"Irony and Turmoil"

[Avery Tynte 0]

Acting Ensign Katherine Swan

&

Dr. Avery Tynte

 

Avery rushed over to the surgical bay as the transporter deposited the body on the bed. The man appeared to be human, or at least appeared human-like; the body was very badly injured and blood seemed to be everywhere. It was difficult to tell if the young man wore a red uniform, or if it was simply stained red with blood.

 

Swan looked at the figure that had just materialized. "Oh DEAR!" She ran over to stand next to Avery to inspect what was going on. "Where do you start?"

 

"We start by..." Avery looked over as the console began to beep. "The vitals are almost nonexistent," he said as he closed the surgical table over the man. "Prep the cortical stimulator."

 

"Aye!" Swan quickly grabbed the stimulators and rushed over placing them on the patients forehead. "Is there a chance? I mean, He is so badly injured." She looked back and forth between the man on the table and Avery.

 

"Internal bleeding is bad...very bad," Avery was reading the scans on the console in front of him. Breathing and heart rate were almost nonexistent, brainwave patterns were not registering at all. "Clear," he yelled.

 

Katherine backs away from the patient. "Clear!" She watched as the man is hit with the jolt from the cortical stimulator. “Ill get the cardiac unit over here.”

 

Katherine rushed over and grabbed the cardiac drugs off a med tray sitting near by; she remembered what drugs to get but she wasn’t going to try to remember doses and such in a emergency. She didn’t feel she had learned enough to hold the balance of a persons life in her hands. She didn’t feel capable enough. She just stood back and waited for instructions from Avery.

 

"Swan," Avery said gently. "It is too late," he powered down the cortical stimulator and shut down the console as the surgical table retracted. It had been a long shot at best, but now the man’s entire system had shut down; every reading was nonexistent and the internal bleeding was far too extensive to repair. Even if they could somehow manage to revive the man's brain, his body would collapse before they could even begin to treat him.

 

Swan looked at Avery, "There’s nothing that can be done? Nothing at all?" She actually felt a loss inside. She hadn't done anything, but she felt as if this was her patient that had been lost. She tears began welling up in her eyes, as she looked from the dieing man on the table and back to Avery.

 

"His wounds were too severe," Avery looked up at her, seeing her distress. "There is nothing we could have done," he said as he entered the time of death into the record by hand on the console to his right.

 

Swan watched as a nurse pulls the blanket over the body. "I thought medicine had come so far that anything could be done. Couldn’t you have put him in a crio-unit and froze him to buy time? I mean anything at all?” She paused to catch her breath, but only for a moment. “If this is what I am looking foreword to; seeing death and not being able to do anything about it…then I want out. I don’t want to be a doctor. I’ll serve my time in a prison somewhere for the crimes I committed against your people. I just can’t do this." Swan turned around to leave, tears now streaming from her eyes. She couldn’t realize how she was feeling at this point. She was upset and didn’t even know this man. What if it was one of the crew she had now made friends with? What if this had been one of them? Could she just let them go so easily?

 

Avery's hand grabbed her arm, pulling her gently into a side office. "Swan, breath," he knew how she was feeling. Losing a patient was something a doctor never got used to, but it was something you developed a resistance to over the course of time. "There are some things that even our modern medicine cannot fix, Swan. His internal systems were collapsing at a rate far beyond our ability to fix," his mind registered the irony of the situation; not a year ago he had been the fresh medic aboard Arcadia, still developing as a Doctor. Hell, he still was developing as a doctor… And now, here he stood giving advice to another young medic. "You lose people Katherine. It never gets easy...but it gets easier..." he wondered idly if that sentence actually made any sense.

 

Katherine looks into his eyes, seeing his also had a tear in them. "How can you get used to folks dieing. What if it was one of the ones that have actually accepted me? I can’t let them down. I just can’t." She pulled her arm away from him and turned her back to him. She slowly walked over to a wall and leaned her head on it. She wraped her arms around herself is if she were cold. "You said it never gets easy, how does it get easier?" she lets out a few soft sobs, " I…I don’t understand."

 

"You don't get used to it." Avery said, a hint of longing in his voice. "You never reach a point where your heart does not skip a beat when someone dies in front of you..." He placed a hand on her shoulder. "That is part of being a doctor, Katharine. That feeling you are experiencing right now...that feeling is what drives you, what fuels you. It is what makes you hell-bound and determined not to lose the next one. That feeling is your soul, your heart and mind. That feeling is what makes you human, or what makes me Bajoran. That feeling is what makes us who we are..." he paused, turning her to look into her eyes. "That feeling is what makes us who we are."

 

As she turned seeing his eyes, she begins to understand. With the tears crawling down her cheeks she asked, "If this is what it is, then why is it you continue? I don't know if I can, I don't know if I can keep going knowing that I may end up working on one of my friends and turn around and loose them." Her eyes search his face for an answer.

 

"The reason I continue is for every patient I save. Every life I can steal back from death," he looked at her, a resolve in his eyes he had not felt since his father's death. "Yes, you lose patients...but you also save them," he held up his hands. "These hands can heal, they can give life," he felt his throat catch slightly as he blinked his eyes. He grasped her hands and held them up. "And so can these."

 

She looked at him holding her hands up. “What make you so sure? I’m not a doctor. I was never meant to be. I’m not even supposed to be here. Maybe I should have stayed where I belonged. I should have faced my folks." She then tried to pull her hands away from Avery, but he had a nice tight grip on them. She just leaned her face down right into her and his hands. She had never talked about it to anyone; the fact that she was upset about her folks disowning her. It was now coming out all in the open. "I cant believe they ... they didn't...want me back." she then cuts loose with the water works and her knees begin to buckle under her.

 

He let her sink down, falling with her and holding her head in his hands, turning it upwards so she can see him. "It was their loss," he picked up on what she was speaking of, chalking it up to doctor's intuition. "Katherine there is a new family for you aboard this ship, a family who is depending on you." He paused to let what he said sink in. "And what makes me so sure you can be a doctor?" he gave her the best smile he could muster. "You care...it is obvious you care, or else you would not be taking the loss of a patient so hard."

Katherine just looked to the ground once again. She was so torn up she didn't know which way was which. She never thought in her wildest dreams she would be hurting this bad. She wasn't sure herself if it was because of this death or her family rejecting her or a combination of them both. She felt drained. She looked up at Avery one more time then started crying all the more harder.

 

Avery let her fall into him...in so many ways he could relate to the emotional turmoil within this woman. Again the irony crept into his mind...not so long ago he would have given anything for Kathrine Swan to be off this ship. After what she did to Naarahe was sure he would never forgive her. But now, in a side office in Sickbay, he held her in his own arms, trying to console a pain that so few could truly understand. He sighed; the Prophets seemed to have an odd sense of things sometimes. "Have faith, Katherine...have faith..."