Chapter Text
“So, how long is this gonna take to heal, Doc? I worked my ass off to get into the Academy, and if I wash out in the second week because of a stupid broken ankle…”
“Relax,” McCoy said, not unkindly. “Last I checked, a recovery from a training-related accident is an excused absence. There’s no nerve damage, which is the only thing that would give you an extended recovery period. We’ll leave the osteoregenerator on overnight, and the bones should be healed by this time tomorrow. You’ll need to take a week off from intense physical training, so your brain can catch up with the notion that your body’s healed, but that’s all.”
“Thank you,” the cadet sighed, settling back into the pillows at the raised head of his bed.
“Though I will be having a word with whoever is sending cadets over a three-meter drop without an antigrav net to break falls instead of ankles,” McCoy said. “You do realize that only a hundred years ago, this injury could have been life-changing? Nobody learns a damned thing about safety when we can just patch everything up in a day.”
The cadet shrank back. “Well, it did hurt. A lot .”
“I’m sure it did, for the three minutes between when you took that fall and when you got transported straight to the Emergency Department at one of the finest medical centers on the planet. Lemme give you something to contemplate, to distract you from how badly that osteoregenerator field itches. And before you ask, no, I can’t give you something for that. What if you’d taken that same fall on an away mission during an ion storm on a freezing cold L-class planet with 25% stronger gravitational pull than Earth, and all you had for the next three days was the medkit from your shuttle and your crewmates’ medical knowledge? You think on that while you’re lyin’ there.”
McCoy watched in satisfaction as the cadet’s face paled. His work here was done.
And the universe knew it, too.
“ Incoming medical emergency, Transporter Pad Two. Human male, early twenties, not breathing; repeat, human male, not breathing, ” his pager announced.
Leonard’s mind automatically ran through protocols for a non-breathing human patient. Ensure circulation. Apply cortical stimulators to protect brain function. Establish airway. Ventilate. Then figure out why the hell a twenty-something stopped breathing, if the first three steps didn’t tell you already.
He stood at the edge of the transporter pad, along with two medical technicians who would assist him. Ten seconds later, the transporter pad hummed, and two figures appeared—one red-uniformed Starfleet cadet, kneeling over another, who was on his side.
“Move,” McCoy said, as he took the kneeling cadet’s place. There was a pulse, but the patient’s face was puffy and bluish. He put the cortical stimulators on both temporal bones. They lit up yellowish green, signaling that brain oxygenation was barely adequate.
“Ventilate him,” McCoy barked at one of the techs, who was already prepared with a ventilator mask, pressing it to the cadet’s swollen face.
“What happened?” McCoy asked the other cadet, while he ran his tricorder over the patient’s still form.
“I don’t know!” said the first cadet. “I got back to the dorm and he was just lying there! I called for emergency transport right away.”
As the scanner passed the ID chip in the cadet’s left forearm, his medical chart appeared on the screen of Leonard’s charting padd. He skipped over the demographic information and went straight to the “allergies” section. There was a long enough list there to back up the diagnosis McCoy already suspected.
“Doctor, I can’t ventilate,” said the tech.
“Epinephrine hypo, right now,” McCoy said to the other tech. “And get an autotrach kit in case his airway doesn’t open.”
The tech handed him the hypospray, which McCoy immediately dialed to the right dosage and applied to the cadet’s carotid artery.
“No change,” said the tech with the ventilator device.
“Shit,” McCoy said. “Epi’s not circulating fast enough. Gimme the trach kit.”
McCoy ripped open the kit, and poured old-fashioned liquid disinfectant over the kid’s neck. He found the landmarks, and slapped the autotrach device on, holding it in place as the device punctured the layers of skin and muscle, and parted the rings of cartilage in the trachea. The device lit up to show it had created a patent airway.
“Gimme positive pressure ventilation, 100% oxygen.”
The tech put the ventilator line into McCoy’s outstretched hand. McCoy connected it to the autotrach, which had deployed its adhesives to anchor itself to the patient’s neck. He heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the cadet’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, in time with the hissing of the ventilator.
McCoy scanned his patient again, now that the life-threatening aspect of the crisis was averted. “His epichip must be malfunctioning. Except for the one dose of epi, there’s only endogenous adrenaline in his system.”
McCoy applied the epinephrine hypospray to the patient’s neck again.
“Better,” he said, a minute later. “Let’s get him off this transporter pad and into a medical cubicle.”
As the techs carefully packaged and transferred the patient, McCoy took a moment to look at the patient’s chart. As he saw the name, he flashed a glance back towards the patient.
“Well, crap,” he said. The patient was still so swollen that he was unrecognizable as the beat-up kid from the shuttle, but the hair and the build were right. It had to be the Jim Kirk he’d barely managed not to throw up on in the shuttle from the dockyard in Iowa to the Academy, just two weeks earlier.
He looked through the chart more carefully. To say that it was not straightforward was an understatement.
“Lotta work to do here,” he muttered to himself. “A whole lotta work.”