sga_flashfic | Five medical issues ... by shaenie and fiercelydreamed (Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral Challenge)

fiercelydreamed.livejournal.com posting in

Title: Five medical issues Jennifer Keller is really, really sick of treating.
Authors:

fiercelydreamed
Summary: Some days it boggles the mind that this expedition consists of humanity's "best and brightest."
Details: Keller, various others, PG-13 for mild sexual content (but basically gen). ~1,100 words, spoilers for S4.
Notes: Installments 6-10 of the 25 Things series (which isn't linear -- each set stands fully independent of the others). Started because

shaenie somehow didn't have enough to do (I know, I'm boggled too), and continued because we like to collectively elaborate on canon with the mad glee of kindergartners stealing sandbox toys when the other kids aren't looking. Installment #1 can be found here.

II. Five medical issues Jennifer Keller is really, really sick of treating.

1. Constipation. Part of it, of course, is the unfamiliar food that's a byproduct of living in another galaxy. She's heard all the excuses imaginable. Something that looks like a carrot shouldn't be pink and taste like okra. I just can't bring myself to eat the sort-of-peas; they taste like chicken. The pseudo-celery smells like feet.

Some days it boggles the mind that this expedition consists of humanity's "best and brightest."

She wishes she could get away with just posting a sign: NO, I WILL NOT PRESCRIBE YOU A LAXATIVE. EAT SOME GODDAMNED VEGETABLES.

2. Granuloma inguinale urtastilae. How the hell no one in the expedition managed to catch a Pegasus STI until her tenure as chief of medicine, she has no idea. On the one hand, it's not a serious health threat and it responds even more quickly to antibiotics than its closest Earth equivalent, donovanosis. On the other hand, because it's a health condition communicable only by intimate contact, she's professionally obligated to chart the course of its transmission through the expedition and inform anyone who may have been exposed to watch for symptoms. So not only does she know who first contracted it (SGA-6 -- yes, all of them -- on a "goodwill" mission to Urtasti), but her confidential computer files now contain a database charting who on the the expedition is sleeping with whom.

There are so many events in that database that she never, ever wanted to know about, and the patient conferences have set new career records for excruciatingly awkward. The level of TMI kills her previously healthy enjoyment of workplace gossip and intrigue.

3. Antholagnia. It wasn't that she didn't believe in Sex Pollen. She'd read the SGC reports before she'd come to Atlantis, and Carson's file on it is as thick as her head, but somehow she'd just never really considered the implications of attempting to treat someone who well and truly has no goal in life other than to get his/her hand down your uniform shirt. It's awkward as all hell, afterward, but the real problem is the during.

Most of the offworld teams are unfortunately good-looking, smart, and have impeccable personal hygiene. And she's only human, after all.

She finds it constitutionally impossible to think clearly when the side of Ronon's thumb is sliding rhythmically back and forth across her nipple, and no matter how hard she tries to tell herself that this is a bad thing, she just can't quite believe it. Not to mention the fact that almost thirty is far too old for personal sexual epiphanies, but Teyla smells like ripe plums and vanilla cream and sandalwood all wrapped up together, with skin as smooth as silk and small, strong hands. Being trapped between the two of them in an isolation room meant for one is a recipe for disaster, or maybe the best wet-dream come to life ever, and is so distracting that she hardly has time to wonder how Dr. Biro is faring with Rodney and the colonel in the other isolation room.

4. The Hoffan Epidemic. 'First, do no harm' have never been idle words to her. When she first read through Dr. Beckett's report on his work with Purna on Hoff, especially toward the end, she can feel his despair between every line he had written. She had cried for him, because she could imagine so clearly how awful it must have been to work so hard to help, only to have it fall apart in such a horrendous manner.

She was proud of him for refusing to continue working with the Hoffans when it became clear that it would dangerously compromise his professional ethics to do so. She admired him for being able to draw the line.

She'd had nightmares for weeks after reading through those notes and case files.

The report he -- or his clone, she supposes -- wrote regarding what he'd done while being held by Michael had been so so much worse.

But.

All of that is nothing compared to treating victim after victim of the plague once it begins to run rampant across the Pegasus Galaxy. She liked Carson Beckett; she respected him. He was a good man, a good doctor, and a brilliant geneticist.

But she can't help it, when she's exhausted beyond endurance by the steady influx of the sick, when she wakes up one morning after a scant four hours of sleep and realizes that she can't remember the name of the people she's fighting to save, when she holds the hands of the frightened and the dying, when she does her level best to comfort their families knowing that it won't be good enough no matter what she does, she can't help thinking: I would have let Michael kill me before becoming an accessory to this.

5. Acute and late-onset Axis I disorders. They all went through intensive psychological screening before anyone let them within spitting distance of an event horizon. In clinical terms, the expedition members have mean resiliency subscale scores well above the ninety-fifth percentile. But being resilient isn't the same thing as being impervious.

She's a doctor, so she knows the research on help-seeking: the reasons people will go to a primary care physician first instead of a psychiatrist, the symptoms they'll report and the ones they won't, the gaps and silences she'll have to feel her way through to figure out what she's dealing with -- what they're dealing with. She's been here for two years now, so she knows who simply won't go to Dr. Kim unless she makes it an order (because she's a shrink, because they're afraid to be told that they're crazy, because she's fresh off the Daedalus and isn't one of them yet), the times where the best course of action is to prescribe something herself and wait and see.

But because she's a person, she hates the weeks after a crisis, when they start slipping quietly into the infirmary: shoulders hunched, eyes bruised. If it's insomnia or nightmares from acute stress disorder, they wait about a week before coming. If it's depression or bereavement, it'll take at least six. Anxiety disorders, or substance abuse, or PTSD, and four times out of five they don't come until someone makes them, until the symptoms get too prominent for other people to ignore. But more than any other posting she's ever had, they all have one thing in common: they don't come until they stop being able to work.

She's starting to think that whatever trait it is that got all of them the greenlight, resilience isn't the right word.

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fishbaum.livejournal.com

Wow. This is fantastic, funny and heartbreaking in turns. A wonderful insight into Keller and the expedition's reality.

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