ACCIDENTALLY DONE |Joshua|

The medical wing was rather busy that day, and as Joshua found he had time on his hands after classes, he was more than happy to drop by and help out. It felt right to be doing something--Joshua had makings of a future workaholic, really. He always wanted to be occupied and that was why, rather than sitting around in the library and watching the dust motes float around, he was always studying or doing something to occupy his mind. It helped him not to think, too, and not to reflect on the fact that (were he not fighting with his father) it would usually be a real hospital he was helping out in. Going from the huge Maple Hollow General to the much, much smaller Medical Wing of the Academy was a rather disconcerting change. Still, he was adapting. And though he could only do so much seeing as he wasn't actually a qualified doctor, the overworked nurses were still glad to have his help when it came to dealing with smaller things like cuts and abrasions. He was right now dealing with a freshman that had cut her hand up in one of the rosebushes that flanked the entrance to the academy gardens. "And why did you stick your hand in there in the first place?" he asked, a question that had occurred to him the moment that she'd told him what she'd done. The girl mumbled something about thinking the Earth elementals were immune and flushed a cherry red, not meeting his gaze.

"I'm a Fire elemental," he said as he cleaned the cuts and then started to bind her hand with gauze to stop the deep cuts from opening further, "and I assure you that I have never been--" He had been about to say 'stupid enough to do that', but reminded himself that he was supposed to act professional and changed rapidly to, "possessed with the urge to stick my hand into a fire." Shaking his head, he gave her one last once-over and then nodded. "You can go." Hopefully she wouldn't do anything like that again any time soon. Leaning up against the receptionist's desk as he left the room after the girl, he gave the young woman a half-amused, half-exasperated sort of smile. "Any actual burn victims for me to deal with?" Being a Fire elemental, he could heal burns in a jiffy--though of course it drained him something terrible and he could only manage one or two in an hour-long shift if the burns were serious. She shook her head. "I would like to keep you busy, though, if you don't mind," she said. He shook his head to indicate that no, he didn't mind, and she said, "Go check the waiting area."

He did so, and he thought that he heard someone asking if anyone was present. He wandered toward her and was surprised when she launched right into a greeting and a request for help. Josh was usually quiet and thus was taken aback by how up front she was. He recovered from this surprise quickly, however. "Sure, Sam," he said amiably. "I'm Joshua, by the way." It would have felt weird knowing her name if she had no idea who he was. The girl was lucky, really--Josh was in a good mood today. Classes had went well and this work was mercifully distracting. "What'd you do?' he wondered aloud, for it would be easier to solve a problem once he knew what he was dealing with. Gesturing toward the room from whence he'd came to indicate that they should go inside, he leaned against the counter by the sink. "Maybe you should sit down," he said, noticing that she was wobbly and indicating the examination table of sorts.

Though he felt concern for the girl, at present it was in a completely professional manner. Joshua had learned from his father that doctors had to both care for their patients and yet lack caring at the same time--they had to follow the rules and not their heart sometimes. It was perhaps a good thing for someone like Josh, who otherwise didn't have a fair share of empathy to go around. He could see someone crying and not really wonder nor feel much concern as to why they were sobbing their eyes out onto the side of the road. With the Fire graduate, his compassion and kindness was earned and not acquired instantly. If you befriended him, he'd care for you. It was as simple as that. Right now, however, there was the familiar spark in his eye that suggested he was taking her situation very seriously. Unlike some of the Medical Wing volunteers that just helped out because they had the free time, Josh wanted to do this for real some day. Hands on experience was what he hoped to gain from volunteering at his school. "You don't know," he said, then frowned. It was more of a statement, repeating what he'd gleaned from her words. Then--in quite a serious manner, not horsing around--he asked, "Do you think you might have hit your head when you fell?" Concussions could be a serious business, after all, and he wanted to check for everything.

When she mentioned the tree, the possibilities seemed obvious. "Well perhaps you fell out of said tree," he pointed out. Unlike some that might have made mocking jokes about this fact, Josh was just trying to piece together what had happened. His father had always told him that it was easier to treat a problem once you knew what you were dealing with. He also considered the possibilities of internal injuries that weren't visible to the eye--though as his colourless gray ones swept over her, he concluded that there were plenty of visible ones to deal with as well. "Looks like the ground gave you quite a beating, at any rate." This time he smiled a bit to indicate that he was being light-hearted and trying to make the mood a little friendlier. It was a mark of his good mood that he was not being sullen and morose about this whole thing. Josh was simply that loner in the back of the room that didn't really make conversation with other people unless prodded to do so. He wasn't in a particularly foul mood today, though, and his formalities benefited from it.

