Fic: G is for Gross
It's Gen Fic Day, folks. And I have a contribution to Janet Alphabet Soup!
G is for Gross
Genre: Humour
Pairing: None! Gen!fic featuring Janet
Spoilers: None!
Season: Four
Rating: PG-13 for medical ick
Word count: 1,415
Summary: Just another day in Janet’s infirmary.
Note: Thanks so much to sg_fignewton for organising this genfic-palooza and to thraesja for her fantabulous beta skills and her tolerance of my many and varied eccentricities. I strongly recommend everyone go and read all the rest of the stories for Janet's Alphabet Soup.
-oOo-
Clink. Janet drops the fifteenth piece of shrapnel into the nearby pan. Only one left. She turns her head, allowing the nurse to dab away the sweat on her forehead before it rolls into her eyes, and squints at the scans that illustrate the locations of the metal fragments littering Lieutenant Woeste’s abdomen.
She turns back to the body laid open on her operating table.
“Retraction.”
Carefully pushing aside a lacerated piece of liver, she spots it. There, glistening red and silver with blood and steel, nestled an inch from his gallbladder.
“Gotcha...”
Janet removes the fragment, allowing herself a brief smile beneath her surgical mask. Now the real work could begin. As she drops the shrapnel into the pan to join its friends, she catches a whiff of something unmistakeable.
“Okay, we’ve got a bowel perforation. Suction.”
-oOo-
“So.” Janet consults the chart in her hands and stops at the foot of the bed. “What have we here?”
All four members of SG-13 are squirming on their gurneys, scratching at their arms, necks, legs, everywhere.
“Routine post-mission check-up,” says the nurse. “They seemed fine at first but then began to complain of formication.”
“What?” Colonel Dixon’s head whips up. “That’s not what I said!”
Janet hides a smile and puts down the chart to examine him. “Formication, Colonel. It’s an ‘m’ not an ‘n’. Means you have the sensation of insects crawling under your skin.”
He’s still scratching at his forearm, and Janet pushes his hand away to examine him.
Dixon’s head flops back into his pillow. “You’ve gotta do something, Doc. It’s driving me nuts.”
“Me too,” says Bosworth from the next bed over. The rest of the team groans their agreement.
“It’s quite a normal sensation, Colonel, particularly after exposure to off-world...” Janet frowns as Dixon’s skin ripples under her fingers. She watches as a dozen or so pea-sized bumps rise under his skin and creep farther up his arm. “Might be more than just a sensation, actually.” She turns to her staff. “Get them into quarantine.”
-oOo-
“What happened?” Janet asks as the nurse sedates Dr. Blake.
Dr. Lee’s stammering isn’t helpful at all. All Janet manages to catch is ‘horticulture lab’, ‘vine’, and ‘predacious’. Combined, the words are enough to give her the general idea.
“Sit down, Dr. Lee, before you hyperventilate,” she orders, and then begins to examine her new patient.
Blake’s leg injury is obvious. Necrotic skin tissue sloughs away, forming a random pattern of black pieces against the white bed linen. Janet places her fingers on either side of the wound, which is surrounded by several inches of swollen, cracked, red skin. Yellow-green pus that smells of decay oozes from the cracks.
A purple thorn is embedded deep in the centre of the wound. Janet picks up forceps from her tray. The sharp prongs sink into his flesh, and she eases the inch-long thorn out of Blake’s leg. It goes into a sealed sample jar and is whisked away.
That clinches it, Janet decides. No more alien plants allowed on the base under her watch.
-oOo-
“Hey, Doc, I don’t feel so hot.”
Major Harper doesn’t look so hot either. In fact he’s looking downright green.
Janet was enjoying a rare coffee break. She sighs and walks over. “What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know.” His hand is on his abdomen, which is never a good sign. “I just feel like I’m gonna-”
Harper pitches forward, ejecting a blast of vomit across Janet’s chest. She sighs again, confirms that yes he did manage to get it into her coffee too, and guides the poor man onto the nearest gurney.
An orderly helps her get him out of his soiled uniform as two airmen stumble in looking almost as bad as Harper.
“Looks like we have a new gastro on our hands,” Janet says.
