Solo An Ounce of Prevention

[Satevis]

4th of Spring, 518 AV

Satevis had learned fairly early in his apprenticeship that learning was a two way street. On the one hand, Jansen and Kalum were taking time out of their days to teach Satevis what they knew about medicine--which was considerable. On the other hand, menial tasks and chores around the Panacea were often left up to him. It wasn't that he particularly minded that, though. He'd been a student long enough to know that one way or another, tuition was always paid, and the chance to learn under such great teachers was worth any amount of chores.

And there was learning to be had, even in the most menial of tasks. Any doctor worth his salt should be able to cut bandages, and clean, and keep a laboratory organized. There was a meditative quality to hard work too, especially in a place as beautiful and remote as Syka. It was easy to lose himself in the simple chores that kept the Panacea going.

Or at least it would have been, had Satevis not currently been entertaining a guest.

"Are you going to be doing that all day?" said guest said, leaning against the Panacea's railing and watching Satevis cut thin strips of bandage from a bolt of cloth with some disdain. Satevis looked up from his work at her. The woman, a Verusk with dark hair, silvery, patterned skin, and eyes that shone a luminescent green, lounged with all the deadly grace of a huntress. A very bored huntress.

"It's my job, Seraya," Satevis said, going back to his work. The scissors continued to cut straight lines across the fabric. "If you're bored, you can entertain yourself elsewhere."

Seraya shrugged, but made no move to leave, folding her arms and settling back against the railing. Only a few days since Satevis had first started hosting the Verusk woman, and he still found her as impenetrable as he had at first. He decided to leave her to her own devices for now. He still had work to do.

"Do you people really need so many bandages?" Seraya asked after a while, frowning dubiously at the pile that had accumulated in front of Satevis.

"It's a new settlement, with settlers coming in on every tide," Satevis said, setting down his scissors and starting to roll the strips into neat little bundles. "Everyone's exploring, swimming, expanding, and building, and not everyone is experienced at doing any of those things. Injuries happen. It's best to be prepared."

Seraya hummed in response, her bright green eyes thoughtful. "But..." she said, "the man who runs this place is a healer. The blue-skinned one."

"That's true," Satevis said, "But he can't be everywhere at once. And I'd rather have them around than not have them around. I'm not a healer, after all."

"You know much about dressing wounds?" Seraya asked, frowning dubiously. It had been clear to Satevis that she had dismissed him as useless not long after meeting him.

"Somewhat," said Satevis. "I'm still learning, but I know the basics."

"Is that so?" Seraya asked. She stepped forward, her posture challenging, and extended her arm towards Satevis. "Then, assume I was wounded. What would you do?"

[Satevis]

Satevis glanced dubiously at the expanse of unbroken flesh in front of him, marred here and there by scars that suggested that Seraya had had more than her fair share of wounds and incidents over the years. He wondered what had caused them, but now was not the time to ask, so instead, he looked up at the woman he was hosting.

"What sort of wound?" he asked.

Seraya shrugged. "An arrow wound."

There was a puncture-shaped scar on Seraya's forearm, a ridge of rough flesh that suggested the question might be more than theoretical. Satevis searched his memory for any of Jansen's lessons on puncture wounds and found himself coming up short. He did know the first step of treating such a wound, however. That had been part of his initial few lessons.

"Well, first of all," he said, "I wouldn't try to remove the arrow. At least not yet. As uncomfortable as it would be, the arrow does do its work to stop the bleeding. I would use bandages to immobilize the arrow until we could get you somewhere where the wound could be treated." Now that he was considering it, he would probably have to break off part of the shaft, to ensure that the arrow didn't move during transport. He thought about asking Seraya for more clarification on the arrow itself, but decided against it, worried that it would bring this scenario sharply out of the hypothetical.

Seraya sniffed in disdain, shaking her head. She withdrew her arm, resting her hand on her hip. "Any warrior worth his salt knows that much," she said. "What then?"

"I'm not entirely sure," Satevis admitted, although he was already rising, looking back at the door to the lab.

"Aren't you a doctor?" Seraya asked, scowling at him.

"Apprentice," Satevis corrected offhandedly, his mind already focused on the puzzle she'd presented. "And if I'm not certain, at least I know where I can look it up."

