Jacklyn Baker (called_jack) wrote in the_colony, @ 2010-09-19 20:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | ^ week 20, jacklyn baker, jed bailey, louisa may smith, |* jack/jed/louisa |
Week 20 - Thursday
Characters: Jack Baker, Jed Bailey and Louisa May Smith
Location: Dr. Smith's house in Medford
Summary: Jed takes Jack to see the doctor
Rating: G
Despite agreeing to come along, Jack still wasn’t pleased with the idea of seeing a doctor. She was quiet on the ride over, mind running over with all the things that could be wrong. She could have messed her head up bad. Her arm wasn’t going to heal right and she wouldn’t be able to use it anymore. She was going to have headaches and pain forever for the rest of her life. None of those things could happen if the doctor didn’t tell her they would. Jack was much happier at home, glad to just be feeling better. She didn’t want to visit some stranger and talk about how she was broke.
Derek and Bridget were already on their way to the door but Jack hesitated, walking around the truck to let Bosie out of the bed. The dog rushed forward to swipe his tongue across her face. “Come on, Bosie.” He leapt out to investigate where they were and Jack looked around for Jed. “I should stay with him for a minute in case he has to go to the bathroom. I don’t want him to get lost.”
Jed waved Derek and Bridget to go on inside; looks like he’d be having another talk with Jack. He’d already okayed with Bridget that Jack would go first, knowing that any wait would make the girl only more nervous. Now just to have Jack uphold her end of things.
“He’s a smart dog, he ain’t gettin’ lost. Besides, looks like he’s got chickens to entertain him and everythin’,” he said, nodding that way as he set a hand on Jack’s shoulder. He only put a little pressure on it, hoping to guide her to the door. “C’mon, let’s let him roam while we get the fun bit.”
“But...” Jack tried to find some way to stall. “Bosie can’t come in with me?”
Jed looked doubtful but said, “We can bring him in, but if the doc says he’s gotta say out, he’s gotta stay out, okay?”
“Okay...” She patted her leg and Bosie ran up. “And you have to stay with me, too, okay? You said.”
“No worries, I’m stickin’ with you,” he said with a smile, holding the door open for both of them.
Louisa May was nervous.
She didn’t like feeling nervous, but this was the first time she’d been able to practice for months, and a small part of her was worried that she’d forgotten everything she’d ever learned. That, and the thought of communicating with actual people and not having to fear being shot at or robbed in the process was making her almost giddy after so many months alone, so her stomach was a mess of butterflies and excitement and fear. She would be able to be Doctor Smith again, which was a role she knew and loved, and was much more familiar than the woman who stomped around in her daddy’s overalls and chopped wood and collected eggs like some messed-up Little House on the Prairie. She would be holding the reins. Even though she was rusty, she knew more than they did when it came to fixing people up, and she was good at her job. Repeating this to herself (and any chickens that would listen) did not help her feel any less nervous, though.
She’d spent all yesterday and this morning getting ready, the physical labor of cleaning her house and the errand-running taking her mind off of the impending visit. She wanted to do this as professionally as she could, which necessitated a supply run to the General Practitioner’s office in Medford. Surprisingly, it had been left unmolested, and so she was able to pick up quite a useful haul -- the biggest find was a portable ultrasound machine. She’d come back for the rest later to “stock up,” but she felt fairly confident that she could handle a kid with a broken arm and a pregnant lady with her newly found stack of supplies. As part of her efforts, she’d also dug out a portable generator and some lights and light stands from the U-Haul that was packed solid with things from her daddy’s general supply store, and with a lot more elbow grease, managed to set up a fairly decent examination room -- lit, relatively warm from the stove against the adjoining wall, and most importantly, clean.
When she heard the vehicle pull into her yard, she was as ready as she could be -- and hearing the voices chatting outside as they approached her house only served to increase her nervous anticipation. The introductions were done in a whirlwind -- along with Derek and Jed was a very pregnant lady named Bridget Mackenzie and a short girl named Jack. They were introduced in short order and made their way into her livingroom.
She was not, however, expecting a rather large dog to follow the last few people in. She frowned for a moment. Dogs were not in her plan.
