PM to join No time to rest(Philomena)

[Adnaj]

56th of Winter, 512AV
The halls of Hearthside Medical were quiet. For the first time in a long time, there were no patients. Adnaj was glad for the rest. It meant that no one was currently dying from this great plague which had struck Zeltiva. For once, there was no suffering to be found in his halls. He needed the break. Capitalizing on the moment, Adnaj was in a dark, back room. He was meditating.

The last few weeks had been exhausting. Even as a Nuit, even without a specific need to eat or sleep, something in Adnaj just felt...tired. Maybe it was more mental exhaustion than anything else but being a healer in Zeltiva was just not incredibly fun anymore. It wasn't that had lost any of his zeal or that he regretted the fact that he had come here. It was just that he didn't want to be a heroic battle-medic. His interest wasn't in high passion and moments of intensity. It wasn't in "saving the day" or necessarily in "saving lives."

Medical study had gathered Adnaj's interest because of the complex study and the ability to conquer and solve medical mysteries. He was more interested in boring, proficient anonymity than in being 'the hero of the Blight.' The challenge had been interesting at first but the oppressive onslaught of hopeless patients had continued for far longer than Adnaj had anticipated. The initial outbreak had been so immediately devastating that Adnaj figured it would have run its course by now. However, this epidemic was uncharacteristically prolific.

This morning, however, he got his respite from all of that. He took a moment to quiet his mind, sit still and meditate before the Zeltiva delivered the first patient needing of Adnaj's care.

[Philomena]

The thrum of the street outside is still awakening, but the docks are not late risers, and the low rumble of moving hogsheads, the muffled call of stevedores, the clatter of people makes the gentle cadence of the city. The sounds of it pervade almost as high as the University on most days, and here, closer tot he city's poor, the noise is a gentle, continuous under-hum on the streets.

Another noise intrudes now, however, and this one closer - two voices, in something of an argument. Both of the voices are female, one a damp, broad burr of a voice, bold and brash, and thick with a low accent. The other is harder to hear through the walls, nasal and wheedling.

"... 'tis what 'tis, Goody Hargreaves." muttered the wheedle.

"Nae 'tis, you're a damned fool and don't be a petching weasel o'er it now. You know you're a damned fool to be coming to me! Petch my own percher! I birth babies and I patch o' scratches! Set a bone, 'haps. I dunny know naught on this plaugery!"

"I'm ... I'm fine... I..."

To someone who knows the neighborhood, the louder voice is perhaps recognizable, particularly to a medical professional: Goodwife Marsa Hargreaves, a competent midwife, and general herbalist-healer to those too poor or too stubborn to go to a proper doctor. Her great, blowsy form, red-nosed, and wrinkle-faced, leans against the door, turning the knob, and enters, pulling along with her a minuscule woman in a battered Mackintosh over a mud-spattered undyed linsey-woolen dress, with uneven, greasy hair, and off-kilter blown-glass spectacles. She looks pale, perhaps a touch feverish, and her left hand is wrapped in a linen bandage.

"Enough o' that, Minnie Lefting, you're being a spoiled petching child on this." The old midwife turns now, ignoring Minnie, to call after the Nuit doctor, "Doctor, I've 'eard good things on ye, and be needin' y'now!"

The old woman's near-sighted, cataracted eyes seeking the room for the doctor. The undersized pale creature stares sullenly at the floor, a blush climbing wild into her pallid cheeks.

[Adnaj]

Adnaj's meditation was brought to an abrupt end by two voices. One of them, the louder and more boisterous, was that of Goody Hargreaves. He knew of her existence but he wasn't familiar with her work or with her proficiency in herbalism. He didn't recognize the other voice, however.

Adnaj rose up and walked out of the treatment room in which he had been meditated. He exited into the hall and hurried in the direction of his lobby. His nuit shell was that of a man who had passed in his sixties. Although mildly overweight at the time of his death, that body was thin and scrawny by now. The dark shadows had begun to form under Adnaj's dark eyes. Altogether, it would have been a strange sight to see such a scrawny form walk down the hall in such purposeful and upright gait, even if that gait was cthe characteristically slow and unatheletic gait of a nuit.

"Thank you for bringing her to me, Goody Hargreaves. It sounds like you had a bit of a difficult morning in your attempt to coerce her in for proper care." He gave the subtle, sterile, disingenuous smile which Marsa would have recognized as characteristic of the cold nuit in Zeltiva or in the distracted, jaded medical professionals, here. Though which characteristic, in Adnaj, had been responsible for the half-hearted smile was mystery not really worth the solving.

He took a quick moment to look her up and down. He recognized that sweaty sense of pallor that he had seen in so many Blight victims before her. After this, he asked Philomena to open her mouth so that he might be able to reflect some light inside.

[Philomena]

The Goodwife Hargreaves stands back, her slender midwife hands wrapping around her strong sailor-wife arms across her chest, as she looks at Minnie with considerable irritation, "Aye, I did, this 'un. It's 'er lef' hand, Doctor, she 'as a minor laceration what's begun putrefaction and blood poisoning. Took 'er some snake oil, I figure, an she's a barmy one 'bout keepin' the cut clean, but its rudder bad, now, m'thinks its plaguey, and the old bitch ain't ownin' up to it."