Not wanting to overwhelm her with questions if she really wasn't sure what had happened but also wanting more things to go on than just what he had seen, he started to check over the injuries that were visible whilst also inquiring, "You don't think you've broken or sprained anything, do you? No cracked or bruised ribs?" He nodded to her side as he spoke. Not that he was suggesting she had no idea where the ribcage was, it was just a force of habit. Bringing his gaze back to her face, he said, "Warn me if there's any pain when I touch you. I'll do my best, but I'm not psychic." His tone was pleasant enough but had regained its usual seriousness. As he handled the injuries and tried to get a better idea of how to heal them, Josh wondered if she was the type that wouldn't admit she was in pain even if she was near fainting with it or whether she'd be honest. Sometimes that made all the distance. "And you're sure you can't remember anything else?"

Joshua nodded as she affirmed the possibility that she might have hit her head. In his mind, he was going over a memory of a time when he was younger when he'd fallen out of the tree in their backyard. It had been Donovan who had found him--after chewing him out over the fact that he was not supposed to be climbing the tree to begin with, the man had started asking him a number of questions and flustering his poor son. "I want to make sure you don't have a concussion, Joshua! This is very serious, do you understand me?" But what was it that you were meant to check for? Josh appeared to be pondering something for a moment--going over what he'd read in books and what he'd been told by his own father. Then, expression clearing, he turned his attention back to Samantha. "Do you have a headache?" he asked her in that same professional but not unkind tone he had used originally. "Or do you feel any sort of sickness or confusion? Vision can sometimes be a part of it, as well... does anything look blurry?" Knowing that he had just asked several questions at once, he paused patiently to allow Sam the time to think about it and confirm or deny the possible symptoms. Hey, at least he was nicer about it than his father had been to him!

Her comment on the ground was almost amusing to him, but both out of respect and his own generally serious demeanour he showed no signs of it externally. "Do you mean that you're an Earth elemental?" he guessed, for it would have been a very strange thing to say otherwise. Hell, he'd met some odd types in this school and he wouldn't put it past some of them. "Just because you've got an affiliation, it doesn't mean that the element can't hurt you," he pointed out, thinking about the idiot patient he'd seen earlier who'd thought it was a perfectly fine idea to stick her hand straight into a rosebush. He could have mentioned this to Sam for comparison but decided against it. Laughing at someone else's pain might have made him seem like an asshole. "It's possible," he nodded when she asked. "There could have been a number of things on the ground where you fell--branches, rocks, or even just an uneven landing could have done it. I suppose it all depends on how hard you landed and how far you had to fall." Then, as an afterthought, he added, "And if you hit any extra branches on the way down." Those could definitely have been a cause for more pain, after all.

He gave a wry sort of smile. "If your back was broken you likely wouldn't have made it here," he remarked. However, she mentioned a sprained ankle and he knelt down so that he could take a look at it. He applied a light pressure to it and glanced apologetically at her, knowing that it probably hurt to have someone else handling an injury of yours. But he was trying to help and at least she didn't seem like the type that would bite his head off for that. He did his best to keep things in a professional attitude but he couldn't promise anything if his patients started bitching at him for lending his assistance. "Looks like you might be right," he said. "Want me to fix up some sort of a bandage for it? It'll heal better if you apply compression, and it's important to keep it elevated as well. I can hook you up with some ice--" Sure enough, as he said this he crossed the room to a freezer where several ice packs were held and passed her one, "--to help with the swelling. Try to stay off it as much as you can." He waved his hand a little when she apologised to him. "It's not your fault you can't remember," he said fairly. "Now, let's see about those cuts," he said in a business-like tone. "You wouldn't mind if I used any alcohol swabs or disinfectants, would you?" He knew that some people were opposed to the pain of getting those things into the cut and didn't want to start in on it without her permission.

Joshua frowned thoughtfully as she replied to him. She certainly didn't seem as if she was drifting in and out of consciousness and she was answering all of his questions. Sure, she had stumbled in here looking a bit worse for wear but the graduate assumed that most people would stumble if the ground had given him as good of a beating as it had Sam. "Well, I'm hardly a professional," he said slowly, still thinking, "so I couldn't treat a concussion even if you did have one, but the other staff in the Wing could." They had a couple of doctors on hand that were of higher skill than the simple nurses in case someone was injured at the school and couldn't immediately be transferred to the large hospital in the Hollow. However, they weren't to be bothered unless the injury was serious. "Keep any eye out for any of the things I mentioned," he advised, "just in case. One can never be too sure." He'd hate to tell her that she was absolutely fine only to have her stumble back in the next hour barely conscious. Though confident by nature he still had doubts sometimes about his skill. "How would you know?" he inquired, never having had contacts himself to judge the feeling of having them in versus having them out. He didn't know whether there was a sensation or whether you actually had to try and take the contacts out to tell. He didn't fancy the idea of that himself and was glad he had good vision. You could probably end up poking yourself in the eye or something, he mused.