Recovering from her initial surprise, she invited everyone in, and gave a pointed look at the dog. “And whose dog is this?” she asked.
Jack’s stomach twisted nervously. “Mine. His name is Bosie and he’ll lay down and be quiet, I promise.” The request in Jack’s words were clear: please don’t send my dog out.
Louisa May looked down at the dog, who looked back up at her. Better to have it inside where people can keep an eye on it than outside chasing my chickens, she thought to herself. She nodded, curtly.
“Long as he stays in the living room. He’s not coming in with you while you’re getting your check-up.” Her tone left no room for negotiation.
“No problem. He’s a good dog, he won’t get into anything,”Jed said, giving Jack’s shoulder a squeeze.
Jack opened her mouth and then shut it again, quaking a bit under the doctor’s tone. She stroked Bosie’s head with her good hand. “Stay here and lay down.” Bosie looked sadly up at her and then obeyed. “Good boy.”
She glanced nervously at the doctor. “You’re not going to make Jed stay out, too, right?”
Louisa May shook her head. “He can come in, that’s fine.” She strongly suspected they weren’t family, but if that’s what the girl wanted, it’d be easier all around. That, and she wouldn’t trust a strange doctor alone with a kid either. “Let’s take a look at that arm,” she said, gesturing to the former guest room that was now her examination space.
His hand still on Jack’s shoulder, Jed walked in with her and was a little shocked that it sort of looked like a doctor’s office. Not the walls and windows, sure, and there was a dresser and rug that looked out of place, but that’s where the housey-ness ended. There was even a makeshift examining table. “You treated folks here before?” Jed asked.
Louisa May grinned despite herself, proud of her hard work. “Y’all are the first,” she said. “I put in a busy day yesterday.” If she was going to do this, she was going to do it right -- or at least as right as she could. She didn’t half-ass anything her entire life, she wasn’t about to start now.
“Okay, Jack? Could you sit up on the bed for me? And Jed, you can just sit right over here.” She indicated one of the folding chairs she’d borrowed from the porch. “Before we get started, let’s just go over what happened. How’d you break your arm?”
Jack looked up at Jed one last time for support and then climbed up to take her seat. “I fell outta a tree.” Her eyes were mostly on her arm, resting in her lap, rather than the doctor.
“That’d do it. And how long ago did you have your fall?”
Jack wished Jed could answer questions instead of her. “Almost a week? I think a week tomorrow?”
“Yeah, ‘bout a week. She broke her arm and hit her head, bad enough she got headaches,” Jed added, shifting in his chair but keeping himself from getting up.
Louisa May nodded her head, noting to check the girl for any lingering head trauma. “Okay. And I see they got a cast on you, too. And whoever wrapped it, looks like they did a pretty good job, and it’s good your arm has been kept stable. Still, I’m gonna have to pop that one off of you to make sure you don’t have nerve damage, and everything’s all aligned properly, and put a new one on. Best to be safe with arm injuries -- we don’t check early on, it could lead to problems down the road.”
She hadn’t been expecting the kid to arrive with a cast on already, but she’d taken off more casts than she could ever remember, and it probably meant Jack’s healing time would be cut down by a good week -- if everything was going as it should, that was.
Jed grimaced. It was hard to waste a cast like that when they might run out in the future, but he couldn’t object when it came to Jack. She had to heal right. “Alright, sure, sounds good.”
Jack looked startled. She hadn’t expected to have her cast taken off.. Everyone had signed this one already... “Alice checked me for nerve damage. She had this thing she ran on my arm. It hurt a lot.”
“I’ve got a piece of equipment that’ll do an even better job at making sure you’re healing up okay. Can’t check unless I can get to your arm, though.” She continued. “And if it’s been a week, it won’t hurt as bad this time around.”
Jed shifted to his feet. “Wanna hold my hand while she does it?”
Jack nodded, reaching out with her left hand to take Jed’s. She looked pointedly away from Louisa.
