Back to Normal?

Month 9 Day 16

1531 Hours

MacGregor

Drake’s office door was open, and he heard the patient coming before he ever saw her. “Ow. Ow. Ow.” From the sounds of it, every step is painful, but what happened? Should have known this quiet period after shore leave wouldn’t last long. Not with her aboard, anyway.

Then he saw that certain redhead stop in the sick bay doorway and carefully lean against the wall to take a deep breath. “Okay, I made it this far. I’m not sure I can get any further.”

Drake got up and got as far as his office doorway, but Beth was already there, already asking, “What’s the problem?”

“I hurt,” Mac stated. “My hips, my thighs, my knees, my left ankle, my shoulders... ugh, even my neck! It all hurts!”

“What have you been doing that suddenly you’re a mass of pain?”

“Sleeping!” the redhead declared, and then clarified. “Trying to sleep. My bed hates me, keeps dumping me out, and my floor is even harder now than it was before shore leave! I’ll bet I’m a mass of bruises, and I think I may have twisted that ankle once when it got caught in the blankets as I fell.”

“Let’s see if we can get you to this first exam table,” Beth suggested, offering an arm to help support the other woman. She caught sight of Drake in his doorway and asked, “Well? Are you coming?”

“Right behind you,” he stated, stepping forward. He watched as Beth lowered the bed to its lowest setting, and Mac very gingerly sat down. “Don’t lay down,” he told her.

“Not on my back,” she told him. “Nor my sides. Sitting is bad enough.”

“Okay, you said your shoulders, hips, thighs, knees and one ankle?”

“Mm, probably should have said upper arms, because that’s where I landed, when I landed that far up.”

“Let’s take a look there, first.” He carefully raised one loose sleeve up to rest on her shoulder, and could see a dark smudge forming on the back of her arm, just below the shoulder. She had similar coloration on the other arm, now that Beth had raised that sleeve too. And one elbow was developing some color, too. “How many times did you fall?”

“I wasn’t keeping track,” she returned. “I was just trying to sleep. Maybe a dozen. Or more. I started feeling like I should have just stayed on Weight Station C.”

“You already worked out today?”

“No, I didn’t have a spotter. But I had a really busy night, trying to process all that mail that’s been piling up. One item was a letter from Kevin, my cousin, who I don’t hear from very often, so on top of being really tired, I got homesick. So I went to the gym and spent some time just sitting in Gaelund gravity. Which made me even more tired, so I went home and went to bed.”

“How did you ever get through the Academy if you kept falling out of bed every night?” Beth asked.

“I didn’t fall out of bed at the Academy,” was the answer. “I didn’t start that until after I got here, to the Fireball.”

“Well, it must have made it difficult to enjoy your shore leave,” Drake observed.

“No, I didn’t do it on shore leave, either,” she answered. “Oh, the first couple nights were a little rough; I was startled awake a few times. Don’t know why. But after the first couple nights, I slept fine. I had really hoped I had gotten over whatever was causing me to sleep so poorly!”

“Yes, that would be nice, even if we still didn’t know what causes this problem for you,” Beth sympathized.

“Did you take a nap before you reported for work last night?”

“Ahh, no,” Mac admitted. “I was excited to get back, spent the evening working on my Yukosk dictionary. Della had to pull me away from it.”

Della didn’t have a date? No, not going to ask that. None of my business.

“I was going to work on it again this evening,” Mac went on. “But once I realized how much pain I was in, I knew I needed to get here and let you medicals patch me back together.”

“Lay down-“ Drake began.

“Do I have to?”

“On your stomach,” he finished.

“Thank you. That will be much easier.” She slowly rose to her feet, turned around, and lowered herself to the bed again, laying on her stomach.

Drake turned to Beth. “Wrap the ankle, drape an ice blanket over her. Half an hour on, half an hour off. If she feels like it, she can use the computer when she’s not under the blanket.”

“Thank you, Mac,” the redhead told him. “Any chance I could get some supper? Um, breakfast?”

“I’ll speak to Bugalu in the messhall and have him bring you something. Can you hook up with your computer from here, or should I send for Oakhurst to help?”

“No, computers make sense. I won’t have any problems with that.”

“Good. Are you scheduled to work tonight?”

“Ye-e-es,” she answered uncertainly.

“I think you’ll be able to,” he reassured her. “But I’m going to tell Dr Davis that if you don’t feel you can do it by 2200 hours, she’s to notify engineering that you’re in sick bay.”

She sighed in resignation. “Okay.”

Beth was back with Nurse Karu, who carried the heavy ice blanket. While Beth wrapped Mac’s ankle, Drake helped Karu drape the blanket over Mac’s back and turned it on.

“Oh, that’s already cold,” Mac stated.

Karu giggled. “It’s supposed to be.”

“Smaller ice packs take time to make an impression.”

“It’s assumed that if you need the broad coverage of an ice blanket, you need it cold right away,” Drake told his patient. “I’m glad you came in to get this taken care of as quickly as you did. Not like the last bruise of yours I had to treat.”

“It’s the way you treated the last one, without giving me grief over what I’d done, that brought me in this time. Well, plus the fact I could hardly function, with so many parts of me in pain.”

“Just try to relax and let my old fashioned medicine do its job.”

“Okay. But don’t forget to tell Bugs to bring me some food.”

“I won’t forget,” he promised. As they walked out of the examination room, Beth turned on some quiet music to help the patient relax.