My Body is a Cage

[beenwaitinglong]

Who: Godot and Daedalus Yumeno
When: August 10, evening, a few hours before sirens
Where: Skye Medical Center
Summary: Godot goes to the doctor to see about his "almost dead" problem.
Warnings: Nada

Comments

[beenwaitinglong]

Godot had granted Daedalus the courtesy of setting his coffee aside while he ran the physical, and sat with his fingers pressed against the gauze from the blood test.

"My condition... is pretty bad," he said, with a cynical little half-smile on his face as he spoke. "I was poisoned six years ago. Came about as close to dying as a man can without calling the funeral parlor. Hell, I think they had to hang up on the receptionist at the morgue at some point."

He took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh, appearing to gaze vaguely off across the room-- though it was impossible to tell where he was looking anyway. "Every organ that counts is messed up. My nervous system's about as shot as it gets without being a vegetable. I'm blind. And I get to enjoy this little cocktail every day..."

Lowering his hand from the gauze on his arm, he reached for his briefcase and pulled out, among all the legal papers, a leather case almost full of prescription bottles. Anti-seizure medication, steroids, blood stabilizers.

"There's usually more, but I haven't bothered replacing them since I got here."

[gaveherwings]

"Yes, you did tell me that they snatched you from the jaws of death." A slight smile, just enough to express a quietly sharp bit of cynicism- Godot had a flair for dramatizing the incident, at least, it had been the center of their previous conversations. He suspected it was a wonder the man had any trust for doctors after all.

Every organ that counts...the liver, the heart, the bowels- those would need the routine examinations.

Legally blind, perhaps, but for a man damaged eyes and damaged everything, he certainly still seemed...relatively functional. That was promising. He reached gently for either side of the visor. "...does this come off?"

Then, distracted, he raised a brow at the pills, eyes widening slightly.

And they said Regent Donov had been hanging on his last string of life. With the exception of a respirator, Godot didn't seem too far behind.

"These are the essentials?"

[beenwaitinglong]

He grinned at the jaws of death comment. "Ha...! Dramatic as I am, I wasn't exaggerating on that little detail. I never got all the details, but they were apparently on the way to the morgue when my monitor started back up again."

Godot reached up to assist him in removing the visor. It came away fairly easily, displaying his milky-looking eyes for the first time. "Clinical trial visual aid," he explained. "There's a sensor implanted in the back of my brain to pick up visual signals... I'm no eagle eye, but it works well enough." Well, unless he needed to identify colors, but that was a stupid thing to complain about when the other option involved a white cane or a dog.

He stared blankly into space and reached alongside him to feel for the tops of the prescription bottles-- each with a letter scratched into the top to help him identify them by touch. "These are the essentials," he repeated. "They said the seizures are the most dangerous. I skip the pain pills when I can, but, well... everybody has their bad days."

[gaveherwings]

"Closer calls happen here, I'm afraid." Daedalus murmured, thinking with a passing shudder of Mr. Break in his coffin. Death was cheated spottily among the newcomers. He himself had escaped what should have been an end- mortality was never really a pleasant thing to dwell upon.

He shined a funduscope's light briefly into the man's eyes, scribbled something down, then paid closer mind to his visor.

"It's probably something similar to an Autoreiv's visual pickup-" the doctor wondered aloud to himself, handing it back carefully.

"Right. These are all covered by your premium?" So many prescription bottles. "How... open are you to to idea of experimental procedure or transplants?"

[beenwaitinglong]

"I wouldn't doubt that they do." Godot slid the visor back over his eyes and the red lights flickered back on after a few seconds, his vision returned.

"My premium covers this much... nothing worse than an epileptic would get. I'm not sure about the other medications I was on because I haven't checked. As you can probably imagine, I'm not real enthusiastic about letting my premium know exactly how expensive I am."

He was quiet in thought for a moment at the question of procedures. "I'm not thrilled at the idea of anesthesia," he admitted. "And nobody back home would touch me with it anyway."

