graves (violentgraves) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-10-22 01:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2018 [09] september, jacob graves, mary-june greenling |
Who: Jacob and Babs
Where: LBJ
What: initial checkup
When: Backdated to when he first arrived
Nothing was simple in the quarantine rooms at LBJ. Babs worked alone, she had little help those days as she set up the clinic once more and tried to get a handle on it all. Becoming the head of health wasn’t exactly Babs’ dream, but hell- she didn’t do well with people less qualified than her ordering her around. In the army she’d at least had ranks and titles to help her know that the doctors and admins in charge were qualified. Here? Not so much.
She was halfway through getting all the medical records (as poor as they were) and some medical textbooks into her small office so she could lock them up, when someone came sprinting around the corner.
“Captain Greenling- we need you,” the person said. Babs looked up and at the sight of the sweating and blood on the man’s sleeves, she began to sprint to. She was led to one of the quarantine rooms, and began to wonder just how much damage one of the supply runners had gotten.
What if it was Olivia?
Babs cast the idea out, entering the room and saying a strange, hurt man.
She went to the cot and kneeled next to it, looking at the man and examining his eyes and wound before shouting out curt orders about what to bring her for cleaning, stitching, and helping with swelling.
“My name is Captain Greenling, I’m a nurse. What’s your name?” she asked him, wanting to hear his verbal skills.
Jacob really hadn't seen that sort of thing coming, and he was a little taken aback by the young woman barking orders. And she was a Captain, and he didn't think that was her first name. So, he was dealing with military, which he guessed was alright right up until it wasn't.
“...hi, Cap,” he said first. “Jacob Graves. The president is no one in particular right now, unless you count blondie out there, and have you seen a girl with dark hair, teenager, goes by Lily Graves?” he asked, because that was always his top priority.
He winced faintly as he shifted. When people had looked at his wound, they'd poked at it a little and now it was reminding him that it was painful and untended. He hadn't been able to do anything with it, considering its location.
Okay, so he wasn’t totally out of it. Babs could work with that. She was handed a bare of scissors and began to cut at Jacob’s clothes were the injuries were, wanting to see them before she applied some basic first aid- later she’d have a male volunteer do a full search without any clothes, but that was for later.
“Mr. Graves. I’m going to have one of these nice men go ask about Lily. I need you to tell me what happened, okay? To the best of your ability. We’re going to get you comfortable,” she said. Babs had a very direct way of doing things- she knew what her end goal was, she knew how to get there, and she knew the only thing standing in her way were the people around her.
People were a problem. They didn’t listen, the lied, they tried to look better than they were. She didn’t give a damn if someone didn’t know how to do something in her clinic, but lying about it and trying to guess would get people hurt. She didn’t care if someone had gotten hurt because they’d fallen out of the bed during sex- she needed the truth. Maybe that was why Babs tended to send people away as she worked. Less noise. Less distractions.
“Hey, I liked that shirt,” Jacob protested, frowning a little, but he didn't actually try to stop her. He just sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose slightly as if he was forming a headache. “Hope you have something for me to wear when you're done, because I don't have much with me,” he added.
“You can drop the 'Mr.'. It's either Jacob or Graves,” he said, so she'd know what to call him. Or what he preferred, anyway. He eyed her with a skeptically raised brow. “Anyone ever tell you your bedside manner could use a little sunshine?” he asked rhetorically, sarcasm in his voice. Truthfully he didn't care, he was a blunt person at the best of times, but he was also someplace he had no experience with, and he was thinking making himself feel less like patient zero would be helpful.
“I was trying to find a place to hole up for the night before I kept going. This was about a week back. And I hit a trap.” He shifted and felt the red, infected rake up the back of his ribs on the right side pull. It wasn't pleasant. He'd also had worse in his time so he was only mildly worried about it. He knew it felt wrong, hot, and he knew it was a wound that wept, but he'd been alone and hadn't been able to treat it.
Some people, before things got worse and worse, set up traps in places they were holed up in. Jacob had done it a lot himself. This one had just been especially well hidden, he was guessing whoever had set it had done so not for zombies but to fend off raiders. It had been simple, really, and would have killed him if he'd been a little slower. Instead, a big ass blade sliced through his back.