“Well, before we get to that point, let me go ahead and check your eyes and head out a little and get your temp,” Louisa May replied. She could tell this kid wanted to be as far away from her as possible, so it’d be best to do this initial examination first -- that way, once the cast was back on, she could leave right away. She rustled around in the tray behind her and gave the kid an electronic thermometer covered in a little plastic sheath, hitting the activation button with her finger before passing it off.
Jack’s nose wrinkled at the taste of plastic but she tried to hold the thermometer firmly under her tongue. Now that she had Jed’s hand though, she didn’t want to let go.
Jed didn’t even try to move away, though it was a bit awkward being that close to the two of them. His eyes wandered around the room, taking in the pictures and curtains and things without really seeing them.
A small cheerful ‘beep’ indicated that the thermometer was finished, and the doctor popped it out of Jack’s mouth to take a look. “Normal,” she said, nodding her head. “That’s good sign number one.” Sometimes, a poorly healing break or infection could cause low-grade fever, which was something she was glad to avoid.
“Okay, next, you’re going to do an eye test for me,” Louisa May continued.
Jack looked for a chart, the kind you read off to check your vision but that wasn’t the kind of eye test the doctor meant. Instead, Dr. Smith had Jack do a bunch of stuff about moving her eyes. She followed her finger or looked away from if that’s what she was supposed to do. The last part was to stare at one spot and then turn her head back and forth fast. That was the worst. Jack did it but blanched when the doctor said stop. “Ugh,” she commented, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.
Jack’s dizziness was not unexpected -- especially since she’d given her head a good crack -- and there weren’t significant lags, which would have been much more worrying to Louisa May especially a week after the head injury. She wished she had a CT scan or MRI at her disposal, but the eye test served in a pinch. “Well, considering you’re a week out, that’s pretty much what we should be seeing,” she said, looking over to both Jed and Jack as she explained. “Eyes tracked smoothly, and both were moving at the same speed. The dizziness should get better as you go, and if it isn’t gone entirely in a week, we’ll have another checkup.”
Jed had kept glancing at Louisa May throughout the tests, trying not to appear concerned but also wanting to watch her reaction just in case. The news made him relax, though. “See, told you it’d be fine,” he told Jack, giving her hand a squeeze.
“If I’m fine, I could have stayed home,” the girl mumbled, only half under her breath.
Louisa May judiciously decided that it was best for all if she simply pretended the girl hadn’t said anything, as anything she’d say back would probably come off as patronizing. Still, she internally rolled her eyes. Lord knows she wasn’t expecting to be treated like some sort of second coming, but it was always a struggle to work with people that didn’t want to be worked with.
“Right. We’ve checked out your head, let’s check out your arm. Has it been swelling or uncomfortable at all? You been taking any painkillers?” If they’d slapped on the cast right away rather than splinting it for a few days, the subsequent swelling would have gotten painful even with anti inflammatories. Pain management was tricky, too, and if they had her on something too strong for her size, or potentially habit-forming, it’d be a long haul to recover from both the break and the pills.
“I get sore sometimes but it’s getting better.” The cast actually helped with that. “Sometimes I take some medicine. Alice gives them to me.”
“She’s careful about it,” Jed piped up quickly. “Alice had a kid before, she knows to do stuff smaller.” Or at least he assumed she knew.
Louisa May frowned and nodded. She’d like to know what sort of pills, and how often, and how much, but neither Jed nor Jack seemed to have specifics. “I’ll write down some recommendations for Alice, just to make sure.”
Despite Jack’s looks of silent disapproval, the cast was off without too much hassle. Louisa May improvised by using one of her dad’s electric multitools, and after a few key cuts, the cast popped open exposing the sleeve underneath. This Alice did a decent job dressing Jack’s arm, which Louisa May could certainly appreciate. As she peeled back the sleeve, she could see that the girl’s arm was bruised yellow and green, but there was no sign of skin breakages, excessive swelling, or infection, which was definitely a plus.
“Okay, Jack, for this next part, we’re going to do something a little different. I don’t have an x-ray machine around, but this should at least give us a little information about what’s going on under the surface” She indicated the sonogram machine. It wasn’t perfect, and she knew that sonograms weren’t typically used for bone imaging, but she figured it was certainly going to give her more insight than just probing the arm with her hands -- and it would be significantly less painful, too.