~*~*~

"Your patient is bleeding out while you waste your time, Satevis!" Seraya said, calling out to him from one of the Panacea's benches while Satevis looked through Jansen and Kalum's journals for information on puncture wounds. The Akalak men were out of the Panacea for a few hours, so Satevis couldn't ask them directly. Not that he wanted to, in any case. It would likely go against the spirit of the challenge. "What do you think the Founders are going to say if I die in your care?"

"You are unlikely to die from boredom," Satevis said, scanning the neat handwriting in the journals as he flipped through the pages. He had to be getting close now.

"How do you know that? You're not a real doctor!"

Satevis sighed in exasperation tinged with amusement, flipping the page again. "I know some very old people," he said, thinking about the Ethaefal he had once met in Lhavit, "It hasn't happened to them yet."

"I doubt you know many people older than me," Seraya said, pillowing her head on her arm where she lay sprawled out on the bench.

Satevis paused, looking up from the top of his book at her. He realized that he didn't actually know this much about Seraya - age was not something he often concerned himself with thinking about. "How old are you, exactly, Seraya?"

Seraya shrugged. "Five hundred or so," she said. "I've stopped counting."

[Satevis]

"Five hundred?" Satevis asked, looking at Seraya in astonishment. "That would make you..."

"Old as dirt, yeah," Seraya said. "At least as far as you folk are concerned. I'll have you know I'm not even over the hill yet."

Satevis did some thinking. He'd known that Seraya and her people came from behind the World Gate, that they had missed the Valterrian entirely, but he hadn't known that each individual person in her race was that old. If Seraya was at least five hundred years old, and her own people didn't consider her ancient, that meant that there were people in her race that predated the Valterrian. Not even the oldest of the Ethaefal could say as much. It was an astonishing thought, and it almost made him forget what he was supposed to be doing.

"You're off in space again," Seraya said.

"Sorry," said Satevis. "Just thinking."

Seraya arched a brow. "Share with the class?" she asked.

"I was thinking about the Valterrian," Satevis admitted. "If your people had been around, maybe we wouldn't have lost so much history."

Seraya didn't say anything, but Satevis wondered if her thoughts were running along the same line as his. There was a lot of history the Verusk likely remembered. He could only imagine what secrets they would have. Secrets that he assumed were lost in time.

He looked back down at the notes, but the words swam in front of his eyes. He wasn't focusing on them, he was thinking. Remembering. His clearest memories from his lifetime as Taras hadn't really given him a timeframe, but he'd been able to put a few things together, from his anthropological studies and from what memories he did have. There was a blanket in one of his memories, a weaving style that would have been popular in Eyktol around two to three hundred years ago. But even those memories paled in comparison to Seraya's lifespan. Seraya had been born before Taras--Taras's short life had been an eyeblink in her existence. She'd lived long enough for him to have been born, died, fallen, and returned again.

And she was here, lying on a bench at the Panacea, nagging him about arrow wounds.

It was a humbling thought.

"I really hope you don't take this long with patients who are actually bleeding," Seraya said, drawing him back to the moment.

"I'm coming," Satevis said, getting to his feet. He brought the journal with him for reference, pulling up a stool next to Seraya's bench. She propped her head up in one hand, watching him with a look that was almost bored.

"Alright," Satevis said, glancing at the text next to him before proceeding. "In the event of an arrow would, the arrowhead first needs to be removed. In some cases, this means a small incision might be necessary, to widen the wound enough to safely remove the arrowhead. This is why the shaft should be left in place, if possible. With the shaft in place, the arrowhead is easy to locate."

Seraya nodded, her green eyes solemn. None of this information seemed particularly new to her, but now that he knew what he knew, Satevis wasn't particularly surprised. She'd identified herself as a soldier. Who knew how many arrow wounds Seraya had seen, or had had, or had inflicted. It was an uncomfortable question, so he didn't press, but he did get the sense that she was asking about this for a reason.

He went back to his notes.

[Satevis]

The notes carried a lot of extra notations and instructions for odd situations, such as the arrow containing barbs or striking critical locations on a patient's body. As he glanced at the notes, Satevis realized why Jansen had not yet told him how to treat a wound like this, except how to keep a patient stable until he could get to them. A lot of the notes in the journal seemed well beyond his current medical ability. He'd thought that he had learned a lot about medicine, but looking at these instructions, he realized that most of what he had learned so far had been basic--how to splint a simple fracture, or support a sprain, or treat a burn or bruise or cut, or how to settle a stomach or treat a fever.

