Things Past – HOW long since you had a medical?
by Commander Chelsea Dunham
Post Details
Ryan made his way to sickbay after a very long and satisfying rest. Not that he felt like he needed it of course but now in hindsight he did and Chelsea, as always was right. Despite feeling rested however there was one problem niggling away at him that he intended on being seen too it had been left too long. The main doors of sickbay hissed open and he nodded in greeting to the nurses and junior doctors present as he made his way to the office. He walked in and saw Chelsea sat at the desk. "Hi" he said with a smile.
Chelsea smiled back warmly. "Hey" she said looking up and deciding this was the perfect time for a coffee. She stood up and moved towards the replicator. "Coffee?" she asked, already knowing only too well exactly how he liked it.
It seemed oddly familiar and safe, yet at the same time, equally un-nerving and awkward to feel so comfortable together after so long.
"Please yeah" he smiled as he sat down. "So I figured I'd been gone long enough to be allowed to come back and do some work, allowed being the key word" he smirked.
"Lt Milarno!" she replied in a formal tone, a smirk forming on her face as the banter began. They always had been good at that. She fetched the drinks and put them down on the coffee table between the two armchairs in the corner. This was the less formal part of her room where she held meetings that weren't so intensely formal.
".... are you suggesting I'm stopping you from getting back to work?" she asked in a mock accusatory tone as she sat down.
"Well I'm hoping not, but yet again aswell as many other occassions you were right I needed it, thankyou" he told her as he picked up his coffee and held it in his hands before bringing it to his lips and taking a sip of the steaming hot liquid.
"I was right?" she feigned shock and her smirk widened. "Who are you and what have you done with the real Ryan Milarno....." she grinned.
"I'm calling security.... the Ryan i knew would never admit such sacrilege!" she laughed.
Ryan laughed. "No I wouldn't have but I'm still stubborn as ever which brings me to a problem..." he eyed her warily. "Something I thought would go away but you know, wishful thinking and all that" he said with a heavy sigh.
"You talking about me?" she pretended to eye him accusatively again but her eyes were twinkling to show that she didn't mean a word of it.
"No, no of course not" he smiled. "I need a doctor and I'd prefer you" he spoke seriously.
Chelsea heard the change in his tone and responded with a tightening of the soft semi-bajoran ridges on her forehead into a gentle frown. "What's wrong my friend? What's happened?" she asked.
"I um, I keep getting really bad headaches, nausea, all basic symptoms of space sickness but that's absurd so i ruled that out it's the tightening and pain in these godforsaken ridges around my eyes that worries me"
"Cubicle One! Right now, Mister! When did you have your last check over? I'm going to take a proper look at all that reversion and see what it's doing to you." she said, drinking more of her tea and preparing to get up.
"You're not going to like the answer to that" he told her as he placed his mug down, also preparing to stand.
"Why do you say that?" she asked, her frown deepening. "Is it still going on even now?" in her head she tried to work out exactly how long ago he had started to show the first signs.
"I've never had a check over Chels, when I left I didn't keep an eye on it, so if you did one when this all came out then that was the last time" he explained as he stood up.
"RYYY!!!" she exclaimed shocked but on reflection she kicked herself for not anticipating this. She should have known he wouldn't deal with it head on. He would just suffer in silence. He was like that.
Ryan rolled his eyes. "I know, I know I'm an idiot but it's probably just a defunct gene or something" he said flippantly.
Chelsea rolled her eyes. "I doubt it. It's probably because you don't take care of yourself. You're too busy looking after others but you don't care enough about Ryan Milarno to invest the time and energy to keeping him healthy. As your department head I object to you not keeping your most valuable asset, you... up to the standard we need you to be to function properly at work but as your long-term friend I hurt to think how little you value your own welfare. You *have* to understand how much your friends care about you and since you can't believe we're all idiots all the time, then you have to realise that if we think you're worth it, we have to be at least a bit right about you. Can't you take our words for it that you ARE worth it." she sighed, giving up as she noticed the look on
his face.
