Practicing Medicine // Complete

Chapter Eight: The Sanitarium

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STATUS

Battery Level: 12%

Wireless Signal: (?)

Operating Temperature: 92F

HEALTH

BP: 124/90

SPO2: 100%

Temp: 98.5F

RR: 15

HR: 80

TIME

Day: 25 SEP. 2279

Time: Far Too Fucking Late.

CLIMATE

Current Temperature: 73 F

Atmospheric Pressure: 732 mm

Background Radiation: 0.231 RAD

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The lights were flickering- the air was hot. Every fan in the building was whirring at full speed, and the wind outside was howling, shaking the rickety wooden windows and blasting through the corrugated metal roof. Inside the grimy hospital room, little streaks of black, drying blood dripped down aluminum cots, where the morphine was flooding in through plastic IVs- clear liquid draining through clear, twisting tubes.

And I was really, really tired.

My prediction about this being the longest night in my life had turned out to be right on the bottle-caps. Over the course of the last few hours, I'd worked with Gram and Jas to get all of the patients into the barracks, pulled together an operating room, and tried to keep my errant patients from getting hurt any further. Tried not to hurt myself any further either, what, with all the bruises I'd gathered during the chaos. I bruised real easy in some spots on account of that thing that I don't like to talk about.

Blinking away sleep, I surveyed the group. The least serious case was Cook; a couple of messed up ribs, nothing more. She gave me a friendly wave as I walked past her bedside.

"Howdy Cook. Painkillers working?" I asked, checking her morphine I.V. I'd decided on the dosage I needed using an old trick my father had taught me: one tenth of a milligram IV per 1 kilogram, with subsequent doses at half that number. Only complication I was worried about here would the respiratory depression of the morphine mingling with the possible respiratory distress from gettin' her lungs hurt, but as it stood that was a non-issue.

"Mhm- Actually, I think I feel better than I did before the deathclaw threw a table at me!" She gave me a coy little smile. "But, you know, if you wanted to up the dosage a little, I wouldn't complain..."

"Ain't worth a prayer," I said. She stuck out her bottom lip.

"Why not?"

"Well, cause clean Morphine powder is expensive! Hell, you'd have to be crazy to think I'd waste my caps getting you extra high!" She laughed at that- well, tried to laugh at it, but let out this awful cough-laugh instead, which descended into a fit of loud, dry coughs. She was clutching at her chest when it was finally over, and her head was hanging back. She wasn't smiling no more.