Useful, because those were the sorts of minor injuries that happened often in a settlement where people were constantly building things, working and expanding, but he'd learned very little about serious injuries. He also realized that while Jansen had been teaching him anatomy and how to check a patient's vital signs, his own understanding remained surface-deep.

Seraya clicked her tongue impatiently, and Satevis looked back at her. "The notes make mention of what to do if the arrow has come into contact with a major artery, or if it's lodged in bone," he said. "Since it's an arm wound, I don't believe that there are any arteries there, so I'm going to skip that part. I'm also going to assume that the arrow isn't barbed."

"Fine," Seraya said, shrugging. "What then?"

"Well," he said. "In this purely hypothetical scenario, the next thing to do would be to remove the arrow. Assuming that goes smoothly, we can now begin treatment of the arrow wound. The notes say that an arrow wound through a limb that doesn't strike anything vital has a good chance of healing well, provided that it doesn't cause an infection. Stitching may be required in the caseo f particularly large wounds. I suppose, if we're assuming that I know how to do sutures, I would have to suture the wound closed and treat it with a healing salve before bandaging it. From there, I'd probably give the patient something for the pain and continue to monitor the wound over the next several days to make sure that it's healing well without any sign of infection. If I'm the person treating the wound, I would probably age it."

"Age it?" Seraya asked, looking over at him.

Satevis nodded, looking down at his hand. With the sun still high in the sky, it was nothing remarkable. A simple, dark-skinned human hand. "An ability that comes with my Ethaefalan form," he said. "I can age things by one day. It's not always useful, but applied consistently over several days, it does help injuries heal twice as fast."

"Speaking from experience?" Seraya asked.

Satevis thought about the infirmary in Zeltiva again, remembered Tock lying on that bed, unable to put weight on her injured leg. He nodded. "Yes."

[Satevis]

Seraya considered this, leaning back and looking up at the Panacea's ceiling. She stretched her arm out over her head, a pensive frown twisting its way across her features.

"You aren't the only one who can make wounds heal faster," she finally said.

"Oh?" Satevis asked, looking up from his notes at her. "What do you mean by that?"

Seraya's brow furrowed in distaste, but she nodded, half to herself, and sat up, turning towards him. "I'll give you this one, since this is supposed to be an exchange," she said. "Verusk blood is special. It can keep wounds from getting infected."

Satevis's eyes widened. "So you've never...?" he began.

"Had an infection? Of course I have, don't be stupid," Seraya said sharply. "It isn't magic. We just don't get infected easily. And our blood can stop other wounds from getting infected as well. It's not something we like to advertise, so don't get any ideas."

She narrowed her eyes at him, as if Satevis was about to pick up a scalpel and start waving it at her. Satevis held his hands up in protest. "I would never!" he said.

But it was still very interesting. If Verusk blood could ward off infection, that meant it had some property that stopped an infection from taking place, similar to honey or an herbal salve. He wondered what that could be. A flip through Jansen's notes reminded him that infection was less likely to take root in wounds that were clean, but while the cleanliness of the wound seemed to be part of the issue, it couldn't be all of it.

Otherwise, why would honey work? Why, in this case, would blood?

"I'm a little disturbed about how seriously you're taking this," Seraya said, swinging her legs over the side of the bench and waving a hand at him. "Do I need to be worried about you taking samples from me in the middle of the night?"

"You have nothing to fear from me," Satevis said, eyes wide. He'd meant it to mean that he would never do something like that to Seraya, but she snorted.

"Damn straight," she said, giving him a critical once over. Satevis felt his face warm, and he looked away from her, back at the notes.

"Still," he said. "It is very interesting. I'm trying to wrap my head around the medical applications of that. Don't worry," he added, when Seraya opened her mouth, "I'm not going to tell anyone unless you ask me to. But clearly, this has to be because of some property in your blood. If we could somehow find a way to copy that effect, we could save a lot of lives."

"Your people already have healers," Seraya said.

"Not enough," said Satevis. He thought about the famine in Zeltiva, thought about the deaths that still occurred elsewhere on the continent. Here, Jansen saved them from the worst of it, but there weren't that many healers as skilled as he was. He realized that those were a doctor's thoughts, not merely a researcher's, as he snapped the book in his hands shut, but that didn't make the thoughts any less true. "Not enough."