The look on his face softened seconds later and he nodded. "I'm sorry I' am but what this has done to me is something I can't even begin to go into detail but you know me well enough to know without even asking. You say friends?" he scoffed. "I just have you and what you say matters so I will listen and I'll try but just please make this pain go before anymore lectures"
"No more lectures. I've said my piece. Cubicle One....." she stood aside to let him go first and snatched up her favourite Med kit to follow him immediately.
The doors parted to allow him entry as he arrived and he walked inside and sat on the biobed in the centre of the room. "Any initial thoughts to what it might be?" he wondered, his voice quiet, Chelsea's words had, had an impact and his sullenness showed that.
"As you know I'm interested in genetics but the reversion after alterations and medical intervention over long terms is new ground to me." she began an all over body scan, starting from the top of his head, drawing up the bio-arch over his 'bed' and setting off a whole series of checks and tests. She shot him some analgesics with a hypospray and gently traced his eye ridges with a hand scanner whilst the main scans were whirring away.
"Hmm" he mumbled in thought as the medication began to have an affect. "Me too" he told her. "I wonder sometimes if they hadn't of hidden the cardassian part of me would there still be complications like there are now or would it be normal, I'm assuming the latter because other hybrids are fine, you know" he sighed.
"Sometimes I feel like a freak, human, with bajoran nose ridges, and then to top that Cardassian physiology" he let out a laugh. "How screwed up is that? Y-You said before I don't take care of myself, you're right because I resent this. As stupid as it sounds I have nightmares and I want it to go away but I know it can't...removing those genes would do damage" realising he was ranting he stopped and looked up at her, an apologetic look in his eyes. "Sorry...you didn't need to hear that" he told her.
"But I did. Because you needed to admit it and I'm here to tell you Ry that it's COMPLETELY natural and healthy that you should resent it. You should let that out. No-one facing the mental shock and physiological trauma that you've been through would have come out any less confused or angry. Don't beat yourself up for being perfectly justified in all of that!" she said gently, uploading the hand scanner's data as she spoke.
"You were a war baby. A child born of a troubled time and your family obviously tried to help you survive that by disguising who you were on the outside. What they didn't do was to prepare you for what had happened to you, to your mother or anything important. They just needed to get you away alive. I don't suppose they thought about how it would affect you or if it would ever break down and reveal itself." The medical equipment rolled out data and results as she was talking. "Ryan, you're one of the best doctors in Starfleet. That in itself makes you a very valuable and worthy person no matter what shape your eye sockets are or your nose or any other superficial extra.... you ARE an extraordinary doctor first... after that you're an unusual man, physically but only in that your features are unusual. The rest of you is a gift to all the hundreds of patients you have helped over your time. You can't measure your value by asthetics. You're a clever, compassionate, talented, very important person on the inside." she sighed
"But it's all a mess Chels" he began to chuckle as the realisation hit him. "It really is" he sighed and shook his head as he listened to the beeps of the panel as the data was being displayed. "How do I get over this? I convinced myself I'd made progress when I came back here, I haven't...your words I'll just have to try and remember" he smiled.
"You *have* made progress. You made enough progress to come back and pick up your most important part of life, your medical work. You're facing up to it all and the recognition of it and that you want to fix it are the most important turning points of all, Ry." she reassured him.
Ryan smiled, nodding in acknowledgement of her words. She was right he knew that, it was a big step, but it was a long road that had always seemed to be endless now possibly in time there could be an end to it in sight. "Is there anything from the scans?"
"They suggest that your ocular bone structure is soft as yet and not too deep. It's attempting to compensate for not having grown when you were younger so it's doing too much at once. You know better than i do that this could be operated on but it would be risky. On the flip side it could be a way to stop it getting worse and if we reduced the circumference of the growing circles of cartilage we could regenerate boundaries for it to leave you with smaller, more compatible ridges that wouldn't grow and wouldn't look out of proportion. I don't know how you feel about surgery now?" she put the possibility to him.
Ryan let out a sigh as he made his decision. He began to nod his head, opting for the risky surgery. "I feel alright about it, it's worth the risk" his tone serious and he looked up at her and smiled briefly.
"What risk?" she replied flippantly, grinning at him. "I'd do it myself...... and we could get Murdoch to help... he's pretty good..... not as good as me but the two of us together are the best there is." She sounded like she was bragging but she was telling the truth and she needed to instil confidence in Ryan - not least because he really had 'come to the right place' - so to speak.
