Fic: A Good Man, Ch 2
If people had it their way, Leonard McCoy would be witness to more than 8,521 immaculate conceptions.
The girls that give these virgin births all fit the basic description of Mary too, which is to say that they’re all young. And scared. So scared that they deny ever having sex with anyone. The first time a girl vigorously shook her head when he asked “have you had sexual intercourse with anyone in the past five months,” Leonard gaped. It was the second week in his residency and he was learning the ropes, doing grunt work in the ER. The second time, he laughed. The third (all of these were in the same week), he got worried. The amusing part of the whole thing went away real fast.
These girls are scared. Leonard doesn’t ask what kind of education they’ve got (“you know that’s not physically possible, right?”), he doesn’t ask what kind of home they’re from (“does your mom know about this?”). He doesn’t ask about the neighborhood they live in or whether their boyfriend treats them right. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the different signs, and the folks that generally come to this hospital usually struggle to make ends meet.
Some of these girls are victims of rape. The doctors and psychiatrists try to encourage them to report it to the authorities, but they’re usually too traumatized and afraid to do anything like that. Some’re hooked on this or that illegal drug and Leonard knows at the bottom of his soul that they shouldn’t be mothers. Some are just innocent, unlucky girls. It’s the first time, and now they’re pregnant. Others are in denial. They know exactly how and when things went down, but they don’t want to admit it. Leonard learns fast that he’s gotta press the ‘off’ button on his emotions, else he’ll go crazy trying to help these girls. His job is to tell them the truth and their options. He takes tricorder readings to check for any venereal diseases (he thanks God that the tests aren’t invasive anymore, like they were in the old days), gives them meds, and passes them on to another doctor. A specialist here, a psychologist there, a rape counselor, a drug rehab center.
He’s required to tell the girls all their options. They can keep the child. They can keep it and raise it, they can keep it and give it up for adoption. They can abort it. Whatever they choose, all the options are intensely emotional and life changing for the girls. They’re already scared and they want this nightmare to be over. A lot of them want him to make the choice for them. Once, a girl listened silently as he gave his usual spiel, crying the whole time. Afterwards, she looked at him with puffy red eyes and asked “what should I do? Tell me what I should do.”
He had received training for all this, but the first time it happens, it hits him like a punch to his gut. It occurs to him that this girl might not have a father, or a mother, or anyone to turn to. She’s alone, with a life growing inside her. She can’t be more than seventeen years old.
And for some reason that he still can’t pin down, he got mad. He got mad at her for putting him on the spot with a question like that, he got mad that she was alone, he got mad that the world was such a cold, indifferent place. He got mad at her because he’s a doctor, and it hurts him to kill or harm life in any way. He understands the need for abortion. Asking a raped woman to carry to term the child of her attacker is insane. Asking a woman to carry to term a child that’s destined to die because of some genetic hiccup is hell too. Barring things like that, he hates the idea of abortion. He’s seen enough death that any life is a wonderful thing. But Leonard also knows that he’s also not this young, scared girl whose life might change depending on what a random stranger who happens to have a medical degree says. Where’s her mother? Where’re her friends? Who the hell am I that not one, but two lives rest in my hands?
It made him do some serious soul searching, mostly with a bottle of whiskey. Jill noticed (she always noticed) his mood and offered what comfort she could. In the end, Leonard didn’t resolve any issues or find the answer to all things. He simply got used to it, to the point where it was just a normal day in the ER. People die, they live, they survive, they give up. He was amazed by how helpless he was in it all. Sure, he might correctly diagnose some rare case of paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, then another patient would go into cardiac arrest.
It’s a battle against death and disease, and Leonard fights it every way he can. When he was younger and first starting out, he was determined (like all young doctors that work in the ER) to save every damn life. It wasn’t realistic (they told him this) but he’d find a way. He’d reinvent the way people did medicine. They already tried to do it with machines (people hated that. There’s something about being looked after by another human that just can’t be simulated by a robot, no matter their accuracy and precision)-he’d make crazy surgical techniques. He’d find the bullet cure, the magic pill that dissolved away all pain (well, dissolved away the pain and wasn’t extremely addictive or cause ten thousand harmful side effects). The world would be a better place.
And then reality hit him. The reality that you can do anything and everything, but if the man doesn’t want to live, he just doesn’t want to live. Leonard McCoy learned some things about life, the heart and soul of it, that he didn’t learn in his anatomy book or the textbooks. The human body is like a machine, with all its various parts and pieces. One thing breaks down, others might follow or not. It depends. A surgeon goes in like a mechanic and fixes it up. The patient might recover or not. It depends. A man suffers a concussion and loses half his memory. He forgets his children, job, friends, family, everything. Who is he, deep down inside? The woman on the surgery table getting a bone marrow transplant, who is she?
The human body is like a machine with a heart. The mind can be damaged, the body can rot, the bones can wither away. Too many things can go wrong with the physical organ of the heart too. But Leonard knows that a person is his heart. A person is her will to live, or her desire to die. A girl silently cries as she decides in her heart to keep the baby. Another resolves to abort it. Some of these girls come back into the hospital days later as corpses. They were so scared and alone that they decided to kill themselves, rather than face the terror of the unknown. Some of these girls come back to the hospital wailing in pain as the contractions hit them like a tsunami.
Leonard wasn’t very religious when he started this. Sure, he went to church and got baptized, took part in communion and listened to the preacher. He tried to live an honest life.
Being a doctor changed things. He doesn’t know the Bible as well as he should, and he still has far too many sins he hasn’t taken care of. But he knows a verse. It’s neither here nor there, Leonard thinks. For some reason, it still resonates in his heart.
Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped,
and said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.