general clinic log

[testsonseashells]

Who: Drs. Solus or Strider, various patients.
What: Echo checkups
When: Whenever
Where: LSR clinic

The LSR clinic, despite its run-down, beat-up appearance, is actually fairly clean on the inside. Lit by white fluorescent lights, it's generally pretty empty, with the occasional non-network patient coming in to get something looked at. A volunteer is usually found running the front desk, organizing papers and responding to phone calls, while Dr. Solus and Dr. Strider take care of the actual medical business.

The waiting room is barebones compared to other clinics and medical practices - LSR doesn't have the money to get entertainments for the waiting patients, so all that's available are a few chairs.

When it's your turn for an appointment, whoever's at the desk will direct you down a hallway to the left, and you will meet one of the doctors.

[ooc: general clinic log! all checkups for crazy echoes can take place here. specify dr. solus or dr. strider in the subject line.]

Comments

[gogoghostpowers]

"Holy magic. Huh. Okay then." Danny doesn't have much else to add to that, either, because by this point all of his skepticism about magic and aliens and superpowers had been completely worn down by nearly six months of nonstop weirdness.

Danny flexes his arm a few times, bending it up and down, up and down at the elbow a couple of times just to get used to the feel of the bandages. Ravi's question distracts him, though, and he drops the arm, forearm hitting his thigh (which causes him to wince a little at the contact with the injury, but he gets over it pretty quickly).

An x-ray? He considers the offer. It seems a little excessive, especially now that he's all bandaged up and in (semi-)decent condition again. But...when else is he going to get a chance to check this stuff out? And if he's missing something as vital as skeletal structure, isn't it worth checking out to see what else might be going on?

"Actually--yeah, I think that might be a good idea."

[healspec]

AND THEN AN X-RAY HAPPENED. And while they waited for it to come back, Ravi gave Danny some print-outs for wound care instructions, including how to change his bandages (which he would need to do every 12 hours), and went over it with him to address any questions he might have.

When the x-ray did come back, it...sure was a torso-shaped blob of uniform cloudy whiteness. Ravi stared at it for a long moment, arms half-folded, one hand over his mouth. He couldn't decide what to say. And, well, even somebody who didn't really understand x-rays could tell that this wasn't what one was supposed to look like, so he wasn't sure he even needed to explain it.

It wasn't the first time he'd seen impossible shit due to echoes, and it obviously wasn't life-threatening, so he didn't think it was something they needed to be concerned over.

He really, really wants to make a joke about this, but wow that would be wildly inappropriate.

[gogoghostpowers]

Danny reads over the instructions a couple times over. This shouldn't be too bad to take care of, although he thinks he might have to find a dumpster somewhere in the city to toss all his used bloody bandages--he doesn't want to risk his parents somehow seeing weird green blood.

While Ravi fetches the x-ray, Danny puts away the instructions in the pocket of his hoodie, hoping that the blood-soaked (and rapidly stiffening) hoodie won't stain the instructions too. But that's something to worry about later--right now Ravi's got the x-rays. Danny moves closer to see it and stops dead in his tracks.

"Huh. That's...that's not supposed to look like that, is it." Danny is pretty sure x-rays are supposed to have like white blotches in the shapes of bones, not just...weird cloudiness.

He already did it once but he checks again, gripping his good wrist and squeezing. He does the same to his hand and his fingers. "I don't get it, though--it feels like I have bones and stuff there."

[healspec]

"A person, no. But it is the best x-ray of a mannequin I ever have seen." HE'S JOKING but he deadpanned that so well it may be hard to tell.

He looks over at Danny, lowering his hand from his face but keeping it close to his chest. "Echoes can be very strange. If you feel fine, probably there is nothing to worry about. If something changes, come back and we will take another look."

[gogoghostpowers]

He nods. "Yeah...okay."

Danny lowers his injured hand and delicately pulls his sweater sleeve over it to hide the bandages. "So, um. I-is that it?"

[healspec]

Well, that's everything Danny came here for, at least. But Ravi looks at the x-ray again, regarding it thoughtfully. It's true he couldn't sense any bones or anything in Danny's arm, but he didn't check for internal organs... Maybe the green whatever-it-is is somehow interfering with the X-ray and giving a false signal?

