ArchivedLogs:Treating the Dead

Treating the Dead
Dramatis Personae Dex, Iolaus	2013-12-14 "Shot in the head" is not a usual medical complaint for walk-ins.
Location <NYC> The Mendel Clinic - Lower East Side
With its sharp crystalline edges and sleek lines knifing up into the sky, this building is one of the most /distinctive/ new additions to the neighborhood. An angular structure in glass and steel, the tall tower has a deceptively slender look to it that is belied by the heavy security as soon as you enter the doors. The front doors are frosted with the Clinic's logo -- a rising sun over a rod of Asclepius -- a motif echoed in many places throughout the building. Visitors to the clinic must first pass through a small mantrap, guarded by some of the Clinic's security guards; once they make it through the metal detector and airlock's double doors they emerge into the much more hospitable lobby. With dark wood floors underneath and comfortable black and red couches at its edges, the high windows give the room an airy feel. A bank of elevators to one side carry visitors to the many destination floors, while the wide welcome desk at the other side is manned by a security guard ready to help point visitors in the right direction. From the instant he arrived, Dex has been a disturbance. Not deliberately, but his appearance bothers others in the main room. He's ghastly pale, and looks too much like someone that has the zombie disease and might go berserk. Dex himself put up some confused resistance upon arrival, but is clearly out of it. He's got a pile of tissues pressed to his head to mask whatever bruise or injury is there, but is acting like he's having a hard time walking or thinking in a straight line. It's also clear that the only reason he's in there at all is somebody else made him come. So, half to ensure he doesn't just walk out into the street suddenly, and half to reduce problems that Dex's presence is giving to other patients, he'll sit in an Exam room, as if not entirely sure how he got to be there. There is a knock at the door, and a moment later, the door to the exam room opens and closes behind a man with a warm smile on his face. Dressed in a white dress shirt undone at the throat and a pair of dark blue jeans, Iolaus looks over the patient for a moment. "Hello. My name is Doctor Iolaus Saavedro. I'm one of the doctors here. Looks like you've got a bit of an injury there," he says, gesturing towards the other man. "How are you feeling?" Perhaps having heard of Dex's discomfort, Iolaus doesn't make his way over to where the tennager is sitting; instead, the doctor moves over to sit down on a stool in front of the computer and logs in with a dip of his badge and a quick few strokes on the keyboard. "What brings you in today?" he asks, turning to smile at Dax once, voice calm and soothing soft. Dex is simply sitting there, slouched a little to one side, one eye blocked by the hand that has the kleenex wad applied. And not moving at /all/. The kleenex wad is not covered in blood-- hardly, it's a stark white but has some mild dark seepage on it around an edge. Dex doesn't look combative, he looks nearly expressionless, vacant. He doesn't seem to register the doctor's arrival right away, but then sits up just a little, staring without blinking. The teenage boy is clearly slow on the uptake. "I've a hole in my face. But I think it is getting better. Martin said it needed to be looked at, but I didn't want to," Dex says, without any anxiety, just a slow mumble. "Generally, we prefer to stick with just the right number of holes in your face. Unless you're getting a piercing, I suppose," Iolaus says, friendly enough. "I can take a look at that for you and put on a better bandage, if you don't want anything else done." His eyes flick over the tissue for a moment, judging. "But I can't tell you what I think needs to be done unless you let me take a look." The doctor pauses for a second, and then straightens a bit on the chair. "How does that sound?" "Maybe something to cover it a little better," Dex says slowly, processing the idea of a better bandage, evidently. He drops his hand loosely. The tissue stays stuck, though, and Dex realizes it, and lifts the hand again to pull it away. He has a fairly good-sized hole burned into his face, just over an inch wide, to the side of and above the eye, with charred burned flesh all around it, eye misted white and empty and partially cooked. The hole clearly goes at least halfway into his brain, a black charred, horrific chasm injury. Dex should /probably/ not be able to walk around and argue about health care. Iolaus looks at the other man's injury from where he sits for a moment, smile fading slightly off of his face. "That's quite a hole." His voice is still even and pleasant, and he makes no move to get up. "How long have you had that injury? Have you ever been injured like this before?" Despite his requests, the doctor makes no move to get up off of his stool. The time question makes the teenager stare. Well, stare