Minnie looks almost as pallid as the Nuit, though the combination of her pudginess and the swollen eyes and cheeks of deficient sleep leaves her face puffy and unattractie. She might be embarrassed - she has the smallness and reclusion of carriage of the habitually embarrassed - but ehr body is too exhausted to display the emotion. She has her left hand pulled protectively across a leather satchel on her should, batterd and lumpy, and her right grips at a spot in the neckling of her dress, a hidden button or closure, perhaps, which the observant eye will see her fiddling with.

Her dress is black imitation lace over white, and it hangs ill-fit across her frame, drooping in a way not entirely proper around the collarbones. Her hair is half freed from two braids. She smells very strongly of cheap violet-water, and in general could pass for a washed up older trollop one might pick up on the street when the coppers in one's wallet are too light to go to the Loveless, only she doesn't look as if she ever were pretty in the first place. But then, some folk aren't so picky about a face. In line with this possibility, the man's smile means nothing to her, positive or negative, the man's appraising eye is met with no particular timidity. Her whole demeanor is passive, hollow. Perhaps just the edge of resentful. "I'm fine..." she offered with a brogue so thick it could catch in a knit scarf, "I said I'm fine, Goody. Jus' a bit leeward unner tha snappers, 'sall."

Nonetheless, when the man asks, she opens her mouth. Her teeth are far from perfect - crooked, with a few missing in the back, and the dark spots of a childhood of being underfed - but not an adulthood. The scurvy-marks and gum damage is old, scarred, not new and fresh. Her throat is healthy enough, a little inflamed, probably just general immune distress. Her breath is not pleasant - it has the sour salty bile odor of one who has not eaten when one last should have, the odor of the belly trying to draw the last dregs of nutrition from a long ago kelp and oil based meal.

[Adnaj]

When Philomena opened her mouth Adnaj noted the mildly inflamed tonsils and the lightly pale hue of the tongue. Those findings were indicative of an immunological response but nothing too severe. He recognized the familiar smell of human breath. He had been through this enough times that he had encountered all of the smells that one could conceive to come across. From the most artificial and obvious attempts to ensure agreeable breath to the most diseased and foul odors. He detected something else, though, something a bit more indicative. Heat. Philomena's breath was hot, warmer than normal what was to be expected, anyway. It was another finding which was adding up to the clinical picture of a minor infection.

He listened to Goody Hargreaves as he then feels her swollen lymph nodes. Once she was finished speaking, he thanked her again and turned to his drowsy, fatigued patient.

"Thank you, Goody Hargreaves, I can't help people who don't come into my office. Zeltiva is lucky to have your eyes out there upon those streets, and looking out for the good of the people."

"So its Minnie then?" he asked his patient. "Or would you rather be addressed as Ms. Lefting?" He nearly interrupted himself after he had asked this question. "And I'll need to see that hand." It wasn't that he didn't want to hear her response, he certainly did. He just wanted to hear it while inspecting her left hand. The reason for his quick speaking was in the spirit of performing his job in a timely and professional manner.

[Philomena]

Minnie blushed, and closed her eyes, avoiding the eyes of the Nuit doctor, and the old midwife, "Doctor Lefting, sir. A pleasure." She muttered the pleasantry awkwardly, clearly unsure if that is how one introduced one's self in such a circumstance. "I have had it... it looked at, at the infirmary. They have been treating it, off and on. I... something inside, it broke, that's all, it has been running, and it... it smells off, I guess..."

She then moves her hand, blushing with something akin to humiliation, to unwrap the gauze on the left hand, untidily. The flesh beneath looks treated, but terrible. Her hand is swollen and a bright, burning red, with darker streaks running up her fore-arm - blood poisoning, almost certainly, the heat of the infection almost palpable even from a distance. The middle of the palm shows the source - a moderate laceration, with an infection that has spread, now, into a purple-black, putrefacted circle. Some of the flesh has been cut out of the hand by a surgeon, trying to remove the infection, and a ball of sticky red-stained gauze fills the hole - she inhales sharply as the air touches the wound. Aside from this, the flesh around the wound is heavily bruised, to the point where the skin has broken, leaving her whole palm a purple-black mass - the bruises are much fresher, clearly only a few days old, and to a pathologist's eyes, show the application of blunt force trauma, a hard corner of something having clearly been applied with force to the hand, more than once.

The smell is 'off' - but it also is unsurprising, given the state of the wound: rot. The flesh, quite simply, is eating itself away, with little to be done about it. She looks away from the wound.

"Healers talked about amputating at the... the elbow. But they said it wouldn't do much good, and... with the plague, it'd weaken me too much."

[Adnaj]

"Ah, a doctor," Adnaj remarked. "And the Infirmary? You must be a professor, then. What is it that you teach?" He asked his question as she revealed her wound.