Jacob was calling it a win. He'd walked away.
“Blade – looked clean enough, it had been sharpened, no rust. I wasn't able to do much for the wound by myself. And I'm fine. I don't need to be made comfortable. Spray some Bactine on it if you've got it, and send me on my way.”
“Anyone ever tell you it’s a bad idea to act macho when a medical professional is trying to help, Jacob?” Babs fired right back. One of the few pleasures of the disintegration of hospitals- no one was going to yell at her for being rude to patients. “What happened when you got trapped?” she asked She looked at the wound- it did need to be disinfected. This was exactly why she’d told Savannah she needed alcohol. In an ideal situation she would have used it to help sterilize, given that actual disinfectants were becoming hard to come by. Brandy would have worked- hell, vanilla extract would have worked.
“Did you hit your head? Neck? Look, you’re going to be stuck with me for most of today no matter what. Hiding details can kill, and I’m going to have to give you a full exam for bites anyways.” It wasn’t just that Babs had shitty bedside- it was just that she didn’t care. Once she had, once she had really tried to have a good relationship with patients. But reality had ruined that for her, and no one liked the nice nurse who smiled too much when a family member was dead or when bad news was being given.
She’d learned that most people- okay, smart people- prefered to have the bull cut.
“It's not machismo,” Jacob said. “And I got hit. It wasn't a containment trap, just something left to fuck up anyone's day who went into that room. I'm guessing it was where someone had slept for a while, and they didn't bother disarming it before they left. So, I got hit, I tried to clean it but again – I wasn't able to pull that off well.”
He eyed her as she worked, and then started in on him about hiding details. He gave a half smirk. “Watch too much House back in the day?” he asked. “I'm not hiding anything. Assume your standard shit went down while I traveled across the states to get here from Detroit. I haven't been bit.”
Jacob didn't let his attention wander from her. “So bruises, scrapes, fights, malnutrition, dehydration, and yes. Fairly recently, I fucked up my knee,” he said. His knee was swollen, something that could be told through his jeans, even, and he had wrapped something around it to try and help brace it, but he was not super great at that kind of thing.
Babs hated House. Hated it; she had gritted her teeth every time someone said she looked like the ‘pretty doctor’ on that show, hated how people thought that was how medicine worked. It wasn’t, she could promise you that. But then again, she’d take a House comparison to a question about how realistic Grey’s Anatomy was.
“No, actually, that show was airing mostly while I was serving in the Middle East. Not a lot of TV time, just a lot of guys trying to be tough,” Babs said, her teeth grit enough to show in the angles of her jaw. She didn’t have a stool or chair to sit on, and so she knelt before Jacob and looked at his knee, rolling the pants up to take a quick look before raising a brow. “You know I’m going to need you to take your pants off,” Babs said, already guessing at a sprain. But she’d need to feel it and really see it to make that call.
Okay, so he had a swollen knee. Cut up back. Older head trauma. She made a quick mental list and gathered what she needed to stitch and wrap the wound, deciding the knee could be on the bottom of her list.
“Ever been stitched without medication?” she asked. She had a small bottle of hand sanitizer for herself, latex gloves, and the supplies on a plate that had been washed and disenfected. Cleanliness was something Babs wouldn’t, and couldn't, do without in the clinic. “I need you to lay on your stomach,” she said.
Maybe Graves’ comments got to her a little bit. Maybe she just wanted him to be distracted while she worked cleaning him up and fixing him up. But she spoke again, less of a strain to her words.
“Tell me about Lily.” She almost said Olivia, which was dumb. Olivia wasn’t her freaking kid.
“Thank you for your service,” Jacob told her, without any sarcasm. He meant that. He may not get along with authorities, but he'd considered the military himself. His conviction hadn't allowed him to though.
He sighed and shook his head at himself. “Pants. Right.” He reached for his belt, not comfortable with this, by any stretch of the imagination, but oh well. He paused when she asked if he'd ever been stitched up without medication, and he nodded. “Yes.” When you got fucked up during a job that was a whole lot of not legal, you didn't go to the hospital, you got a sewing kit and did that shit yourself. Also, when he'd been in prison, there'd been one particularly bitchy nurse that really didn't like the convicts.