more, since he was already doing that. "...half an hour? Maybe an hour?" Dex suggests, clearly with no real certain concept. "No hole in the face before. I got eaten a little bit once," Dex says, focusing on the middle of Iolaus's chest as if the answers were somewhere beyond him. "And some other things." While Dex is deadpan for almost everything he's said, the last was clearly evasive. He's probably unable to lie convincingly, let alone 'act casual.' "I see. And when you got eaten, how quickly did you heal?" Iolaus asks, looking over the younger man's face. "Did you get a fever?" A pause, and his smile returns. "This might sound a bit of a strange question, but... are you alive?" His eyes twinkle for a moment, and he waves a hand in the air, a gesture of almost dismissal. "I mean, do you have a heartbeat? Do you get hungry?" Dex seems to wake up a good amount. In that he jolts his head a little bit and pulls his hands up to fidget. It's a little bit ... desperately deliberate. As if he realized he wasn't moving at all, and promptly adapted to fix it. "Some hours. And I'm /not/ a zombie," Dex says, with the first infusion of any kind of emotion he's shown so far: fear. "/Zombies/ can't be shot in the head and walk and stuff," Dex says, a bit loudly, as if sound level added to the logic of that statement, starting to get up. He's really not very coordinated, despite what his athletic build suggests, he's a bit slow to put his feet down. "Easy, easy. I didn't say that you were. I would know; I was one of the inventors of the cure." Iolaus says, raising his hands in a gesture of reassurance and surrender. "But most people can't be shot in the head and then walk at all, and you are quite pale. How long have you been so pale?" Iolaus' voice is easy and soft. "Let me take a look. If nothing else, you need a better bandage than that." Now, the doctor stands to his feet, turning to pull two gloves off of the wall and tug them deliberately on. Dex releases a frustrated noise that isn't actually a sigh. It's a huffy non-sensical sound. "I'm not good with time," Dex says, but is back more to being deadpan, tone flat. It's possible that he only shows emotion under certain situations, or control levels. "I think I got the kleenex all out," Dex says, switching towards helpful, but does stick his fingers into the wound, looking for stray stuck pieces of kleenex. Which explains why his fingers were (and are) a bit stained on that hand. "I'll get that. I'm going to have a nurse bring some saline to help flush that wound out for you, alright?" Iolaus says, turning back to open the door and glance both ways down the hallway. "Becca, can you please bring me a debreeding kit and some bandages? I'm going to need a full set, I think." A pause, and he lets out a low 'mmm', considering. "Actually, can you just bring the trauma cart? I'm not sure what I'll need. Thanks." Iolaus turns back to Dex and takes a few steps over to him. "Alright. Tell me if you have any pain, alright? Just going to take a look at what we've got here." His hands come up to gently probe around the injury, fingers lightly brusting and pressing at the edges, feeling along the burns. "Where are your family? Are you in school?" A very close look will suggest that in the deep recess, the burned brain tissue, there's a little bit of repair going on. Some of the black burned areas, the deepest, are starting to turn more of a sickly gray, like a cadaver's brain surface. Some of the surface parts, like around the eye, are doing a bit of regeneration maybe, but none of it is fast enough to actually be certain of. If Dex is a healer of some nature, it's deathly (ha, ha) slow. Dex clearly is monitoring what Iolaus is doing, with a sort of distrustfulness. He doesn't flinch or anything, though, but Dex is about as much fun in temparature as you'd expect from a corpse that was outside for a long time before being brought in. His core temprature hasn't improved. "Dead mostly; I stay with Gramma now. I was, yes. Not sure if my school is reopened yet." The talk seems to distract Dex from suspicion, like doing two things at once is difficult. "I'm sorry. It's been a trying time for us all." Iolaus says, softly. "Still a little bit of tissue paper in here that I want to make sure we get out. We'll just have to--" The knock on the door causes Iolaus' hands to still and look over as the door opens. A red cart with several drawers is pushed into the room, followed by a nurse. "Becca, meet Dex. Becca, can you please break out..." The doctor's eyes turn to look back at the injury. "One debreeding syringe and then occlusive bandages and an eye cap? And a silly amount of gauze." Becca nods and gives Dex a look of only slight apprehension before she bends to turn and look through the drawers, fetching the requested instruments. "Have you talked to your grandmother and let her know you were hurt? We can have someone hear give her a call so she can come pick you up after you're done here." "I will later.... I don't think she notices," Dex