touched down, and she was through them the moment she could fit, racing for the ER and OR 2. She hit the doors with her beak roughly three minutes from the time she first got the alert on this case.

Star Runner looked around the room, sounding the area with a pulse of sonar to see who was already there, "Where's Spider and what?s the patient's status?"