Braken's Medical Mysteries

Posted on Wed Mar 2nd, 2011 @ 11:13am by Lieutenant Commander Jonathan Mantell & Lieutenant Kiyraesyn Valdor

Mission: Hippocratic Hijacking
Location: Away Team Camp, Braken Colony
Timeline: Backpost: Following "Braken's Scientific Quanadaries."

It was the one area that Jack had been avoiding since the call from Captain Cowell. With the Away Team now fully under his command, it was up to him to oversee all of its aspects. And although the makeshift treatment ward was the highest priority for the Away Team now, the boy had busied himself with other word, citing logistic concerns or personnel issues as an excuse. Though it had flowed freely in the first few hours, as time went by, Jack could no longer avoid his fate, and grudgingly began to make his way toward the earthbound sickbay.

It wasn't difficult to determine where the treatment ward began, though it had overflowed from its original boundaries in the short time since the Away Team had set it up. Cots and pallets began populating the prefab constructs that had been hastily fastened for that purpose, and some of the small huts were so full that patients were laid against the shadowed exterior walls. The cries and moans from within those enclosures were so intense that they acted as a kind of force field for any who were brave enough to walk by. Only the medical personnel seemed to have the courage to penetrate those fields, and as Jack passed one who hurried away from one such hut, he noticed that even they were not immune to the disturbing sights and sounds.

The boy certainly couldn't envision himself walking into one of those huts. He wasn't very fond of doctors in the first place, and his recent experience in Arizona's sickbay had warned him against the ship's doctor. It wasn't the doctors that kept him away from the mini-sickbays but the patients. It was the sick and diseased that the Miran boy was truly afraid of, something that, he supposed, had become more real with his encounter with the ill Romulan woman in the Colonial Administrator's office.

Catching one of the passing nurses clothed in a simple white smock, as the Braken colony's inhabitants had been invited to bolster the Away Team's small numbers of trained medical personnel, Jack asked the whereabouts of Doctor Valdor, the Arizona's Chief Doctor. When the nurse merely pointed, the boy's face paled. He had no intention of entering one of those death huts if he could avoid it. He grabbed the nurse by the arm, a pleading look in his eyes, and asked her, "Could you send Doctor Valdor to me?"

Moments later, Valdor's form materialised beside the XO. She hurried to kneel over him and examine his condition.

"It's alright, Commander, I'm here now." She said soothingly, scanning him with her medical tricorder. "Luckily, you haven't been contaminated-not yet, at least. I take it the care package we sent down wasn't enough."

Jack batted away the tricorder with a practiced hand, lending no doubts about his current medical status. "I'd prefer to keep it that way," he mentioned, glancing over the doctor's shoulder to the small pre-fab buildings behind her, eying them warily. The Colonial Administrator wasn't sick, and some other members of the colony had escaped sickness as well. For some reason, many of them came from industrial regions of the city. So it was obvious that there was a way to avoid getting sick, even if the Away Team hadn't figured out a foolproof method yet. Which was part of the reason why the boy had come this way. "Do you know what's contaminating them? What's making them sick?"

"Well, I had a feeling the care package wouldn't suffice, so I started to run some tests. I had Kirsgaard beam down to collect some samples and since then, I've learned that there is a particularly virulent strain of something akin to Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, running rampant around this planet. Are you familiar at all with Earth's history on this subject ?"

The boy shook his head. He knew some history, but nothing involving medicine. "No, what's the Human Immunodefinitively Virus?" he asked, his tongue not quite exactly duplicating the doctor's profusely technical words.

"Immunodeficiency," Valdor corrected, "and it means that the body's own immune system is attacking itself from the inside out."

Jack looked, with a mixed expression of shock and awe on his face, at the cots and pallets of sick colonists. For some reason, the Doctor's explanation had intrigued him. Some part of him, certainly not the Engineer, found the idea of the body being at war with itself peculiar and a curiosity. "You mean their own bodies are making them sick? What happens when their immune system wins?"

"Unfortunately, in this case, the virus is highly adaptive. Their bodies are unable to produce enough antibodies, and this particular virus has begun to attack and assimilate the white blood cells at an exponentially irreparable rate. Without a viable cure, they will die."

"Can't you just, you know," the small boy waved his hands, imitating the scans of a tricorder and the injection of hyposprays, "cure them? You're a doctor, right?"

"Alone ? No, but with enough time and study...and assistance from other doctors, anything is possible." Valdor replied with an air of genuine optimism. "We have to understand more about this virus in order to destroy it, and I'm sure we will eventually. At least, I'd like to believe we will."

"Well, I think those Science nerds are working on it," Jack replied, cluing in the doctor to her colleague's endeavors. "You could give them a hand." With that he turned and started in the other direction, keen to be away from the medical facilities here as much as on a starship.

Kiyraesyn smiled after the XO, reminded of his youthful outlook on things, despite his physical age. He truly was unique.