Scars Deeper than Skin

Posted on Tue Jun 25th, 2013 @ 9:59am by Lieutenant Commander Joseph Thompson & Lieutenant Ophelia Lysander

Mission: Episode 1.2 - "A Friend in Need..."
Location: Sickbay, USS Yorktown
Timeline: MD02, 0950

[[USS Yorktown, Sickbay, MD02, 0950]]


Sickbay was all but deserted, with just Ophelia and a lone nurse manning an otherwise empty facility. That was generally seen as a good thing in the medical profession, and Ophelia didn’t particularly mind the quiet. Humming softly to herself, she stood at the central workstation idly going through their inventory, though she knew that she was just killing time. With the help of Dr. Haelen and the rest of the medical staff, Sickbay ran like a well-oiled machine, but it never hurt to keep an eye on things.

Nurse Chelsea (PNC) walked past with a tray of instruments in hand, doing a little reorganizing while there was a lull. “You seem especially happy today, Dr. Lysander,” she commented, giving her superior a bemused smile as she passed by. “Any particular reason?”

Ophelia supposed it was the humming that gave her away. “A day off does wonders for one’s mental and physical well-being,” she smiled, referring to the daytrip she’d recently taken with Hazel to Cardassia Prime. It really had been surprisingly rejuvenating, and she thought it might have been thanks in part to the time she and Hazel had spent with Lieutenant Commander Thompson. His excellent timing and sharp eye had averted a potential disaster when Hazel had rather uncharacteristically taken advantage of her mother’s distraction and made a run for it, and his intervention had then led to a pleasant conversation and a very interesting Cardassian dining experience.

And speaking of Joe, Ophelia noted that he was due to arrive at any moment. Efficient doctor that she tried to be, she’d used the opportunity of their friendly lunch meeting to suggest that he finally visit Sickbay for his mandatory physical exam. He’d graciously acquiesced, though Ophelia couldn’t help but suspect it was largely due to the fact that she’d offered to share some of her scheduled holodeck time with him. Everyone loved time on the holodeck, after all, and she wasn’t above the occasional act of bribery if it meant getting crewmembers to Sickbay.

As if on cue, the doors hissed open and Joe himself strode into Sickbay. "Morning, Doctor," the Security Chief said pleasantly. "I've come for my required poke-and-prod session. Think I'll survive?" Like many former marines, Joe was ingrained with a dislike of Sickbays; after all, who wanted to be stuck on a biobed instead of out on the front lines. Joe knew, however, that it was checkups like this that even let him be "on the front lines", so he took them with good humor. Besides, he thought, it'll give me a chance to see a new holodeck program later.

Smiling in greeting, Ophelia fought the urge to roll her eyes good-naturedly. She had to at least partially maintain some of her inherited Vulcan stoicism, she thought wryly. “Oh, somehow I think you’ll come out unscathed,” she replied, briefly turning her back on Joe to retrieve an obliging PADD. As she pulled up his medical profile, she turned back to him with her doctor’s demeanor fully in place. “Why don’t you pick a biobed and take a seat. We’ll get through this as quickly and painlessly as possible, I promise.”

"Sure, sure," Joe said as he headed for a biobed. "That's what they all say. Then there's the running and screaming." He grinned as he sat on the biobed. "How's Hazel doing, by the way?" The little girl had been quite sweet yesterday, even if the sight of her had brought a familiar pang of pain to Joe's heart.

“Hazel’s wonderful,” Ophelia smiled, moving to stand beside Joe. “She hasn’t stopped talking about the Cardassian birds, though. She informed me very seriously that she would like ‘the funny red one with the purple smudges’ for her next birthday.” Thank goodness her birthday was far enough away that she’d likely forget about the bird by then. Somehow she didn't think their Betazoid cat would look the other way with a bird sharing their quarters. “You have quite the colorful medical history, Lieutenant Commander Thomas,” Ophelia noted after a beat, still perusing the PADD.

