Situation Normal.... Ah, the hell with it (Open)
(OOC: I hope there are still folks watching this community! I desperately want to try Bones on for size before I app him anywhere. Don't be shy! I promise he won't bite - though he might, you know, hypo your ass. 8| Not that that's a surprise at all.)
Leonard McCoy was not a particularly impatient man, not generally prone to nervous fits and starts. But space, though he'd had to accustom himself to living in it, tended to bring out his fretful side. He paced in his office off the main sickbay floor. His staff had exiled him there for getting underfoot and otherwise driving them all up the wall with his constant checking and rechecking of all the equipment and supplies, as if he was expecting an influx of emergency trauma patients.
The trouble was, he might be expecting exactly that awful eventuality. There was an away team due back any minute now from the surface of a newly-charted planet. Newly-charted tended to mean it was full of all the disease and danger McCoy knew was just waiting for a victim. It was bad enough when he didn't know his patients, but now having lived and served with them aboard ship for months, they were also his friends.
Friends who might at any second come in gushing blood or sprouting green and purple growths or -
He took a deep breath, running a clammy palm over his face. It never got easier, beforehand. When confronted with the emergencies themselves, he could distance himself in his single-minded focus of saving lives. Afterward, he could have his nervous breakdown in private, comforted by whatever liquor was handiest. But it was the waiting that got to him, the uncertainty, the worrying...
Leonard forced himself to sit down at his desk. He picked up a padd and tried to focus on the dry report rather than listen for the slightest sound of activity coming through his open door.
Leonard McCoy was not a particularly impatient man, not generally prone to nervous fits and starts. But space, though he'd had to accustom himself to living in it, tended to bring out his fretful side. He paced in his office off the main sickbay floor. His staff had exiled him there for getting underfoot and otherwise driving them all up the wall with his constant checking and rechecking of all the equipment and supplies, as if he was expecting an influx of emergency trauma patients.
The trouble was, he might be expecting exactly that awful eventuality. There was an away team due back any minute now from the surface of a newly-charted planet. Newly-charted tended to mean it was full of all the disease and danger McCoy knew was just waiting for a victim. It was bad enough when he didn't know his patients, but now having lived and served with them aboard ship for months, they were also his friends.
Friends who might at any second come in gushing blood or sprouting green and purple growths or -
He took a deep breath, running a clammy palm over his face. It never got easier, beforehand. When confronted with the emergencies themselves, he could distance himself in his single-minded focus of saving lives. Afterward, he could have his nervous breakdown in private, comforted by whatever liquor was handiest. But it was the waiting that got to him, the uncertainty, the worrying...
Leonard forced himself to sit down at his desk. He picked up a padd and tried to focus on the dry report rather than listen for the slightest sound of activity coming through his open door.
