Fic: A Good Man, Ch 3
The Starfleet uniforms are nothing short of a grade-A pain the in the ass.
Leonard’s a doctor. The only doctors he knows that would wear something as insane as these bright red straitjackets are hospital directors, who don’t actually do anything but walk around the halls waving papers and looking important, or someone who’s got a stick stuck down his craw. Leonard’s a doctor, and he needs to move damnit, if he wants to treat patients. Starfleet seems to prize order and the appearance of efficiency over the actual thing. This isn’t the first time he’s come across such boneheaded rationalization, and he knows it won’t be the last. But he’ll be damned before some admiral’s idea of a uniform gets in the way of saving a man’s life.
There’s also the redness of it. Leonard’s not one to search for meaning where clearly none is present, but he can’t help but wonder about this one. Is it that old Spartan mentality, when the warriors wore blood red cloaks to disguise the flow of blood and make them seem invincible? Is it a nod to the fact that Starfleet is the biggest truly communist system that’s ever been conceived on the Earth (think about it-it’s a pure command economy. They get no choice in clothes, meals, quarters, transport. Cadets’re discouraged from having too many personal objects)? Is it that red makes humans alert, keeps them on their toes? Does someone higher up have a fetish with the primary colors? Why the pure crimson? Leonard watches the Academy campus from a lecture room window, the blocks and dots of red moving every which way. It’s a weird sight.
He figured when he signed up for Starfleet that practicing medicine in space would be the same as practicing medicine at the hospital. In some aspects, it is. But damn, Starfleet’s rich, and it shows. They’ve got all the latest technology, nicely packaged and ready to use. The tricorders they issue are ten times more sensitive than your regular stuff, and there’re are fifty more options. Every Sickbay’s got state of the art equipment, designed to cure anything in the books. The biobeds monitor the patient’s frequencies with exquisite accuracy, they’ve got nifty bells and whistles that allow him to create amazingly detailed profiles of his patients. Right now, Leonard’s taking mostly technical classes devoted simply to explaining how to use all this grand machinery. Christ, they even have a high speed, high resolution, portable electron microscope! The fact that he’s able to look instantaneously at microbes blows his mind away.
But as he uses the gadgets and reads the case studies, the more he realizes that human feats in biomedical engineering have got nothin’ on the universe. She hurls every single malady imaginable at the poor bastards who go into space (confirming his suspicion that space is disease wrapped in darkness and silence). The success or failure of the CMOs lay in their ingenuity, their ability to think on their feet while people were dying left and right like it was goddamn Spanish influenza. And there’s always some time when the machines fail for one reason or another, and it’s back to the old fashioned methods. Leonard can’t imagine making a diagnosis without a tricorder, but that’s what they’re learning right now. He’s studying hard. Someone’s life might depend on it.
Leonard always was fascinated by old medicine. Some of the techniques were barbaric (needles to sew up a person? Like they were some sorta garment?) and terrifying (bleeding a person to somehow cure them? Though that’s not the worst by far. He doesn’t even wanna talk about amputations). But the professor, who may as well be old as Hippocrates himself, makes it clear that they’ve got to keep all their options open. The old man tells some incredible stories (he can’t decide whether to believe them) about using some indigenous tree sap to glue together the flayed skin of an officer, breaking cranial bones (bashing her head in, essentially) to relieve the pressure that accumulated in her skull (caused by a freaky space virus, no less), forcing a man to drink his own urine to balance out his crazy electrolyte counts. Leonard doesn’t take notes. He watches intently and listens.
He’ll be taking classes on xenobiology and xenophysiology too. Leonard’ll always count himself a human doctor, meant to treat human patients, but he’s gotta know the basics. There’s a comparative xenomedicine class he’s enrolled in for the next term, and the whole premise of that is tryin’ to find universals in the way bodies are structured. It’s an interestin’ question, both academically and in the field. Some things, like pain as an indicator of illness and the interconnected nature of the body and mind, seem to be universals. Other than that, Leonard speculates that biology’s having a field day. The way he sees it, even before warp drive and meeting the Vulcans, humans wouldn’ta had veterinarians if you could cure a dog the same way you cure a human. They got animal doctors for a reason.
All in all, he’s busy. Being busy means he’s not thinking about Jill and Joanna. Not thinking about the divorce and his family is the closest thing he’ll get to happy right now. Leonard’s trying to stay away from the bourbon and brandy because that’s a sure-fire way to get him depressed. He doesn’t always succeed, but Jim manages to keep him away from the alcohol, mostly by getting himself off-the-rocker drunk every Friday. It’s like clockwork. Jim still goes by the “work hard, play hard” philosophy, with the emphasis on playing hard.
Well, he’s not bein’ fair to the kid. Jim’s somehow juggling seven classes and three extracurriculars. Leonard’s not sure if Jim’s doing all the work for those classes, or if he’s even attending all of them, or if he just doesn’t sleep. He seems the type to do all three. They don’t keep tabs on each other yet, so Leonard doesn’t make it his problem. But he can’t help but think that this is another one of Jim’s I’ve-got-something-to-prove things. And sometimes he wonders if the kid’ll burn up in the fire of his own ambition, or if he’ll go on to change the world. People like that usually go one way or the other. Or both.
It’s a start, and not a bad one. It could have been worse, he knows. Leonard’s doing what he loves (even though it cost him all the people he loves), he’s meeting some people in the medical department who he can respect and get along with, he’s got a roof over his head, clothes on his back, food in his belly. A few credits in his account. He’s still not too sure what to make of Jim, but he’ll roll with the punches. The fact that he’s going to serve in a tin can that’s liable to break down in the middle of the vacuum of space is something he’s not thinking about right now. He’ll deal with the aviaphobia when it comes (usually throwing up works).
He’s busy, he’s not unhappy. Life’s not horrible.
Except, he never managed to learn how to do his own laundry. It explains why the damn uniform’s shrunk two sizes. Or maybe they were like that to begin with. He can’t tell. Where’s the number for the damn Office of Affairs? There’s an admiral who’s gonna get an earful.