"Comes with the territory, I guess," Joe said with a shrug. "Can't go through a war without getting some injury. I'm sure the shrinks have fun whenever they get to pull me in for their evals." He twisted his lip wryly. He had a lot of memories to go with those medical entries, especially the more intensive ones attached to his service record. Not that I'm uselessly nostalgic for them, he thought. I could have done without the chest and back injuries. "At least with modern medicine I managed to survive some of them that I otherwise wouldn't," he said out loud.

Ophelia nodded, in full agreement. “Based on what I’m reading in your file, you must have had an excellent team of doctors on your side. These aren’t insubstantial injuries,” she mused. She’d want to have a look at those old injuries later in the exam, but first she decided to start with the usual questions. “Now, has anything changed since your last medical exam? Any illness or injury that you didn’t treat or report?”

"Nope," Joe said promptly. "No illnesses, a couple minor abrasions that I took care of right away." Of course, Joe's idea of "minor" wasn't necessarily the same as Ophelia's, but the end result was the same; every injury had been taken care of in a timely manner.

Reaching for her trusty tricorder, Ophelia nodded again. “You should really let the good people of Sickbay treat those, Commander, even if they’re minor. At the very least, it would give us something to do on slower days,” she said with a quiet laugh. As she popped the hand scanner free from her tricorder, she asked, “Is there any history of illness in your family that your file doesn’t reflect?”

"None that I can recall," Joe said, which with his memory was as good as saying absolutely none. "I'm sure all your fancy equipment here can be better used to treat people who really need it, though. I have plenty of medical training for my needs." Unlike his former CO, Joe hadn't dabbled in the medical field through actual medic training. He had, though, gotten his fair share of training and experience in enough first aid to support those long missions out on his own. "Besides, with Hazel's new bird you'll have plenty of things to do." He winked and grinned.

This time Ophelia did roll her eyes, laughing as she did so. “Don’t even say that,” she jokingly admonished. The doctor began to run the hand scanner over Joe, keeping up a stream of conversation all the while. “As my Grandfather Jones always said, if you say something enough, it’s bound to come true. I don’t mind birds in the least, but I don’t want to mend my daughter’s broken heart when that bird is inevitably eaten by the cat.” As she began to review the results filtered onto the tricorder’s screen, she paused a moment to smile at Joe. “You know, she’s even considering naming her dream bird Joe. I think you must have made an impression on her yesterday.”

Joe was mildly surprised. He knew how fast little girls could form attachments, but he hadn't thought a few hours on Cardassia would lead to a bird being named after him. "I'm sure her dream bird resembles me greatly," he said with a laugh and a touch of irony. "After all, I'm so blatantly colorful."

Ophelia couldn’t help but laugh quietly along with him. “Personally, I can’t really picture you in hues of scarlet and violet, but maybe Hazel feels differently.” Returning her attention to the tricorder, she hummed in approval as she finished reviewing the results. “You really are the healthy one, aren’t you. Everything I’m seeing here tells me that you’re the picture of good health."

"I should hope so," Joe said. "I do try hard to stay healthy. I'm not sure I'd be able to say that if I turned up looking red and purple all over, though."

Ophelia chuckled as she entered a few brief notes into her PADD. “As someone who works in the field of medicine, I can tell you that stranger things have been known to happen. Now,” she continued, her tone of voice becoming more businesslike again, “your file notes that you experienced serious injuries to your back and chest before your transfer to Starfleet. Do either ever give you trouble? Aches, pains, irritation from the scarring—anything like that?”

Joe shook his head. "A bit of phantom pain sometimes, but my doctors did a good job," he said. "I won't go so far as to say that I don't even know they're there, but I certainly don't feel any problems from them."

Nodding, Ophelia notated as much on the PADD. “I’d like to have a look at them, if you don’t mind. The scars, that is,” she said, lowering the PADD again. “I trust that your doctors did an excellent job, but so long as you’re under my care, I’d like to at least see for myself that they’ve healed properly.”

"Sure," Joe said. He slipped off his uniform and undertunic, revealing a well-toned upper body. On his upper left arm, the tattoo of a wolf head spoke of his time with the Marines aboard the Wolfhound; a small scar was visible on his chest, matched by a slightly different scar on his lower back.