He didn't take his pants off first, going instead for lying on his stomach like she asked. Jacob's back had a lot of scars on it. Some of them very old. His life had been rough before he'd ever had to deal with zombies. He paused before he continued, thinking about his daughter. “She was always a girl who knew how to take care of herself. I made sure that she knew how to throw a punch. She wasn't ever a girly kind of girl, either, always playing in the dirt and climbing trees. She was more interested in hands on anything than playing with dolls.” His voice had taken on a lighter tone, talking about his daughter.
As hard as Babs was on patients, she’d never cause them harm on purpose. She wasn’t Nurse Ratched, after all. Even drunk frat boys with a bullet in the leg who flirted with her before vomiting had gotten morphine, and she hated that she didn’t have at least a stiff drink to help the guy.
His back was a patchwork quilt, and Babs was aware that she’d asked him to become vulnerable only after his voice went softer. She’d ripped his clothes, she’d asked him to undress, and then asked him to open up about his kid. That was all peeling back layers, and Babs knew that she wouldn’t have liked it happening to herself. Which was maybe why she was such a bad patient whenever she was hurt. It was hard to keep that empathy up, in particular when Jacob was hardly the last person she’d have to strip down in some way that day.
Her gloved hands skirted the skin near the wound, she looked at the way the skin had been sliced, where it needed to be cleaned.
“How old?” she asked. I was like that, Babs bit back the words. Remembering who she’d been before San Francisco, before the Middle East, before world ended helped no one.
He noticed she hadn't acknowledged his thank you for her service, and wondered if it didn't matter anymore, with everything gone. But he didn't ask. Instead, he was quiet for a long moment, letting her poke around, gritting his teeth when she touched somewhere tender. The wound was infected as hell, he knew.
“Eighteen,” he answered. “Probably a really feisty eighteen.” He hoped she was. That she still had that rebellious nature, that the zombies hadn't robbed her of everything. He hoped that he didn't find some shell. You won't. She'll be fine. She's your daughter, and she'll be okay.
Babs wasn’t sure if service counted anymore. She had done something a long time ago, it had given her skills. That was great. But no one gave a crap anymore, there were no more wars to be fought. Just zombies. She didn’t even feel like she had the right to accept a thank you- she’d watched her husband, and infantry man, die before her. It was like biting into a bad cherry tomato.
Probably. Interesting.
“When was the last time you saw her?” she asked as she started the long, painful process of cleaning. When she thought he might be done speaking, she kept asking question, kept pressing him on for more information to get his mind to focus on something else.
He waited until the first wave of pain subsided to dull instead of sharp before he answered. Maybe it was more infected than he had initially thought. It felt too tender. “Two years ago. She left with her mother for here, and I was in Detroit,” he answered, though didn't embellish. He understood what was happening here. She probably didn't give a shit about Lily, or anything about him, she was keeping him thinking about something that wasn't his wounds being treated without so much as a shot of rot gut whiskey to take the edge off.
“There gonna be any quid pro quo here, Cap?” he asked.
“Quid pro quo? You wanna stab me and then sew me up?” Babs asked, actually laughing for a moment. She didn’t like how the wound looked, but she’d seen worse than this. She could work with it. The cleaning took care, and there were plenty of wasted cloth scraps covered in pus and blood by the time she felt it was finally ready for a real stitch. “I’m a bad patient,” she said, not even thinking about how Graves might mean that she should say something personal back.
Babs had barely told anyone anything about herself. Day knew her through Brian. Savannah knew her through the now dead shelter leader. Same with Maizie. She liked the wall.
He quirked a half smile. “Well that hadn't been my plan per se...” he teased in return. “Plus I'm shit at stitching. You can see the ragged scar on my left bicep for proof on that,” he said. He'd done it enough times that he could get it done, but yeah, he wasn't any good at it. It was servicable when he did it, not pretty.