"Oh this is far more than a simple wound, Dr. Lefting. He took in the sight of her hand and tried to assemble the visual clues as quickly as he could. "And had it not been for the plague, than amputation would have been the right thing to do. I'm not sure, however, as to whether or not the proper time for amputation as passed, anyway."

The wound was visually striking but it was not the thing that worried him. Gruesome injuries and focal decay could be contained. What worried him were the signs of septicemia: an infection within and spread throughout the blood. The general signs of infection, her swollen tonsils, the lymph nodes, the streaks into her arms along distended veins hinted at a fully systemic infection.

"What did they give you in the infirmary? What has Mistress Claira been using to treat you? You saw her, directly, not an intern, correct?" He attempted to hide the urgency in his voice while he spoke.

Before speaking next he rose up to approach a desk on the other side of the room. He gathered a number of various items from the desk. He gathered a needle, a bottle of alcohol, a rag, a bit of rope and a few glass vials. It was clear that he was going to have to draw some blood.

Adnaj new that he wasn't going to be able to analyze exactly what was in Dr. Lefting's blood stream but he could do 2 things. He could observe the sedimentation rate and indirectly the systemic immunologic response. He could also introduce a protein and sugar concentrate to observe for the presence of any abnormal organic (bacterial) activity.

"I can clearly see the attempt to excise the infected tissue from your palm, but what else happened here? Did you suffer some earlier trauma to this palm? Maybe fall down and catch yourself against the street? I can only assume that whatever event pierced the skin of your palm was the same event that introduced the infection."

[Philomena]

IT was not that Minnie did not perceive the little fluctuations in the man's sense of urgency. It was, simply, that she had trouble caring - and therein would be the last diagnosis, likely, of a doctor to overlay the others: Melancholia. The woman's self regard is clearly abandoned.

"Doctor o' Literature, sir. Wes' Wing." The woman's brogue is growing thicker as she speaks - she would sound like a fool, now, in a group of University professors, "Aye, 've seen Mistress, she 'twas what cut the knot out o' it. Its th'plague, sir. You can… can treat it, but it funny act like nae normal disease. It'll comb back, 'till it 'as me."

She sighed, heavy, biting hr bottom lip - open air on the wound is a painful sensation. The Midwife sighs, and shakes her head, her brow curling slightly. She speaks more softly now, "Goody Lefting, you… I've some rounds ter be attending' on, a few girls a'comin' to term. Damned awful time for them to do it, too. The doctor 'ere, I've 'eard good things on 'em, I… Goody, you stay safe, 'eh?"

She begins shuffling backwards out of the room. She's halfway across, before Minnie, without turning says with a bleak finality, "An' you, Goody."

Then, she approaches the man's last question. She chews on the question a moment, and her lips moved open and shut a few times, before she muttered very softly, "I 'it it on a desk corner a few times, 'sall."

Her eyes are fixed steadfastly on her feet. Her legs quivered slightly where she stood. She was clearly exhausted at standing.

"Self-inflicted, sir."

[Adnaj]

Adnaj gathered his supplies and approached Philomena. He strapped the rope around her arm and pulled it taut.

"Funny" pathological behavior. Diseases not acting "normal." How depressingly timely. These strange types of presentations were all that Adnaj had seen over the past few weeks. Even more grim, he had certainly seen strange turns and unexpected behavior take a large number of his patients.

"Well I'm going to do everything that I can possibly do and I won't let it have you until I've tried everything."

He pierced through her skin and into the basilic vein as he said this. Perhaps it was because he was trying to artistically draw her blood and prohibit any pain. More likely, it was because he was apt with tissue diagnosis but his ability to identify mental and emotional disturbances was not as sharp. Either way, he didn't pick up on Philomena's sense of apathy and hopelessness. He chalked it up to frustration over her health complications.

He withdrew the, now full, needle to the sound of Goody Hargreaves making her exit. He carefully placed the glass vial into a wooden stand for analysis later.

Upon hearing her answer, he immediately turned around to make sure that he had heard properly. Before anything else, he noticed her sense of physical exhaustion and gestured her to a nearby seat, now pulling one up for himself as well.

"You slammed your hand on the sharp corner of a desk multiple times? On purpose? Why would you do such a thing, Dr. Lefting?" The Nuit physician asked the professor with an incredulous tone in his voice.

[Philomena]

Minnie sighed, almost in exasperation as the man committed to an aggressive treatment plan, but she did not pull away or argue. The needle came to draw her blood, and she hardly reacted - her skin pricked up slightly at the pain, but a girl learned, perhaps, with her upbringing, to accept pain with an air of submission rather than avoidance. The chair made this worse - the standing, perhaps, that little bit of tension is all that's really keeping her together, it seems, for as he takes her to a seat, her body begins to melt into it, and her eyes visibly droop slightly.

The question made me Minnie blush hard, a sickly rose rising up her pallid cheeks, spectral and blotchy. Her voice though, takes on a bit more spirit, almost a fighting tone.

"I... does it matter? You 'ave to know my why's and wherefores to treat my 'and doctor?"