[gaveherwings]

"Right." Daedalus slid him a sideways smile, nodding quietly, flipping the charts once across the clipboard with a small wink- just to show that he was filing two copies, one for himself and one 'for the books'. A third blank form was waiting beneath those. "We've spoken about keeping your official records clean. I've prepared a few arrangements for you..."

"Luckily I have a friend in the city offices, working with the formal filing," He sighed, glancing fondly aside for a brief moment- (a friend he'd be heading home to fairly soon) "...to know what kind of tabs they actually keep (or more importantly, what they don't) when it comes to new arrivals. So never fear, our epileptic prosecutor will keep his essential medication."

Click. The third set of medical forms slid up front. Daedalus brightened, and held his pen poised, sitting back against the examination room cabinets.

"Now then, Mr..." He shot him a quick discerning look up and down. Something Re-l would recognize if it ever cropped up in her paperwork. "Cage?" He suggested, with a breezy shrug.

"Mr. Cage. I've taken liberty to set you up on the city's base policy for newcomers, which provides minimal coverage, but that's not too much of a problem, because Skye's facility isn't scoffed off as a charity operation without reason. So it's only really a question of how far you're willing to put yourself in our hands."

"Lets run through your options. No anesthesia-" He nodded lightly, making a brief notation. "What about healing alternatives- via special abilities, 'magic', or...pioneering gene therapies? Dr. Pyke, our chief director is a very liberal minded, very decent-hearted man- while we're certainly not SERO, our hospital offers full coverage for some of the more...radical treatments not yet formalized."

[beenwaitinglong]

Godot hadn't known exactly how far Daedalus was willing to go to take care of his papers, and felt a touch guilty deep down that he'd be playing the system while employed as a prosecutor of the law... but the other option was to pay out of pocket and struggle to make ends meet.

He smiled a bit, sedately. "You've been busy," he murmured. "Thanks for going to the trouble."

And as for the rest... "I don't know how much I believe in 'magic,' Doc... and I'd like to avoid feeling any more like a science project than I already am." He reached for his thermos and unscrewed the lid to pour himself a cup of coffee.

"I signed up for the visor because the worse that could happen was I stayed blind," Godot added, sipping his coffee. "It'd just be anticlimactic if I signed up for something else and ended up dead."

[gaveherwings]

Not going to give him license to play miracle worker?

And here he prided himself in cleverness with paperwork, if for the lack of...phenomenal wonders of supernatural talents (something he was growing to envy in his other coworkers). Daedalus might have visibly deflated, it he hadn't been for his carefully managed face.

"I see," the young doctor nodded, not so able to keep the slightest edge of disappointment out of his tone "that you've had your fill of cutting-edge procedure."

A sigh. Back to the clipboard, and the test results, and...a depressingly long list of problems to medicate on the city's baseline health care police. He'd...have to get creative by other means. Clearing his throat, pressing determinedly onward, he reached for the cabinet to retrieve a plastic not-for-coffee cup, passing it to Godot with a thin smile.

"Well in that case, I'll determine your secondary string of prescriptions, generics, and...we'll...work from there."

[beenwaitinglong]

Godot's smile rose a bit at the doctor's obvious disappointment, taking the cup from him with a smirk.

"I'm not the type to look a gift horse in the mouth, Doc, unless I find out he's got vampire fangs," he said, like that was supposed to explain everything. A pause, then he continued.

"Depends on the procedure. Depends on the methods. Depends what it's supposed to do. I wouldn't say no to something that would genuinely help, but I just don't know if this old wreck of a body can survive the trip to the shop, if you catch my drift."

[gaveherwings]

"No no, not here." Daedalus laughed once, before adding dryly under his breath in a darker tone of slight concern. "...although I hear the blood bank at SPGH had an attempted break-in earlier this week. It's apparently more likely than you think?"

A small shrug, along with another almost embarrassed sound on the edge of his breath. This city. This city made it very hard for a trained professional to keep up with it's pace, with its...high degree of variables. And penchant for disasters. And accidents by night.

Maybe two months wasn't nearly long enough to call oneself acclimated and flexible.