Chelsea grinned widely and shoved Ryan's shoulder gently. "Come on.... let's redesign you a new look....." she returned to the desk and pulled up a holographic anatomical model on which they could both change possibilities to see what the computer predicted would not only look like but where structure needed to be adjusted and function could be improved etc. etc.
Ryan sat looked at the holographic representation of himself and he smirked. "Not too bad if I don't say so myself" he grinned playfully then narrowed his eyes at the hologram in an attempt to be serious and to work out what they could come up with. "Hmm...any suggestions?" he hit a blank, it wasn't easy making a decision to change the way you look all by yourself.
"I fancy the blonde blue-eyed look" she teased with a smirk. She did no such thing. She had fallen for Ryan when he was dark, human looking and brown eyed and she had fallen for Rick who was the same. Dark haired with a slim silver streak at one temple but in no way blonde, so what she was saying was the opposite of the *proof of the pudding* with her own tastes. But her smile told him and he would already have known it anyway. The suggestion of blonde was one that opened the discussion on something TOTALLY different from his current look and his past too.
"I think I'll keep the dark and mysterious look" Ryan grinned then began tapping away at the panel below the holographic representation; he inputted data which lightly withdrew his skeletal structure and countered for the physical pain. He tapped a single input for confirmation and his image changed.
Chelsea reached across him gently and tapped in a change too. It lengthened his hair which softened the look of his stronger forehead and chin. She saved it and they looked at the way it made the image change. "Do you like that?" she asked. "We can erase it if you don't."
Ryan turned with a smile and looked at Chelsea. "I do actually, yeah" he said with a nod and looked back at the holographic image. "I'll take it" he chuckled.
"SOLD" she pretended to bang down some sort of implement that might have been similar to an ancient gavel an auction in the olden centuries. She pressed a light and the image was saved, the computer calculating quickly the details of how to achieve it surgically and with re-generators.
"Okay, so that was easier than I thought, when can it be done?" he wondered.
"Tomorrow?" she answered with a smile.
OFF:
Lieutenant Ryan Milarno
ACMO
DS5
&
Commander Chelsea Dunham
CMO
DS5
by Commander Chelsea Dunham
Post Details
| Title | HOW long since you had a medical? | |
| Mission | Things Past | |
| Author(s) | Commander Chelsea Dunham | |
| Posted | Sat Jan 26, 2013 @ 11:17pm | |
| Location | Sickbay | |
| Timeline | BACKPOST - Prior to "Relief" - not linked to mission. |
Chelsea smiled back warmly. "Hey" she said looking up and deciding this was the perfect time for a coffee. She stood up and moved towards the replicator. "Coffee?" she asked, already knowing only too well exactly how he liked it.
It seemed oddly familiar and safe, yet at the same time, equally un-nerving and awkward to feel so comfortable together after so long.
"Please yeah" he smiled as he sat down. "So I figured I'd been gone long enough to be allowed to come back and do some work, allowed being the key word" he smirked.
"Lt Milarno!" she replied in a formal tone, a smirk forming on her face as the banter began. They always had been good at that. She fetched the drinks and put them down on the coffee table between the two armchairs in the corner. This was the less formal part of her room where she held meetings that weren't so intensely formal.
".... are you suggesting I'm stopping you from getting back to work?" she asked in a mock accusatory tone as she sat down.
"Well I'm hoping not, but yet again aswell as many other occassions you were right I needed it, thankyou" he told her as he picked up his coffee and held it in his hands before bringing it to his lips and taking a sip of the steaming hot liquid.
"I was right?" she feigned shock and her smirk widened. "Who are you and what have you done with the real Ryan Milarno....." she grinned.
"I'm calling security.... the Ryan i knew would never admit such sacrilege!" she laughed.
Ryan laughed. "No I wouldn't have but I'm still stubborn as ever which brings me to a problem..." he eyed her warily. "Something I thought would go away but you know, wishful thinking and all that" he said with a heavy sigh.
"You talking about me?" she pretended to eye him accusatively again but her eyes were twinkling to show that she didn't mean a word of it.
"No, no of course not" he smiled. "I need a doctor and I'd prefer you" he spoke seriously.
