Posted by Ensign Rand Farquharson (Yeoman First Class) in Side sim: Matters of the Heart

Posted by Commander Roman Alden (First Officer & Chief Science Officer) in Side sim: Matters of the Heart

Posted by Ensign Rand Farquharson (Yeoman First Class) in Side sim: Matters of the Heart
Posted by… suppressed (1) by the Post Ghost! 👻

(snip)
She reached across herself and grabbed Roman’s hand despite the pain it caused and she swayed and would have fallen (onto Roman’s bed not far but far enough) if she wasn’t caught. Anti-nausea meds could be used as a sedative. Something was wrong with her heart. Or at least in her confused mind that’s what it meant to her. Her heart rate and blood pressure shot up very suddenly setting the alarms off. Despite Randy and Elbbirt trying to get her to lay back down she wouldn’t. “Chan e, a Ròmanaich, na leig leis mo chur a chadal. Mas e do thoil e. (No, Roman, do not let him put me to sleep. Please.)”

Rand

Elbbirt was looking back and forth between the two men and his patient. “What’s wrong?” He grabbed Randy’s arm to get his attention.

Randy tried to help Roman get her to lay down but she was panicking. “She’s asking him to stop you from putting her to sleep.” He turned back to Rand but Roman seemed to have her. She certainly wasn’t listening to him.

Roman caught her and tried to guide her to lay back. “No, no, don’t move,” he said, the words coming out in English because he said it quickly. “Tha e airson do stamag gun a bhith a ‘toirt ort cadal.” (It’s for your stomach not to make you sleep.) Then he leaned over and gave her a loose hug, avoiding her burns. “Tha thu ceart gu leòr, tha mi a’… gealltainn.” (You’re okay, I promise.) It took him a minute to remember the right word for ‘promise’.

~ Roman

It was for both. She remembered that, from 5 years ago. “Chan eil mi airson a dhol a chadal. (I don’t want to go to sleep.)” Her words were slurred but the panic was obvious. Rand shook her head hard, and that was a mistake. Even holding on to him she got dizzy and her stomach rebelled, her head felt like it was splitting open. Her hands and skin hurt. Even under the bandages she was splitting the delicate new skin. But her stomach had had enough and she managed to move her head over the bed right before she lost what little was in her stomach.

Her hands took the brunt of her weight, the pain jarring her and she noticed the bandages on her hands and stomach for the first time. She heaved and hyperventilated at the same time, and then her vision went black and they were finally able to get her laid back. Randy passed Roman an ice pack while he started cleaning up.

Roman tried to support her as she leaned over the bed, one arm pulling her hair away from her face and the other keeping her supported and attempting to keep her from moving too much. The mess hadn’t quite missed the sleeve of his shirt.

“One of you want to explain what that was?” Elbbirt half asked half demanded while he took readings and checked Rand over again. Randy looked at Roman, “I have no idea. She just kept saying she didn’t want to sleep.”

Rand

Roman set the ice pack against her head once they had her laid back and settled again. Then he looked at Randy and shrugged. He thought back, thinking like it was a scientific study. What relevant evidence had there been that could’ve predicted this…?

When she broke her foot, Roman had to convince her to take meds because she didn’t want it to put her to sleep. It was the origin of her telling him to ‘rip the bandaid off’ when it came to medical help. When he’d had his concussion, Rand had argued with Randy about being put to sleep then, too. And he remembered her saying how much she hated being sedated after her cardiomyopathy. He felt confident enough to guess: “She hates being sedated. She thought it was going to put her to sleep.” But he didn’t understand why, he’d told her it was for nausea, so had Elbbirt. “I told her it was a nausea medicine but that almost seemed to make it worse…”

~ Roman

“Some anti-nausea medications can be used as a mild sedative. They work by calming the nerves that are creating the feeling of an upset stomach and as those nerves calm and settle they stop sending distress signals to the rest of the body and so everything else calms, the body relaxes and sleep happens. I wouldn’t give her one of those right now though, not that it would hurt her like a sedative would, but she’s already confused and disoriented enough. I wouldn’t want to give her anything that would increase that.” Elbbirt was watching the monitors, her pulse was still high but was falling and her pressure was down. Her K3 indicator was also high but he hoped the anti-inflammatory and the fact she’d passed out would help that. He passed the scanner of his tricorder over her head, “Well the good news is the swelling is till coming down. By minute amounts, but at least it’s still down and she didn’t make it worse.”

