Broken Phase

Posted on Mon 10th Aug, 2026 @ 9:19pm by Commander Paul Graves PsyD & Lieutenant Victor Delling MD

1,345 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: [MAIN] Learning to Fly
Location: Sickbay, Thunderchild
Timeline: Explosion +8 days (11 weeks before Station reopens)

Paul Graves lay in his bed and contemplated the opposite wall of the ward he was in.

He'd been moved out of ICU, once the medical staff had tested his breathing and swallowing and had determined he wasn't in immediate danger of dying again. They had not removed the Foley from him because he couldn't walk. Paul had tried to convince them that removing the Foley catheter would be a great incentive to get him to walk, because he felt like a beached whale with it in--but no luck there. His eloquent, well-reasoned argument that sounded great in his head had come out sounding like a garbled mess. He couldn't say the right words for specific things. 'Catheter' had come out as 'cat,' and no one could figure out why he wanted a cat removed. What cat? There was no cat. It was enough to make a grown man throw something.

Fortunately, he knew enough about medicine to realize they would remove the thing within 48 hours, if only to prevent infection. He could wait. No--he couldn't. Removal could not happen soon enough to suit him.

His meals were soft foods, like scrambled eggs, because his doctors wanted to restart his digestive tract gradually. Paul, on the other hand, was ready for a double-meat cheeseburger and some Death by Chocolate cake from Orchids & Jazz. Being a vegetarian? Gone by the wayside. He wanted food.

Today, they were testing him. He'd already been visited by a physical therapist and an occupational therapist. A speech therapist would be next. Apparently, he would have to relearn how to walk, how to do just about anything with his right hand, how to balance when standing upright.

It was terrifying. Full recovery seemed eons away, and he had to be able to function as Chief Counselor and Second Officer to return to work. At this point, he could not fathom how to do it.

Victor entered quietly and settled down beside Paul, not speaking, just sharing the room with him for a long few moments. "Frustrated to the point of bursting yet?" he asked as he pulled up the most recent scan of his brain on the PADD that rested on his knee.

Paul chuckled and then gave Delling a vigorous nod. "Ye-yes. Broken phase annoying. You--okay?"

"I'm okay" he sighed deeply and closed his eyes against the truth in the statement and the vast inadequacy of the statement as well.

"S-Zorry I--can't el--hh-help," Paul told him. He let out a breath and looked toward Victor's PADD. "Hh-how bad?"

Victor chuckled, a wry sound that was out of character for him. Though, he suspected the counselor had a better read on him than he would initially let on. " Are you referring to me or you?"

"Me," Paul said. The speech impairment's one advantage, he thought, was that it forced him to be far less chatty than usual and far more concise. Saying extra words took too much effort.

"You'll reroute your pathways. It will take you longer than you'd like but you will succeed. You just have to rebuild your mouth's ability to speak the words you know. I'm going to assign you to Wyndon as he's the best recovery therapist I've ever encountered. "

Paul nodded. "I like Window--Wyndon." He let out a breath. "Now you. Tired?"

"Am I tired?" Victor gave a wry chuckle. "Yes, more than I am able to articulate."

Paul nodded. "Can feel." He gestured toward Victor clumsily with his right hand. "Tell me."

Another chuckle, though this one was more unshielded than the last. "There just hasn't been a moment's respite from the first breath of station air I took. The medical crew are wondering when I'm going to start hanging skulls and shrunken heads in the back of my office, which has truly never appealed to me in the slightest. I knew this wasn't going to be an easy assignment, particularly following Dr. Addams, but..." he raised both hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Paul shook his head. "Before you--Cay-dence Marshall--no ssa-kullz. Addams--I miss her, but--gone a while. No--shoes to fill but yours. You--working non-ss-top since arrived. Ship fire, surgeries, now expa-losion. No time rest. Ss-taff rre-spect you. Be you."

Victor sighed deeply and then chuckled at the irony he felt from that statement. "Be me. I mean yes, i have to do that. I'm kind of stuck as me. No choice but to be that which i am. Is it enough though, one wonders.."

Paul looked at him. "If not enough, then world ex-pects too much," he said firmly. "Or you ex-pect too much. You--good as are. Good CMO. Why you feel that not enough? What more needed?"

Laughing weakly, Victor shook his head "That is a very good question, in point of fact. I suppose I'm a bit paranoid still."

That fit with what Paul was feeling from him. Victor seemed confident enough in his own abilities. But confident in whether he would be supported? Not so much. "Can't re-mem-ber your ss-tory. What happen-ed?'

"It's a long story." he sighed gently "The TLDR is that I was on the Myogi before I came here. Everything that could possibly have gone wrong with my department did. It started well before I arrived, as the previous CMO just abandoned his post. It wasn't my fault....but the effects of pregnancy on the captain were...volatile and everything was my fault."

"Did the Chuh-ief Counselor inter-vene?" Paul asked.

"Not with any success. I can't say what happened behind closed doors because obviously I wasn't there but...It never got better, not from the start."

"Hm." Paul frowned. He could think of another question or two to ask. Had the Myogi's CO been reasonable before her pregnancy? But frankly, it didn't matter much, now. "What is long verz-zhun?"

"It started with a Mark V EMH as their Chief Medical Officer after their V'nai officer just disappeared. No-one really wanted to talk about it, and I couldn't find anything about the disappearance. Not that the V's not a great resource in a pinch, but providing all the medical care aboard a starship is not the purpose of the Mark V EMH. I rewrote the subroutine, so that the activation of the EMH would cause an alert to be sent to the on-duty MD. Mostly because they'd become accustomed to the EMH providing care, and it doesn't chart the way regulations require it to because that's not its job. I needed the information about care to be in the charting and it allowed for things to slip through the cracks. That was when I was told- to my face with an Admiral present, that I was stupid. And the assignment ended with my court martial, after I threw the captain out of sickbay. She didn't have the right to the personal medical information of her crew, just because she decided it was her business and privacy is the law...not just my personal preference."

"Why they put EMH in ch-arge when live doctors there? They all interns?" Paul waved that question away as unimportant. "Sounds like--nightmare. Ch-justifying ter-eatment impossible with--poor charting. Medical reg-yu-latory bodies must ha' eaten you alive..." He winced. "What was result of court-martial? You here, so you made case?"

"There weren't live doctors, well...there were but very junior ones. Not up to the task at hand." He offered a one-shouldered shrug and cast his eyes around the room. Every mote of dust stood out to him and he rubbed his face with a tired hand. "I did, but this was something of a punishment detail, though...I think they were not expecting me to take to it so strongly."

"Gah-lad you did. Deser-ved better than they inten-ded. Gah-lad you're my doctor, Victor."

The words he was going to speak caught in his throat and he simply looked at Paul. He hoped something in that look was appropriate, for if he spoke now he was going to cry and that didn't seem like the most efficient use of his time.

 

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