When she said she was a bad patient, he took it. “Yeah? Is it because you know everything too well so someone else tending to you won't do it how you would? Or some other reason?” he asked. He'd known people like that in his past. People who just couldn't stand to watch someone do something for them when they thought they knew better.
Hell. he might even have a little of that going on.
Babs did look at it, a brow raised at how the scar itself had healed. It looked like he’d really done it himself, which was impressive but Babs wasn’t about to tell him that and think it was alright to take medical care into your own hands. Well- not when stitches were needed.
His question threw her for a moment. Her hands were still before she formulate three different answers, and finally picked one. The true one, funny enough. Her hands went back to his skin, and the needle gently began to push.
“No, I just think I can do it myself and that there’s no need to make a fuss about it. Besides, I don’t stay still,” it wasn’t an energy thing. It was a usefulness thing. Staying still, staying in bed or on the couch all day, just staying seemed lazy. Babs couldn’t stand lazy people, she couldn’t stand the idea of just being without purpose. Having a purpose meant thinking about it, instead of thinking about herself and her flaws.
Jacob grit his teeth at the feel of the needle, and shut his eyes, listening to her voice, taking in her words as he dealt with the pain. He had a pretty decent pain tolerance. But that didn't mean that pain wasn't still pain, it just meant he wasn't crying out or anything.
“Too much pent up energy?” he asked. “And I get thinking you can do it yourself. I'm not really someone who takes help a whole lot.” Sure, part of it was just he may have a touch of cockiness in him, but the rest was just he was built to be self reliant. In his life, he'd taken care of other people not the other way around.
She skipped the question about energy as she focused on weaving the man’s skin back together. He was doing a good job, he wasn’t squirming and she could commend him for that. And he was talking, that was good; she remembered in her old medical textbooks discussing the history of how health had changed through the years. One had talked about how when a patient passed out, that meant the doctors had gone too far.
It had seemed barbaric to her. Now she understood that there had just been no other way.
“It’s a bad habit to have, not asking for help,” Babs said in the most non committal way she could. It wasn’t accusing, just a note. Babs didn’t ask for personal help- hell, it was half the reason why her marriage had failed so spectacularly. “Do you know where she is? Lily? You don’t have to tell me where.”
“Or it's a survival trait, because there's no one around to ask,” Jacob countered. “And not yet. I'm trying to find her. I just got here, so I'm hoping that I can get a good lead soon,” he said. “Beyond that, this is the first place I found. I've seen places like this out in the rest of the states. This one looks well run, though. So far.”
Not that he'd been there long. He'd just arrived. He had to work out what the hell was the deal with Austin as a whole, find his daughter, and figure it out from there. It wasn't going to be easy.
Okay. So conversation was happening, Babs could do this. She was working diligently on the stitches, the end was almost in sight for the man. She could only imagine the sort of relief that would have to bring the man, for her to stop and pull back and then work on something she couldn’t jab with a needle.
"I was at an Arizona camp before this. They ran it like Survivor, I got kicked off the island," Babs didn't say it for pity, it was just fact. She's gotten hurt, then punched the leader's daughter in the face. Popular move. She didn’t overly regret it, the woman had been asking for it in Babs’s own mind.
“I've come across a few places on the way here that seemed like that,” he said. “Pretty sure I wouldn't have made the cut either,” he added. “Though can't say I see the wisdom of booting someone with medical training,” he said. That just seemed massively stupid. Sure, she didn't seem like a sunshine and rainbows kind of gal, but who gave a damn about that when she obviously knew what she was doing medically?
“Doesn't seem like it's run that way here,” he added. Seemed like a much more stable place.
“I punched someone in the face. Opposite of medical aid.” The further they got from asking about Babs and talking more about shelters, the more comfortable the nurse became. She smoothed bandages over the newly closed wound, and began to tape it on, making a mental note to write down the date and time, so she could hassel him later about getting new bandages put on.
“No, here there’s a lot of order. Departments, people leading one another in small ways. Freaking democracy,” she didn’t mention the bit where she doubted that Savannah had held an election for herself, instead she kept her mouth shut on that and pulled back a bit so that Graves could move. “How long ago was this hit to the head?” she asked. She wished she had a small flashlight, she wished she had a MRI. Jesus, she wished she had a M.D. so that she could speak with more authority. Everyone knew nurses were capable, and she’d done more than most. But that little itch at the back of her mind that reminded her of hospital rules.