"Well, yes." He nodded, relaxing into a bit more of a comfortable posture, speaking levelly. "I'm just curious which opinions you're willing to consider. Once I have a better idea of what procedures would be worth your while- worth the risk, I'd really like to see what can be done for this 'wreck' of yours. We'll stay in contact, as opportunities come up."

"We'll have a closer look at your liver, your heart, the vitals- Get you an MRI scan, and I'll see what can be done for the seizures, talk to the boys upstairs in neurology."

[beenwaitinglong]

Godot nodded rather blankly as Daedalus went into his laundry list of future plans. He knocked down the last of his cup of coffee and screwed it back on top of the thermos. That ought to hold him for a little while.

"Well, I'd consider a lot of things. I'm not going to trump up my hopes for things that may not be possible, but I'd like to be able to walk for a while or climb a flight of stairs without being in pain," he said. "It'd be nice to feel like I'm tw... 33 and not somewhere in my eighties."

"Mostly, I'd like to wake up and know I'll still be alive at dinner should I happen to forget to take my medication at breakfast."

[gaveherwings]

It was next to impossible to not have compassion for that- that someone around Raul's age should suffer the bodily weakness of an elderly person. No one ought to suffer that.

Godot would be a challenge- perhaps not the kind to exhaust every option on, but to find the correct helps...it was, once again, the sort of situation he'd never really had to deal with in a utopia before, beyond a purely theoretical understanding of how the human system worked, interacted.

Siren's Port was certainly a test of how deserving Dr. Yumeno was of his former position, and of his present one. So many...wild cards of anomalies, with special concerns...

"That you have the continued will to live that way-" He sighed, nodding. "That's the most important thing you can contribute to your health, and the greatest expectation that I can ask of you."

Finally, most of the medications had been scribbled down- great. Now for the pharmaceutical juggling act.

"For today I'll write you a scrip for a painkiller that doesn't interfere with 'the necessaries'...the drugstore across the street communicates directly with the hospital, and they shouldn't give you any trouble. I might even be able to see about compounding a few- make some friends over there, they're good people. (The head pharmacist would probably appreciate that-)" a slight slide of eyes toward the thermos, and a quick flash of a smile "...more than me."

[beenwaitinglong]

Godot smirked again at the "will to live" comment. "Ha...! Well now, it's true I'm a walking disaster... but if there's anything certain to be said about me, it's that I'm stubborn as hell." He'd always held the theory that that was why he'd survived his attempted murder in the first place-- straight up refusal to die.

That was also what kept him going through the moments of despair he toughed out in the hospital. It would be a shame to survive this long and then waste it all in the end.

"Are there side effects?" he asked of the painkillers. "Not that I can't tough out a little drowsiness, but when you stack things up the way I do, they generally turn into 'effects.'"

"Winning people over is a strong suit of mine," he added, tapping the thermos almost lovingly. "My taste in coffee's never failed me yet."

A pause. "Well... once."

[gaveherwings]

Stubborn as hell...he knew a few people of similar defiance. The thought made him smile. People in the city were surprisingly persistent.

Doctor Yumeno nodded. "Ideally, I'm going to try and minimize side effects."

"You might experience mild numbness- fatigue...shouldn't be noticeable." he murmured, still quite astounded at...Godot's caffeine intake.

[beenwaitinglong]

"Numbness and fatigue," Godot practically scoffed. "Old friends of mine. Nothing a good cup of coffee won't take care of."

He paused briefly. "Incidentally, I'm sure the old speech about my particular methods of self-medication is on its way. I won't be offended. I've heard it quite a few times."

[gaveherwings]

At least he was sporting about that. For all his stubbornness, Godot proved a likable man- he'd expect anyone in such a position to take it less patiently, and so it seemed a little beyond him to insist on clearing up vices.

"If you've already heard it, I'll spare you." Daedalus sighed, half halfheartedly admonishing, but mostly resigned to the fact that arguing the point would get him absolutely nowhere. If many had tried before him, there was no use in pressing the point. "Since that evidently isn't going to change."