Profession

July

It was odd to me how easy it was to settle into work at Arkham. The faint smell of the cleaner used in the facility was familiar when I came through the checkpoint, we had a staff meeting each day at 9:15 pm each day, and the corridors and most of the patients were known to me. I easily got used to not knowing anybody's name aside from our shift's lead nurse again, even though it was odd. The nurse I spent the most time paired with turned out to be a real blessing; we spent the time where we didn't have other tasks to do going through patient files to acquaint me with patients who were inclined to act out or self-harm, learning what common triggers were, going over possible responses for various incidents. Sometimes we were assigned to the infirmary, and the doctor on duty, when there weren't any patients, helped to drill me on the treatment side of asylum nursing. This included how to restrain a patient thoroughly but with care, how to sedate a patient who couldn't--or wouldn't--control themselves, how to run screening tests, know what treatment options were most likely to be requested, and how to keep focus when there was a ruckus around us. This would be very valuable training, regardless of where I was when I used it; I could see how I could use it during the disaster sims, for example.

Even though Jon was away in London, Wally kept stopping by. I could see why; there weren't many people who were outside the superhero biz who he could talk to, and I could tell that it was a relief for him to talk about things that happened--not much detail, but everybody needs somebody to listen to them. He'd finally told his girlfriend that he was a speedster superhero, and Linda had not taken it well. They were on a hiatus until she came to terms somehow with this knowledge, and that was something that he really wanted to talk about. I didn't have a lot of experience, but I was learning a lot about psychiatric treatments, and I knew that depression could often be relieved at least in part by someone who would listen non-judgmentally. One night Wally had only had one pizza of the three I'd ordered; he'd usually have two and a half. One was barely enough to keep him going. He was feeling adrift with Jon gone, even though they still saw  each other up at the Watchtower and talked regularly. I understood, I missed him too. It's just better when the other person was there, and Wally was feeling adrift professionally--he'd been passed over for a promotion because it was hard to explain away his superhero absences and they thought he was flaky, plus the thing with Linda, and his parents were fading from his life. He wasn't that upset by that particular distance, but thought he should be, so there was a lot going on. Flash and Iris were expanding their family, and although he was happy for his aunt and uncle, he was feeling kind of squeezed out from his main support. I encouraged him to stop by whenever he wanted and added his biometric markers to the gate so he could stop by for a snack even if I wasn't here. I bought a chest freezer, had it installed in the basement, and filled it with nutritious, easy-to-heat meals so that Wally wouldn't have to go hungry. Or Jon, when he came home. He ate a lot too.

I had started my second week of my contract when Alfred came by one afternoon. He had a kit he'd come up with in the cave to treat kryptonite poisoning--the standard treatment for green K, which could kill a Kryptonian, red K, which produced unpredictable but temporary symptoms, golden K, which could permanently rob a Kryptonian of their powers. Blue and white forms didn't affect Kryptonians, at least. I listened carefully to the treatment protocols which were effective on Superman and would be for Jon as well; in this, his human genes helped to protect him, keeping the kryptonite from being as severe as it was for his dad. It still affected him like radiation poisoning, but the time he could be treated in was longer. There was also a kryptonite scalpel, which was the only thing that could cut through impervious Kryptonian skin. It came in a shielded and sealed case. One of the treatments included a special lightbulbs that perfectly emulated sunlight. I started to work on a lighting harness that would provide the high-dose energy a Kryptonian would need to help fight off the effects of kryptonite.