Then again, this was her clinic. Her domaine.
“Some people just deserve to get punched,” he said, shrugging at that. “Just because you're a medical professional doesn't make you not human. I've never met anyone in my life who didn't want to haul off and bash someone's teeth in occasionally.”
“Not big on democracy?” he asked, arching a brow at her other statement. But he had to think when she asked when it had happened, and he didn't quite know the answer. “Honestly I'm not that sure. I don't even know what day it is anymore, and time runs together. Long enough ago that I imagine I shouldn't be getting headaches still.”
Headaches. Charming. Babs frowned, ignoring the question on democracy. She knew what a concussion could do, even a mild one. She still had migraines she couldn’t help but blame on the one her husband had given her during a friendly touch football game turned rough.
“How often do you get these headaches?” Babs asked. She asked a lot of questions, about symptoms and lengths, and how often. In fact, Babs began to write her answers down, wondering if she ought to tell him to go to the hospital post haste and get a doctor to go over this with her. She wasn’t a neurologist after all.
“Graves- Jacob. This isn’t really good,” Babs understated. “If we were in a fully functional hospital, I’d be telling a doctor to order a headscan and asking for you stay overnight for observation. But we’re not. If there’s permanent damage to your brain, I can’t do jack, and I don’t have enough meds to help you with those headaches. But I would like to observe you with one of those headaches. That’s all I can do.”
Jacob hadn’t been overthinking his headaches. Mostly because he couldn’t do shit about them, and he already had a goal - get to his daughter. The headaches were backburnered, and he just dealt with them as best as he could when they hit, and they did hit hard.
“I don’t know...sometimes it seems like every few days, then I’ll go a while without one,” he said, shrugging. “I know, that’s unhelpful. And you sure that it’s that bad? Talk to me about permanent brain damage.” Which was the scariest sentence he’d heard in a long, long time.
“Well, I’m not a neurologist, so my knowledge is basic. But post-concussion syndrome could cause things like headaches, dizziness, some other symptoms- which can span from a few weeks to a few years. They can cause personality changes, issues dealing with emotional situations. Memory loss, vision issues… brain damage has long term issues. Lots of medical studies on NFL players showed us what getting rammed on the head did to them,” she said.
That nagging voice in her mind told her to be kinder. To consider how scared this man was. For once, she followed it.
“I wouldn’t worry just yet. Headaches we can deal with. Unless you’re showing other symptoms, I think just some observation for now.”
Well, that was all terrifying. He didn't know that he thought it was that bad but the truth was he didn't know. He'd been too focused on moving forward that he'd really lost track of how often he did have any symptoms, and for all he knew, his disorientation with the days was due to other factors, not just not adhering to a calendar anymore.
Her last bit did help a little, though he couldn't help but feel a twist in his gut about the other possibilities. “So I report symptoms to you?” he asked. “And does observation mean you want me back in here every so often, or are we talking quarantine?”
“Back here, I don’t have room to quarantine you that long term,” Babs said, standing up and pulling a chair away from the wall so she could sit on it. “Look, if I had the best case scenario I would grab a doctor to take a longer exam with you, and you’d be here for a week. But I can’t do that- I can tell you what my number is and tell you to contact me the second you don’t feel well,” she said, jotting down the number that synced up with her phone. Or whatever it did- she didn’t fully understand the network yet
He took the number and nodded. “I'll keep you posted,” he told her, and he would, probably. He had his daughter to look after first, but after that, he'd try to keep himself healthy. Which meant talking to her, so... He stood and started to right his clothing. “Thanks,” he told her.
She wanted to say something comforting, something that would make this all better. But those words didn’t exist outside of lies, so she just stood, and offered him her hand. It was rigid, like a child performing a ceremonial move they’d been brow beaten into. Accepting a wafer, the pledge of allegiance, signaling while riding a bike. But she offered it, and then when the moment was gone, so was she.