Neither of the scars appeared to be especially remarkable to the doctor, and a quick scan with her tricorder revealed nothing out of the ordinary, just as Ophelia had hoped and expected. Satisfied, she shuffled the tricorder aside again to add her final notes to her PADD. “You must have been fairly young when you fought in the war,” she remarked softly, frowning slightly. Joe was only a few years older than herself, and if the injury to his back had occurred in 2375 as his file indicated, he would have barely been into his early twenties. It seemed almost too young to her, though she knew that plenty of her fellow Starfleet officers had participated in the Dominion War when they were even younger than that.

"I suppose so," Joe acknowledged, thinking back. "A lot of us were. I joined the Marines right out of high school, and I got deployed shortly after that. There was a lot of perceived glory to be had in fighting a war, nobly protecting the galaxy..." He trailed off, sobering. Young as he was, young as they all were, the war left its mark on all of them. Shaking his head as if to clear it, Joe gave a grim smile. "I'd like to think that our efforts made it so that others didn't have to experience that at such a young age."

The smile that Ophelia gave him in return was sad, but she hoped Joe recognized that it was one of understanding, not pity. “I have no doubt that they did. And no matter what your experiences were, the fact of the matter is that you made a difference,” she said sincerely. “I was too young to do anything myself when the war started, though I wanted to. My mother was a nurse, and I saw how she helped save life after life as casualties were sent to our starbase. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a doctor, so I could help anyone at anytime, and I’d never feel useless when help was needed again.”

"Well, I've got to say you probably chose the better path," Joe admitted. "Helping people who are hurt weighs a lot less on your conscience than doing the hurting." He offered a wry grin. "Not that I'm saying I could ever choose that path. Give me a weapon and a clear line of sight to a target - that's my arena." As casually as he spoke on the subject, he floated between being greatly troubled and not bothered at all by his violent history. He wasn't trying to "hide his sensitive side" or whatever the shrinks liked to say; he just had the ability to get a job done while he was doing it, then worry about conscience later. Most of what kept him going was the necessary belief that his targets really were as bad as he'd been told.

"Well," Joe said suddenly, adopting a light tone to steer the conversation away from the painful areas it might head towards. "Can I put my shirt back on or do you want to keep looking?"

For the second time that day, Ophelia rolled her eyes as she laughed. Surely that was a record for her. “By all means, Commander Thompson, please cover up,” she said, hiding a smirk. As amused as she was by his lighthearted banter, the doctor couldn’t help but linger on what he had said moments before. Joe was a master of deflection, she was quickly learning. She could see real pain in his eyes whenever he talked about his past, but he had a habit of changing the topic so quickly and with such easygoing humor that it was almost too easy to forget what was said. Part of her wanted to hear more, to pursue the topic further, but she knew she shouldn’t pry, especially since they were still getting to know one another.

As she reattached the hand scanner to her tricorder, she gave Joe an encouraging smile. “Congratulations, Commander. You survived your medical eval,” she said, pocketing her tricorder. “Unless, of course, you have any final questions or concerns.”

"Just one," Joe said as he finished straightening his uniform top. He put on an intensely serious face. "An officer approached me recently with an offer to share her holodeck time with me. In your professional opinion, do you think that I am in good enough health to safely try one of her programs?"

Ophelia hummed to herself and turned her attention back to the PADD, making a great show of quickly perusing his medical file again. “Well, it all depends on the officer and her choice of programs, really. But if you’re careful enough, I don’t think you have much to worry about.” The doctor lowered the PADD again and gave Joe a look that broke the façade of over serious physician. “I suppose that means we’re still on the holodeck tomorrow, then?”

"Definitely," Joe said, letting a smile return to his face. "I'm looking forward to it."

“Excellent,” Ophelia smiled. She stood aside to let Joe hop off the biobed. “Officially speaking, then, you have a clean bill of health and are free to go.”

"Thank you kindly, Doctor," Joe said. "I guess I'll see you tomorrow." With a smile and a polite nod towards the nurse as he passed, Joe headed out, survivor of yet another medical evaluation.

OFF

A Post By:

Lieutenant Ophelia Lysander
CMO, USS Yorktown

Lieutenant Commander Joe Thompson
CS/TO, USS Yorktown