She’s getting her new patients settled and is about to sneak away for a change of clothes and hopefully a shower when there’s a clatter behind her. She turns to find Harper reaching for a bedpan and retching into it.
He curls himself into the foetal position. “Oh, crap,” he moans.
“It’s alright, Major,” says Janet, tugging the privacy curtain closed around his bed.
She pauses when she realises the true reason for his moan and pained expression. A large dark, wet, and rather pungent stain is spreading near the Major’s backside.
At least he didn’t manage to get that into her coffee.
-oOo-
“Okay, standard IV fluids and antibiotics for all of SG-8,” Janet orders her staff. “And Major Jankowicz’s thigh needs suturing.”
The rescued team taken care of, Janet turns to the leader of the rescuers. She looks Colonel Reynolds over carefully, taking in his various...adornments. “So, how did this happen?”
“Was a condition of SG-8’s release.”
“Well,” she says, grabbing a pair of scissors and examining the feathers cross-crossing his ears. “If I snip these in the middle, we should be able to pull them out of both your earlobe and the cartilage at the top.”
Reynolds grimaces. “Sounds fun.”
She can tell he’s making an effort to sit as still as possible. She imagines it might have something to do with the long porcupine-like quills skewering each of his nipples. “These may be a little more painful to remove.”
“Yeah, well.” He utters a harsh but resigned huff of laughter. His shaking hands lift the painted animal hide that hangs over his groin. “I imagine that these will be even worse.”
Oh.
Ouch.
-oOo-
Janet’s dragging a forkful of eggs through a puddle of ketchup as Warner slides into the chair next to her.
“How’s Siler’s finger?”
“He’ll be fine,” Warner says, nodding. He reaches for the syrup and proceeds to drown his pancakes.
“Did you reattach the tip?”
Warner leans back and reaches into his lab coat pocket, producing a red baggie. “Nah, the piece was too small to bother. See?” He waves it in the air and plops it on the table next to Janet’s tray before he digs into his breakfast. “Does that look like an avulsion injury to you, or an amputation?”
“Hmm.” Janet takes another bite of ketchupy eggs then picks up the baggie. She squishes the fleshy lump against the plastic to get a better look. It’s hard to see through the film of blood in the bag, but there’s a yellowish-white spot near the centre of the fingertip. “Do you think that’s bone?”
Warner shrugs, dumping another load of syrup over his plate. “Don’t know. Could just be adipose tissue.”
Janet munches thoughtfully, poking at it some more. “Texture’s not quite right for either.” She turns baggie over and sees a piece of fingernail still attached to the flesh. She’s pretty sure she could have reattached a piece this size, but it’s too late now. “Could just be something Felger scooped up when collecting the tip from the floor.”
Behind them, a chair scrapes loudly backwards. Janet turns in time to see Harriman dumping his uneaten meal into the trash before practically sprinting out of the commissary.
She’ll have to keep an eye on him. Could be another case of that gastro.
-oOo-
“Welcome back.” Janet looks over the members of SG-1 as they file into her infirmary. “You four don’t even look like you’ve been offworld.”
Sam hops up on her usual gurney and smiles. “Quiet mission for once.”
“A welcome change, if you ask me,” says Colonel O’Neill, waving the pulse oximeter a nurse has clipped to his finger.
Janet clicks on her penlight and checks Teal’c’s pupillary response. “No one’s suffered any bumps to the head or other mishaps?”
“Indeed we did not, Doctor Fraiser,” says Teal’c.
“Just a hundred or so fluffy bunnies,” Daniel says with a smile.
Janet laughs. “Right.” Her fingers work their way up Teal’c’s neck and to his jaw. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, she nods and moves to the next bed.
“Seriously.” Sam’s legs are swinging over the edge of the mattress. “Daniel thinks they might be intelligent.”
The Colonel makes a strange sound like a strangled snort. Janet makes the mistake of looking over just as a nurse is checking the back of his throat for indications of Goa’uld entry.
Janet’s eye begins to twitch as the wooden tongue depressor slides into Colonel O’Neill’s mouth, and she can almost sympathetically feel its porous texture grating over her tongue.
She closes her eyes and turns away, failing to completely suppress her shudder.
God, tongue depressors are gross.
THE END
With both thanks and apologies to my mother...