Roman listened to Elbbirt’s explanation and nodded. Then something dawned on him and he turned to Randy and scowled. Randy had given him an anti nausea med and afterwards Roman had gotten really drowsy and slept nearly an entire day away. “You did that, didn’t you?” His tone was a bit accusatory. “When I had a concussion. You gave something for my stomach, you made sure it was something that would make me tired, didn’t you?”

Randy didn’t even look sheepish. He understood why Roman was scowling at him. It might strain his relationship with Alden, and that was bad for his therapy, but Randy couldn’t feel bad for taking care of his health. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had or not. You hadn’t slept in almost 2 weeks, you had a concussion, and your stomach was so messed up you couldn’t keep water down. It wouldn’t have mattered if it made you drowsy or not. The sudden release of symptoms that were stressing your body out and keeping it in a hyper aware state was going to make you crash no matter what. But yes I did, it negated your stubborn streak.”

It would strain their relationship, it damaged the trust that Randy had spent months trying to build. “You lied!” He hadn’t raised his voice but it was obvious he wasn’t happy about it. “My stubborn streak isn’t a good reason to lie about it. You should’ve told me what you were doing. I even asked.”

He shook his head then. Her hands, arms, and abdomen were bleeding. “Randy we’ll have to change these bandages. We might as well get a session with the dermal regenerator in too.” They moved Rand slowly to put clean sheets on her bed and Shrine came in to change her gown after she’d been sick. Randy passed Alden a clean surgical shirt so he could get out of the soiled one. She slept through the session.

Shrine brought in a jar and began applying the gel like substance to Rand’s burns. She explained to Alden what it was for, but spoke slowly incase Rand woke up and was listening. “The skin is very dry and tight, but it will itch because it’s healing. This will stop the itch and add some extra hydration. Hopefully it will stop her from tearing the skin if she moves too much.” Then she wrapped the wounds in fresh bandages, pulled up the blanket and slipped out of the room.

Rand

Roman changed his shirt for the clean one and then watched as Shrine treated her burns. He nodded to her explanation, though he didn’t need it. He remembered the gel from his own burns. When she left, he lay back, keeping one hand over hers. He couldn’t get back to sleep, he was too stressed. And whenever he did start to doze off because he was tired, his nightmare would come back and he’d open his eyes. So he lay awake instead.

~ Roman

Thankfully, Rand slept the rest of the night. She stirred once when Grat came on shift, hearing their voices and the movement in the room. She didn’t particularly want to talk to them anyway so she allowed herself to drift back to sleep.

Franks came to see Alden, the lab was back open and everyone seemed back on track if not back on time. There wasn’t much he could do about that though. The planitary sciences lab had hit a dead end with a project they were doing and wanted Franks to help them figure out how to proceed but he was clueless. He wanted Alden’s advice.
Actually he just wanted Alden to take back over, but he didn’t say that. He hinted that he would feel better if Alden could check the animals, to make sure they were all unaffected by what had happened. Grat was in the room and shrugged, “Why not. As long as the visit is short and you aren’t doing any heavy lifting, talking and thinking won’t hurt you.”

Roman nodded to Franks. “It shouldn’t have, but I won’t turn down an excuse to see them.”

Morgan came, the normally confident security officer seemed anguished. She walked over to where Rand was sleeping, rubbing at her own bandaged arms, “I’m sorry I wasn’t faster, Cmdr.”

She had had engineering check all the power relays leading to his quarters, she wished she’d thought of that sooner. But she wanted someone to go in and check everything inside and for Alden to take a look around and see if anything was out of place, missing, or not supposed to be there.

Rand

Before he left with Franks Morgan came in and he stopped and shook his head. “You did your best. It isn’t your fault, it’s the fault of whoever’s done this, whoever hates my family so much they’d track me all the way across space and…” He sighed and shook his head.

He ended up going up and checking his quarters first. He’d already been up there to check on Pipkin but he hadn’t been paying attention at the time. Now he was and to his surprise it did look like someone had been in there that wasn’t Rand. It wasn’t overly messy like Rand’s office, but some of his things were out of place, and not in a way where Rand might’ve moved them. But if they’d tampered with something, it wasn’t obvious what it was.

Roman’s next stop was the labs where he checked each of the animals over and his conclusion was exactly what he’d thought it would be, that they hadn’t been effected at all besides perhaps a fright when it happened. All the animals but Mushu and Nibbles in particular seemed happy to see him. All in all he was there a few hours. One of the planetary scientists saw him in the biology lab and took that as an invitation to come talk about the dead end-ed project and Roman ended up going down and spending several hours in Planetary Sciences helping and giving advice for the project… All chairless, like the model patient he was.

~ Roman