He was not so stubborn he couldn't admit that he was wrong, so when she corrected him Joshua only blinked at her. After all, only the girl herself knew whether he'd taken her words the wrong way or not. "Care to enlighten me?" he asked, raising a dark brow. He worded it in order to make it clear that he was not asking her to explain if she didn't want to, only that he'd like to know what he'd misinterpreted if she felt like sharing. If admitting that you were wrong about something was difficult it was even more infuriating to have the knowledge that you were wrong for yourself. It was just a little thing, of course, but his accursed curiosity made him inquire. As for her injuries, it was a shame that she couldn't remember how she'd gotten them but he had a pretty solid theory involving the tree in his mind. It wasn't stretching the boundaries of reality too far to assume that she'd fallen and hit her head, after all. He was satisfied with this even if he'd been wrong about some of the things he'd interpreted.

She was made of something tough, that was for sure. It wasn't that all of the Academy's students were sissies or anything like that, but he figured she either had a high pain threshold or some amount of pride by the way she managed to not even groan with the pain. He admired that in a person, if only because it was so similar to the way the boy himself behaved. Wanting to get the bandage out of the way before he tended to the cuts (the longer it stayed compressed, the better) Joshua went through a few of the cupboards and drawers in the room until he found what he was looking for. It didn't take him long to apply the bandage, suggesting that whilst he might not be qualified to treat concussions or anything of real severity, he at least knew what he was doing. He enjoyed this, too. Not in the sense that he loved the pain and suffering of others but he liked keeping himself busy with the task at hand. "Feel free to point out any that I miss," he said as he started now to treat the cuts, making sure that they were clean and disinfected so that they wouldn't turn a great deal nastier than they were now. "Obviously you'll want to avoid getting anything in them," he said, not dwelling on this because he knew that Sam wasn't an idiot (or at least he assumed that she wasn't), "but if they do start looking any worse, you should probably drop by." Infection could be serious, after all. "I think that's it," he mused. "Unless you've got other injuries I should be worrying about?"

[Once this thread ends we could have another one where they meet on normal/friendly terms if you'd like?]

He listened with a slight frown, trying to piece together everything and make it fit as it should. Was her vision blurry because of the contacts or was it something worse? Josh was paranoid that he'd send her off with a concussion and that she might get hurt even worse later on but she seemed alright otherwise. "Just come back if anything gets worse," he said slowly, thoughtfully, for he couldn't really do anything else for her. Just wait until I'm a trained professional, he thought sarcastically to himself, and then I can be of more assistance. The thought was dripping with sarcasm because Josh himself knew that wouldn't be for several years now. After he got his degree in Biology he was going to get his masters in the medical school (hopefully) and then he might be able to deal with such things. Until then he was pretty much powerless. He hadn't missed the strange look she'd given him when he asked about her contacts but Joshua chose to ignore it. Normally he might have slipped in some form of a snide comment but professional attitude won over his usual barbed self.

Joshua blinked at her as she explained her meaning, then took a moment of silence himself in order to think that over. It was true that the wilderness had a wide variety of animals and creatures but if she had been trampled by a bear he was pretty sure there would be a lot more blood and pain, or at least heavy bruising from the paws. "I think most of the forest animals would go around you," he mused, "but I suppose it's something to consider, yes." He couldn't rule out anything until her memories came back--if they came back--and she could tell him exactly what happened. He envied people that could take one look at a scratch and tell where it had come from. He wasn't at that level yet, wasn't even in medical school yet. He was jealous of his father's skill and he wanted to be more like the man. His time would come, he knew, and he was trying to be patient, but he couldn't completely push aside the eagerness to learn. "I think it also depends on how far in you were," he added. "The animals like to stay back from the close perimeter because of all the students milling about. Self preservation, I guess." He shrugged.

Apparently she didn't have any other injuries and Josh knew that there was nothing else he could do in terms of helping, so he nodded a little in response. "That's that, then," he said, crossing the room to the sink and washing his hands as was customary. He turned to look at her with his colourless gray eyes and leaned against the counter where the sink was located. "You can go," he permitted, just so they were clear that she didn't need any more treatment. "Just try not to hit your head again--if you don't have a concussion yet, hitting it again might cause one--and stay off your ankle as much as you can." With those words he bade her farewell and settled in to wait for the next person that would wander through the medical wing doors needing his assistance.

[Your next reply (when Sam leaves) will close the thread--do you want me to start a new thread for them in... say, Tim Hortons? (It's in the Hollow)]