says, in that same flat tone. It's probably impossible to read if Dex just doesn't care about her or that, but usually it's just that Dex is giving information without any emotional bias, again. "Not since... well." Dex doesn't trail off, he just dumps the sentence abruptly. Dex gets distracted by the implements, and will reach out to look at one. As for pain-- Dex is acting as if all of this was about as painful as a haircut: he wants to know what's happening, but isn't reactive. "I don't know what will happen," he says, on some tangent thought. The instruments are fairly basic - a syringe filled with saline, scraps of gauze, soft foam cut in a rough circle. "Not since?" Iolaus prompts, gently. "Tweezers," he says, holding out a hand. Becca hands him a pair through, and Iolaus gently reaches in to pluck a piece of tissue paper out of the wound. "Not since what?" he asks, distraction apparent even in his voice. He sets the tweezers down on a tray and picks up a scrap of gauze and the syringe, gently spraying cold saline along the edge of the facial burn and dabbing at it with the gauze. Both then are placed down on the tray, and more gauze picked up. Wrapping the injury is a process, slow winding of gauze around cotton surgical pads. "Since the others died," Dex says, after a pause to recall what he'd been talking about. Now that something is actually happening, Dex has moved from resistant to helpful: "I can lay down," Dex suggests, probably starting to move to lay down in the middle of part of a procedure, likely plenty frustrating to try to treat a moving target. "I should learn how to fix myself," Dex adds, as if the tray of implements made him think of that fact. "I am guessing that you might already know how to fix yourself somewhat, or I think you wouldn't be quite so conversational," Iolaus says, a trace of amusement threading through his voice. His hands still as the teenager lies down, causing the doctor to sigh and then lean forward to continue his bandaging. "What school are you going to?" he asks, continuing the wrapping methodically. "Ah, that's it, thank you, Becca." The nurse gives Iolaus a small smile and slips back out of the room, a trace of relief on her face. "A little bit of pressure, here," Iolaus murmurs, as he tightens the wrapping. Dex is a lot less creepy when he holds perfectly still, since at that point he's simply a corpse, not a MOVING corpse. He's the easiest target in the world-- corpses don't move. No breathing, no heartbeat, nothing: he lays there with absolutely no response. The pressure, nothing bothers him. The questions do get responses, though: "Just a public school. I'm on the football team," Dex adds, a second emotion of the day showing up, pride. "But I think a bunch of the team lost people. I know Joe, and Ron died, or maybe Ron just moved away..." And then silence, still again. "A lot changed the last couple of months." Iolaus says, voice soft. "Most things not for the better. But it gives us a chance to rebuild. Not always a good thing, but an opportunity." The doctor finishes wrapping gauze securely around Dex's bullet wound, then sets about wrapping around the eye cup, securing it, too, to Dex's head. "A chance to try new things, that might be better. Or, at least, different." It takes him much less time for him to wrap the eye cup in place, and when he is done, he takes a few steps back and peels off the gloves. "Alright. Try and keep that dry - put something plastic over it before you take a shower. And we need to see you back here in two days to replace the gauze and see how it's healing. If it starts hurting or something changes before then, give us a call and come in so we can take a look. Alright?" "If it heals in a few hours do I have to come back?" Dex asks, directly. And then, he pauses, as if he spoke before thinking, and sits up slowly. "I mean, a day," he says, lamely, a little bit foolishly, trying to cover that he expects it won't take two whole days to be better. But Dex stands up fully anyway, and starts to work on trying to zip up his jacket, but has a hard time getting the zipper bottom to line up, fumbling it, but with a lot of patience and focus. Iolaus gives the teenager a blink and a look, and then his smile spreads on his face. "I'd like you to come back in either way, but if you're all healed before then, you won't have to come back again to have the bandages changed another time. How's that sound?" Iolaus says, brightly. "And I hope you are. That looks uncomfortable." Iolaus reaches out with one hand, holding it out for a shake. "It was good to meet you, Dex. Maybe I will get the chance to see you when you come back." "Mmmmn," Dex agrees. He's able to shake, it's just a bit limp and cold-fish, since Dex is only slowly starting to come up to room temprature, after all. "Or the next time somebody shoots me cuz they think I'm a zombie," Dex adds, unhappily. But will have no issues with being led or shown his way out; he just tends to shuffle his steps instead of actually lifting his feet.