“I’m going to use this on Bridget later, to see how her pregnancy is progressing, and see if the fetus is healthy. We might even be able to see if she’s going to have a boy or a girl.”
Jack’s nose wrinkled at the word fetus. The word sounded less like a baby and more like a bug growing inside. She never wanted a baby. “Hope it’s a boy.”
Louisa May had Jack lay down, making it easier to position her arm. She held up the tube of gel. “Okay, now, people usually say this feels a little cold. I’m gonna put it on the top of your arm, and see what we see, and we might have to flip it over and do this again to get a better look at the other side. Ready?”
“I guess.” The gel was cold but Jack watched the screen with genuine interest. “That’s my arm? That’s cool. They let me keep my X-rays when I broke my wrist. I thought they were interesting.”
“Some sonograms let you download pictures into a computer, to print off later. But we don’t have that here, so no picture this time.” The images weren’t as crisp as that of an x-ray, but the bone was visibly lighter than the surrounding tissue. “Oh -- see there? See that line? Looks like you had a fracture right there. See how it’s all lined up nicely, though? That’s good.” She tried to be gentle with the sonogram wand, aware that she was moving over tender skin. “And one more spot over on the ulna too.” She frowned. The edges of the break were not as neatly aligned here, indicating there was some shifting around -- either the person that aligned the bones overcorrected, or or this secondary fracture was not as noticeable in the immediate aftermath.
“This one looks like it needs just a little adjustment to get it lined up properly. Good thing we caught it now, and not five weeks down the road.” At this moment, Louisa May was glad that Jed was in the room to provide a little emotional support. “This is going to hurt for a moment or two, and then be sore. After I shift it a little, we can double-check to see that I did it properly, and then we can slap that cast back on.”
Jack’s expression shifted from curiosity to fear and she looked over at Jed. “I’m not supposed to be broke.”
Louisa May was a bit confused by Jack’s statement -- of course Jack’s arm was broken. Had she not been aware of this up to that point? What did she think the cast was for? She certainly seemed capable of understanding that much at least... or was she? Louisa May glanced over at Jed to see how he’d respond -- he knew her far better than she did.
Jed’s calm expression had slipped at the doctor’s discovery, and his stomach gave a twist at Jack’s words. “It’s alright,” he said, his eyes meeting hers. “We juss thought yer arm was broke once, not twice. But Doc’s gonna fix it; that’s why we wanted to check, so she could make sure it’d fix right.”
That didn’t make Jack feel any better. “...Is it going to hurt a lot?”
The doctor’s expression softened a bit. “It will hurt, but certainly not as much as it did the first time around. And I’ll be quick, I just need to shift it a little.” Just a few millimeters could make a difference in terms of the bone’s ability to heal properly, and if it was misaligned, it’d be weaker and more likely to break again in the future.
“I was asleep before. When they fixed it.” She’d feel better if she knew what was coming. Imagining it was so much worse. “How do you do it? Do I have to do anything? Should I sit up?”
“You can stay laying down. I’m going to hold your arm steady with one hand, and use the other to push slightly on the top part of your ulna to bring the edges flush. Then, we’re going to double check that I’ve adjusted it enough, and that the other break is still aligned properly. Then, we’ll put that cast on and get you some painkillers. You’ll feel some pressure and a little shifting around in your arm. It’ll be sore and will hurt while I’m pushing on your arm to adjust it, but mostly because your skin and muscles are already bruised and tender. The actual adjustment to the bone won’t hurt, just feel a little odd.”
“Anything I can do?” Jed asked quickly. Considering he was the reason it wasn’t done right the first time, he wanted to help fix it.
“You can keep right on holding her hand, and make sure she takes the right amount of pain meds after,” Louisa May replied promptly. She wiped off the sonogram gel with a damp cloth, and looked to Jack. “You ready?”
No, she wanted to say. Don’t do it. Instead Jack nodded grimly and turned her eyes to Jed. She held tight to his hand.