Chelsea heard the change in his tone and responded with a tightening of the soft semi-bajoran ridges on her forehead into a gentle frown. "What's wrong my friend? What's happened?" she asked.
"I um, I keep getting really bad headaches, nausea, all basic symptoms of space sickness but that's absurd so i ruled that out it's the tightening and pain in these godforsaken ridges around my eyes that worries me"
"Cubicle One! Right now, Mister! When did you have your last check over? I'm going to take a proper look at all that reversion and see what it's doing to you." she said, drinking more of her tea and preparing to get up.
"You're not going to like the answer to that" he told her as he placed his mug down, also preparing to stand.
"Why do you say that?" she asked, her frown deepening. "Is it still going on even now?" in her head she tried to work out exactly how long ago he had started to show the first signs.
"I've never had a check over Chels, when I left I didn't keep an eye on it, so if you did one when this all came out then that was the last time" he explained as he stood up.
"RYYY!!!" she exclaimed shocked but on reflection she kicked herself for not anticipating this. She should have known he wouldn't deal with it head on. He would just suffer in silence. He was like that.
Ryan rolled his eyes. "I know, I know I'm an idiot but it's probably just a defunct gene or something" he said flippantly.
Chelsea rolled her eyes. "I doubt it. It's probably because you don't take care of yourself. You're too busy looking after others but you don't care enough about Ryan Milarno to invest the time and energy to keeping him healthy. As your department head I object to you not keeping your most valuable asset, you... up to the standard we need you to be to function properly at work but as your long-term friend I hurt to think how little you value your own welfare. You *have* to understand how much your friends care about you and since you can't believe we're all idiots all the time, then you have to realise that if we think you're worth it, we have to be at least a bit right about you. Can't you take our words for it that you ARE worth it." she sighed, giving up as she noticed the look on
his face.
The look on his face softened seconds later and he nodded. "I'm sorry I' am but what this has done to me is something I can't even begin to go into detail but you know me well enough to know without even asking. You say friends?" he scoffed. "I just have you and what you say matters so I will listen and I'll try but just please make this pain go before anymore lectures"
"No more lectures. I've said my piece. Cubicle One....." she stood aside to let him go first and snatched up her favourite Med kit to follow him immediately.
The doors parted to allow him entry as he arrived and he walked inside and sat on the biobed in the centre of the room. "Any initial thoughts to what it might be?" he wondered, his voice quiet, Chelsea's words had, had an impact and his sullenness showed that.
"As you know I'm interested in genetics but the reversion after alterations and medical intervention over long terms is new ground to me." she began an all over body scan, starting from the top of his head, drawing up the bio-arch over his 'bed' and setting off a whole series of checks and tests. She shot him some analgesics with a hypospray and gently traced his eye ridges with a hand scanner whilst the main scans were whirring away.
"Hmm" he mumbled in thought as the medication began to have an affect. "Me too" he told her. "I wonder sometimes if they hadn't of hidden the cardassian part of me would there still be complications like there are now or would it be normal, I'm assuming the latter because other hybrids are fine, you know" he sighed.
"Sometimes I feel like a freak, human, with bajoran nose ridges, and then to top that Cardassian physiology" he let out a laugh. "How screwed up is that? Y-You said before I don't take care of myself, you're right because I resent this. As stupid as it sounds I have nightmares and I want it to go away but I know it can't...removing those genes would do damage" realising he was ranting he stopped and looked up at her, an apologetic look in his eyes. "Sorry...you didn't need to hear that" he told her.
"But I did. Because you needed to admit it and I'm here to tell you Ry that it's COMPLETELY natural and healthy that you should resent it. You should let that out. No-one facing the mental shock and physiological trauma that you've been through would have come out any less confused or angry. Don't beat yourself up for being perfectly justified in all of that!" she said gently, uploading the hand scanner's data as she spoke.