He is definitely too tapped-out to try the magic-sonogram technique to check for internal organs, so he'll have to go with the old stand-by. "Ah--let me check something, actually." He takes the stethoscope from around his neck and motions for Danny to lift his shirt.

He wants to listen for a heartbeat and breathing, see how that sounds.

[gogoghostpowers]

"Oh, uh, sure."

This is typical enough. Danny isn't fully aware of the medical reasoning behind it, but he's pretty sure doctors are supposed to pull out the stethoscope at every appointment, or else they lose their medical license or something.

He goes to pull up the sweater. It takes a little bit of fighting with it, given how stiff it's gotten from all the ectoplasm it's soaked up, but sure enough the crunchiness yields and he manages to pull it up to reveal his bare torso.

[healspec]

He's not a doctor tho!!!

Of course the stethoscope is freezing. Of course.

He tries to find a heartbeat first, but can't. It doesn't sound like there's much of anything going on in there at all, honestly. Which is puzzling, but intriguing, and his face reflects that. He moves the stethoscope to Danny's back with a softly given, "Breathe in," command, listens, shifts to the other side of his back, command given again, listens again.

Finally satisfied, he straightens and steps back, returning the stethoscope to its former position around his neck. "Well." Pause, he looks Danny in the face and gives a mild shrug. "It sounds like you are legally dead. I can't hear anything."

[gogoghostpowers]

Danny lurches forward a bit in disbelief.

"I'm--I'm what?" His voice hasn't even dropped yet, but it still cracks there. Amazing, how that can happen, isn't it?

[healspec]

Whoops, he feels bad about saying it that way, now. He looks a bit cornered, gives Danny a guilty, half-apologetic smile.

He falls back on the patient/caretaker setting to figure out what to say. It's okay if he glosses over the personal aspect in this situation. "You have no heartbeat or lung function. Obviously you still are here, but if I saw that on a chart I would think it was a dead patient."

[gogoghostpowers]

He doesn't believe it. That makes absolutely no sense! He still breathes, he still has a heartbeat, he can't possibly be dead! But just in case...Danny puts two fingers up to his neck, right under the jaw. He keeps them there for several seconds, moving them around to try and find the 'sweet spot' where he can feel his pulse. Then he switches sides. His face goes from disbelief to horror.

"Oh my god. I-I don't--I don't have a heartbeat! I'm actually dead." Sure, the arm was an ugly affair, but he didn't think Shiro had killed him!

[healspec]

"Ah..." No Danny please don't freak out about this, he doesn't really know how to handle that situation.

"My...roommate is a vampire?" he offers, hopeful. "He has no heartbeat either, and he is doing alright."

WAIT THAT PROBABLY WOULDN'T HELP AT ALL, talking about his vampire roommate was just grounds for Danny to think Ravi was saying HE was a vampire now too.

[gogoghostpowers]

"He--w-what?!" He drops his hands to his chest and starts feeling around, as if that will help him find his heartbeat. "I'm not a vampire, am I?! A dead vampire?!"

[healspec]

Yep, wrong direction... He is regretting his word choice so badly right now. Can he just bail on this and forget it happened? That'd be great--but, sigh, it'd also be really poor patient care, so no he cannot do that.

"Probably not." ...Aren't vampires dead by nature, anyway? He chooses not to comment on the redundancy. "What I mean to say is that probably it isn't anything to worry about."

[gogoghostpowers]

Danny feels as though his heart is racing with this revelation, but he can't feel it at all, which only confirms it even further: yup, definitely deceased. It's still kind of hard to really wrap his head around, though, almost too unreal to be true. His hand drops from his chest to land limply in his lap.

"I...I guess not. I do feel--" well, he certainly doesn't feel fine "--like I'm not dying or anything."

[healspec]

Whew, issue settled. For now. Maybe. Echoes were unpredictable so there was always a chance something might go horrifically wrong in regards to this in the future.

"If anything changes, come back and we will take a look at it."

[gogoghostpowers]

"O-okay. Yeah. I'll just--try and keep an eye out for anything." Danny nods and pushes himself off his seat and hopping down a little to the floor. "Um. Th-thanks for the bandages and the checkup and stuff."