un: Bachelor | text

[thantagonist]

Attention Fellow People of Etraya,

I am Doctor Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine. As I understand it, few of you have seen a doctor lately. That simply won’t do! Please, don’t wait to get sick to establish care. I am situated in the hospital, ready to take consent forms and make updated medical histories. At least a few of you have unaddressed concerns, I just know it. The average person comes to see the doctor when it’s too late! Though we cannot die here, there is no reason to suffer unduly.

And if you are otherwise healthy, perhaps think of it as helping me out. In the event of an outbreak, it is far more helpful to have complete clinical pictures of the inhabitants. Especially, as I understand it, there are many biological differences in this population.

Please come visit me during my clinic hours, every day from 10am to 6pm.


[What Daniil really wants is to meet more of the unusual inhabitants of Etraya more quickly as well as conduct casual interviews of the sort of people who are slated to save the universe. But he can’t just say that completely outright.]

Comments

[badlydisarmed]

Absolutely. Once we get you caught up with modern medicine, I'm out.

[ He does enjoy medicine, but ideally he'd be leaving all the boring stuff and just get involved in surgeries. ]

[thantagonist]

[He chuckles. Fine. He’d met plenty of people who wanted to be left to just one very specific thing. Daniil was one of those men.]

So how did you earn your early retirement? You’re not just giving up because of your arm, are you?

[badlydisarmed]

Being trapped in a dystopian hellhole before this slightly better dystopian hellhole should be enough.

[ Has he not painted a depressing enough picture of his life before the dystopias? ]

Daniil trauma dump & P3 spoilers incoming 🚨

[thantagonist]

Is this a hellhole to you? Somewhere with no scarcity, no violence, no inquisition, no infectious disease? With running water and electricity everywhere you go? You said you were from America, 2003? It must have been nice. The last hospital I was in was converted from a theater and had to have water carted from the steppe and put into a gallon jug suspended over a temporary sink for hand washing.

Right before I got here I had to watch them hang my other doctor. Well. Not a doctor. He was a drop out, but still. He was a good man.

[And there’s nothing I can do from here.]

this man needs so much therapy

[badlydisarmed]

You haven't seen the stupid murder games yet. But yes, the hospital I worked in had running water and electricity. Sometimes someone brought a gun or a knife, or there's an explosion, but I'm sure it was much better than a small town in the 20s.

Anything else you'd like to get off your chest?

[ He's gone back to sitting down and sipping wine, but he is listening. ]

Minor patho 3 spoilers

[thantagonist]

Yes! And they’re closing down my laboratory just because I had “insufficient findings”, even though I was in that town for an incredible discovery anyway. We were only open for three years!

And I think I’m going insane. I can’t explain it. My head’s all muddled. Ever since I went to that plague town… I can’t describe it. I feel less in control.

[Daniil polishes off his glass of wine.]

Murder games?

[badlydisarmed]

In one of them you needed to appeal to an unseen audience in order to survive. There's also been monsters at night and in the other bubble city I saw kill or die games.

[ Which is whatever, he's fine.

He digs a piece of paper from his bunch of books and hands it over. ]

Try filling this in, count the plague as a natural disaster.

[thantagonist]

Great. So we’re well kept between periods of torture, then?

[Daniil frowns at it, but it was presented so plainly and without judgement that he does actually sit down on his couch and pull out his pen.]

[It hovers over many of them, though Daniil doesn’t actually mark anything. Maybe that’s a layer of vulnerability he can’t cross.]

[It is only the respect he has for Robert and the knowledge he has over him that allows him to even sort of be psychoanalyzed. And it was complicated. Was it PTSD… or something stranger.]

[He hands the paper back.]

What can even be done about it? Especially with these apparent murder games awaiting us?

[badlydisarmed]

Good question.

[ Robert huffs, looking at his collection of books. ]

I can give you something for the nightmares, but the rest of it is very much outside my scope.

[thantagonist]

I take strycchanine in small doses mixed with morphine. I used to just take valerian extract for my nerves, but it doesn’t really work anymore.

[He follows Robert’s gaze]

What do you recommend?

[badlydisarmed]

Well. Not that.

[ This guy is addicted to morphine for sure. ]

What symptoms do you want treated?

[thantagonist]

[Daniil rubs his jaw.]

The irritability and the depressive episodes, I suppose. I don’t sleep well. It just feels like I’m swinging back and forth.

[Daniil will lose his mind if Robert even insinuates that he’s an addict. Addiction is for people who don’t have jobs. Unlike him, who is very busy all the time.]

[badlydisarmed]

With the caveat that might instincts on this matter might be shit, I'd first recommend to wean you off everything so we can establish a baseline. Finding a balance with psych meds is a nightmare as it is.

[ And he needs to cross-reference which meds can go with which meds. And most of them shouldn't be mixed with alcohol.