"You were a war baby. A child born of a troubled time and your family obviously tried to help you survive that by disguising who you were on the outside. What they didn't do was to prepare you for what had happened to you, to your mother or anything important. They just needed to get you away alive. I don't suppose they thought about how it would affect you or if it would ever break down and reveal itself." The medical equipment rolled out data and results as she was talking. "Ryan, you're one of the best doctors in Starfleet. That in itself makes you a very valuable and worthy person no matter what shape your eye sockets are or your nose or any other superficial extra.... you ARE an extraordinary doctor first... after that you're an unusual man, physically but only in that your features are unusual. The rest of you is a gift to all the hundreds of patients you have helped over your time. You can't measure your value by asthetics. You're a clever, compassionate, talented, very important person on the inside." she sighed
"But it's all a mess Chels" he began to chuckle as the realisation hit him. "It really is" he sighed and shook his head as he listened to the beeps of the panel as the data was being displayed. "How do I get over this? I convinced myself I'd made progress when I came back here, I haven't...your words I'll just have to try and remember" he smiled.
"You *have* made progress. You made enough progress to come back and pick up your most important part of life, your medical work. You're facing up to it all and the recognition of it and that you want to fix it are the most important turning points of all, Ry." she reassured him.
Ryan smiled, nodding in acknowledgement of her words. She was right he knew that, it was a big step, but it was a long road that had always seemed to be endless now possibly in time there could be an end to it in sight. "Is there anything from the scans?"
"They suggest that your ocular bone structure is soft as yet and not too deep. It's attempting to compensate for not having grown when you were younger so it's doing too much at once. You know better than i do that this could be operated on but it would be risky. On the flip side it could be a way to stop it getting worse and if we reduced the circumference of the growing circles of cartilage we could regenerate boundaries for it to leave you with smaller, more compatible ridges that wouldn't grow and wouldn't look out of proportion. I don't know how you feel about surgery now?" she put the possibility to him.
Ryan let out a sigh as he made his decision. He began to nod his head, opting for the risky surgery. "I feel alright about it, it's worth the risk" his tone serious and he looked up at her and smiled briefly.
"What risk?" she replied flippantly, grinning at him. "I'd do it myself...... and we could get Murdoch to help... he's pretty good..... not as good as me but the two of us together are the best there is." She sounded like she was bragging but she was telling the truth and she needed to instil confidence in Ryan - not least because he really had 'come to the right place' - so to speak.
Chelsea grinned widely and shoved Ryan's shoulder gently. "Come on.... let's redesign you a new look....." she returned to the desk and pulled up a holographic anatomical model on which they could both change possibilities to see what the computer predicted would not only look like but where structure needed to be adjusted and function could be improved etc. etc.
Ryan sat looked at the holographic representation of himself and he smirked. "Not too bad if I don't say so myself" he grinned playfully then narrowed his eyes at the hologram in an attempt to be serious and to work out what they could come up with. "Hmm...any suggestions?" he hit a blank, it wasn't easy making a decision to change the way you look all by yourself.
"I fancy the blonde blue-eyed look" she teased with a smirk. She did no such thing. She had fallen for Ryan when he was dark, human looking and brown eyed and she had fallen for Rick who was the same. Dark haired with a slim silver streak at one temple but in no way blonde, so what she was saying was the opposite of the *proof of the pudding* with her own tastes. But her smile told him and he would already have known it anyway. The suggestion of blonde was one that opened the discussion on something TOTALLY different from his current look and his past too.
"I think I'll keep the dark and mysterious look" Ryan grinned then began tapping away at the panel below the holographic representation; he inputted data which lightly withdrew his skeletal structure and countered for the physical pain. He tapped a single input for confirmation and his image changed.
Chelsea reached across him gently and tapped in a change too. It lengthened his hair which softened the look of his stronger forehead and chin. She saved it and they looked at the way it made the image change. "Do you like that?" she asked. "We can erase it if you don't."
Ryan turned with a smile and looked at Chelsea. "I do actually, yeah" he said with a nod and looked back at the holographic image. "I'll take it" he chuckled.
"SOLD" she pretended to bang down some sort of implement that might have been similar to an ancient gavel an auction in the olden centuries. She pressed a light and the image was saved, the computer calculating quickly the details of how to achieve it surgically and with re-generators.
"Okay, so that was easier than I thought, when can it be done?" he wondered.
"Tomorrow?" she answered with a smile.
OFF:
Lieutenant Ryan Milarno
ACMO
DS5
&
Commander Chelsea Dunham
CMO
DS5