Louisa May held the mental picture of the fuzzy image from the sonogram in her mind, centering herself. She firmly held Jack’s arm steady, and felt with her fingers for the spot above the break. Then, she pushed gently on the arm, feeling the bones shift slightly.
It did hurt and Jack could feel things moving that she was sure should never be moving. Her arm was starting to throb. If it was possible, her grip on Jed’s hand tightened further.
“There. That part’s done. Let’s check and see that everything looks like it’s supposed to.” She didn’t want to prolong the girl’s suffering any more than she had to, but if she hadn’t adjusted enough, or had shifted the radial bone out of alignment, she’d have to give things another try. Whipping out the tube of gel, she spread it once again on Jack’s yellow and green mottled arm. This time, thankfully, both of the breaks lined up. “See, there? That second one looks a lot better. We won’t have to do any more adjustments.”
Jed breathed a sigh of relief, his free hand squeezing Jack’s shoulder. He was surprised how hard her grip was on his hand. “See? Not too bad, right? And now it’s all over.”
Jack relaxed a little. “I’m sore. Can we put the cast on? I need to check on Bosie.”
Louisa May was relieved to see Jack talking like a normal teenager again. She nodded her head as she wiped the gel off of Jack’s arm for a second time.
When she’d heard that it was a kid that had broken an arm, she’d made an effort to dig around a little more for cast kits that came in different colors -- and she was glad she had when she saw how much Jack loathed losing her purple cast. “Which color would you like? I’ve got blue, orange, green, red, and plain old white. No purple, I’m afraid.”
Jack brightened a little. “Can I have orange?” Orange was her favorite color. She remembered her room, painted yellow because her mom was too nervous about the intensity of orange paint.
“I can do orange,” Louisa May replied.
Putting on a cast was like riding a bike, and the cloth sleeve and plaster strips went on nearly as quickly as the other cast had been popped off. While they waited for it to firm up, Louisa went over the list of basics -- not to get it wet, not to insert anything under it even if it itched, and not to treat it too roughly. She also covered painkillers, more for Jed’s benefit than Jack’s, and wrote some guidelines on a piece of lined notebook paper along with a small initial supply of ibuprofen.
“I’m assuming y’all are stocked, but if you need more, you know who to call,” she told Jed before handing off the drugs and notes on dosage amounts.
The whole thing had gone smoother than he’d even dared to hope, and the fact that she’d found something that could have gone bad, found it and fixed it, well, Jed’s smile couldn’t be wider. “Thanks, Doc,” he said, holding out a hand.
It felt good to hear that honorific again, and to feel like she really deserved it. The corner of Louisa May’s mouth turned up in obvious pride, and she shook his hand firmly in return. Pointing shotguns at people was not her style, and this was the first time she’d felt truly like herself since her parents died. “Pleasure,” she replied, and meant it.
Jack studied her new cast, liking the color. “Thank you.” Her reluctance about this whole thing didn’t mean that she couldn’t find some manners and the girl was grateful that her arm wouldn’t be useless and fall off. She just needed one thing.
“Do you have a Sharpie? Or, like, a permanent marker?”
Louisa May frowned. Did she? “I’ll have to check. Hold on a second.” She got up and left the former guest room, making her way to the kitchen. She figured Jack wanted her cast signed, which was understandable. At the very least, it was clear they had markers at home, so it wouldn’t be the end of the earth if she couldn’t track one down. If it was going to be anywhere, it’d be in her mama’s junk drawer, where there was always a jumble of pencils and pens. She opened the drawer, briskly rattling around its contents, before her fingers closed on a fat permanent marker. Lord knows how old the thing was, but she tested the tip with her finger, and it made a convincing mark. She brought it back to the room and handed it to Jack.
“That should do the trick.”
Jack handed it immediately to Jed, looking at him expectantly, and he gave a laugh. “You sure it ain’t too tender?” he asked even as he took up the pen and gingerly wrote his name right in the middle. She beamed at him and then turned an appraising eye to the doctor.
“Dr. Smith? You wanna sign too?”
Louisa May raised an eyebrow in surprise, but she took the pen and printed ‘Doc Smith’ neatly on the girl’s cast.