And if Daniil is addicted to morphine it won't even matter what they try, he'll need opioids. ]

Cw: talkin’ bout addictions a little more in depth

[thantagonist]

[The concept of weaning off everything sounds horrid. Plus-]

A baseline is typically something that doesn’t change as much as I experience, I would think. I can maintain the balance as I am now.

[Also, he doesn’t really think of these as psych meds. Or thinking of himself as a psych case.]

[badlydisarmed]

You haven't had to gradually increase your dosage to maintain your level of function?

[ Maybe it's early enough they could wean him off easily? That'd be lucky. ]

Minor pathologic 3 spoilers

[thantagonist]

It’s only been a week. I am not an addict. I use morphine as the medication it is. I’ve just done what I needed to to stay alive.

[Time had moved very strangely. It had certainly been more than a week. And he had been here for more than a week as well. But it wasn’t yet so bad.]

I don’t need it constantly. [He does take it daily. Just a bit. The uppers, however, were another story. He likes how he feels when he’s a little manic.]

[badlydisarmed]

I'd wean off anyway if I were you.

[ But this guy can do what he wants, he can sort that problem later, if he has to. ]

Is that all you're taking? There's a long list of interactions to watch out for when handling psych meds.

[thantagonist]

I may have taken some things under duress of the dwindling of my supplies.

[And he figured it would be improper take anything he wanted from the caninets. Though he had already begun to consider it. Danill sighs.]

…If I must.

[Daniil only even agrees at this stage because he understands how it looks if he flat, outright refuses.]

[Daniil crosses one arm over the other. He doesn’t want to ask, but he’s humbled by everything he doesn’t know. Daniil has fallen gracelessly from brilliant doctor to antiquated fool. He didn’t even know everything he didn’t know.]

I already know smoking isn’t good for you. But do you believe it necessary to stop completely for this?

[badlydisarmed]

Smoking killed about a hundred million people between your time and mine.

[ A handy fact to have as a doctor. ]

Like I said, I would quit while I'm ahead. Opioids are insidious, I've seen enough colleagues get hooked I cut-off painkillers altogether as soon as I was coherent enough to speak after I lost the arm.

[ He's frankly lucky he didn't trip directly into some kind of addiction. ]

[thantagonist]

[oh how Daniil hates getting his own advice back to him.]

I already advise my own patients not to smoke. What I asked is if it will interfere with starting a modern drug regimine.

I know what a morphine addict looks like and the harm they do to themselves and everyone else. I’m careful. I’m not an addict.

[RIP to everyone else but Daniil is built different.]

[badlydisarmed]

[ Says every addict ever. ]

It would. If I'm prescribing anything I need to know what it's interacting with. For instance, if I give you Xanax and you also take morphine, it could kill you. And sure, Aurora would bring you back, but I don't want that on my conscience.

[thantagonist]

[He can’t help thinking it. He’s held it together so far.]

There’s a death price. And I can’t afford lose anything.

[Daniil takes a hard swallow. He stares at nothing on the wall for a moment. He knew there were consequences to this. He he’d have to quit everything. But he pictured quitting from the comfort of his own city, his home, his lab. …with all the things he meant to do sorted out. The mysteries finished with. The town saved.]

[He crushes his eyes closed and presses his face into his hands.]

I’ll do it. But don’t tell anyone, please.

[badlydisarmed]

There's doctor-patient confidentiality— I don't know how modern that is, but it's part of the training. Doctors don't discuss their patients with other people.

[ There's some nuance to it, but in this case there aren't really any other doctors to discuss patients with, plus the point is to put Daniil at is. ]

Cw/tw for foreseeable tags for suicide discussion

[thantagonist]

Please excuse me for a moment.

[Danill stands suddenly and leaves the room.]

[I know what I have to do. ]

[I have no choice. I’ll have to trust Doctor Romano. ]

[I need to make this choice while my mind is still clear.]

[ He stands in his makeshift bedroom as time stretches out before him. He stares into the darkness of the room. Turning the light on would be too much.]

[He’s only gone thirty seconds before he snatches his doctor’s bag out of his room, coming back with his heart pounding. Sweat starts to bead at the nape of his neck. He holds his jaw tight with his lips pursed. He closes his eyes tight, breathing through his nose until he can slow his breath enough to talk properly.]

I need you to hold some things for me.

[badlydisarmed]

[ Robert has always known he's not meant to counsel. He's an okay teacher, sometimes, if the student has a backbone, but he's terrible when it comes to emotions and addiction.

But there's no one else, and Daniil is coming out from some nightmare scenario where he had no one else. So here they are. ]

Sure, I can keep them.

[ Not here, probably. Because this is a man getting rid of his stash, so he can't keep it somewhere obvious.

He'll have to keep a closer eye on the morphine downstairs too. Not that he thinks he could stop Daniil from getting some if he wanted to, but removing temptations is part of the support, isn't it? ]