A Little Professional Courtesy

Posted on Sun Jun 26, 2016 @ 7:56pm by Lieutenant JG Noelle Bennett M.D. & Commander Amia Telamon M.D.

3,015 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Pangaea (Wrap up)
Location: Dr. Bennett's Office, Counseling Department, Deep Space 5

Amia took a cautious look into the Counselling Department and peered around the entrance arch. It was long overdue since she should have reported to Noelle Bennett and there were very few prevarications left that she hadn't utilised so it seemed about time she took one for team and came to sign in.

Approaching the 'reception area' the CMO was already thinking her way through what she felt she ought to have talked over long before this. That episode of amnesia. It hadn't been right and Amia was medically savy enough to know there was more going on than she had accepted so far. Noelle was the one she needed to discuss this with so she braved up and walked on in.

As it happened, Noelle had just left her private office and entered the department reception area to review the rest of the day's schedule. She was standing at the reception desk when the doors hissed open and a familiar, yet unfamiliar face in this context, appeared. In truth, she wondered if the CMO was psychic because Noelle had resolved to put on her command face and order the young woman to her office by the end of the day. Bennett smiled politely. "Hello, Doctor. How are you?"

"I'm doing well thanks." Amia replied. She blushed a little as if some part of her wasn't totally happy with that response. Physically she really was doing well, *very* well. Mentally, she was still not comfortable with that amnesia event yet but otherwise she was good so it wasn't really untrue to say she was okay.

"It's always difficult to talk to Counsellors," she laughed. "It's a bit like Security Officers, a person immediately feels a guilty conscience even if it's not justified. You just HAVE to."

Noelle chuckled. "I promise not to put the hot lamp on you. Come on back to my office," Bennett gestured. "It's been a while I've had a proper girl talk."

Once they were in the relative privacy of her office, Noelle said, "I actually owe you an apology. I've been meaning to follow up with you ever since your amnesia resolved itself. I was quite pleased to hear that."

"Oh it was as much my fault for not checking back with you." Amia was honest in taking her share of the delay.

"I wasn't ready to talk about it to be honest. In fact I'm not sure I am now but then perhaps I never will be unless I just face up to it and clear it away once and for all." she admitted.

Noelle nodded. "I know it was a very traumatic experience for you, as it would be for anyone. I have some understanding of what it took to restore your memory, but did you ever get a sense of the cause of the amnesia in the first place? Medically speaking, we couldn't identify any potential cause, so I'm wondering if you ever came to understand what it was?" Bennett wondered if in fact that had something to do with why she was reluctant to talk about it.

"I.... " Amia hesitated. This was indeed a very astute and well aimed question. She drew in a deep breath.

"At first I thought it was just that I'd been shot and bumped my head when I fell." she said honestly. "But then I felt some .... tugging.................pulling backwards.........as if some part of me wanted to...... wanted to stay away.... as if i couldn't reach that part of me..... as if it had been separated and locked away somewhere else......" This felt like one of those old fashioned sticky plasters that some people used to use to cover a wound in Centuries past. Like it was stuck to her skin and was being peeled off, which was painful.

She shivered and wrapped her arms across her chest in an extended folding action and recognised this herself as a classic defensive/protective position to have adopted. She unfolded awkwardly in a deliberate attempt to give herself a message that said: stop this and start cooperating!!

Recognizing the change in demeanor herself, Noelle took a moment to consider how to proceed. Just because a potentially traumatic event had been uncovered didn't mean it had been properly healed. Bennett wanted to make sure she wasn't professionally irresponsible as she proceeded. "I don't want to pressure you if you're not ready," Noelle replied, "but I take it being shot triggered another memory from your past?"

"Not in a literal sense" Amia answered, thinking carefully to make sure there wasn't anything subconscious lurking before declaring that to be the case.

"I think...." she seemed to be struggling with this. "I think it's because I thought I was going to die. We were evacuating.... everyone was running, panicking..... I had to get the wounded to the escape pods but the healthy were pushing them out of the way...... pushing us...... someone fell.... I think it was a child....... " Amia was back there now.

"I tried to get to her but..... Benj was there first and he was a hero. He stood in the midst of the flood of people and held them off so she could be picked up. I was thinking to myself that I needed to contact Cade..... but I couldn't get to him...... It was a real life live-over of these nightmares I've been having............... " her heart felt like it had stopped with the realisation that came out without warning.

"The nightmares.....!" she almost choked out. "I couldn't live in the reality of those ..... I wanted to shut them away.... so they couldn't come to be real.... he didn't come.... he couldn't.... he never can.... it's how the nightmares go...... on that junkship we came here on.... he's always lost on the junkship.... in the night..... and I'm asleep... like I was that night ..... and he's gone... and I can't get him back..... he's never coming b......." this time the choke was real.

Amia didn't break down, she just sat there, apparently detached, but with tears rolling down her cheeks. She made no sound any more, just stared into her own thoughts with a horrified expression on her face as if she were watching something roll out behind her eyes.

Suddenly she stood upright. Bolt upright, as if her chair had become electrified or hot unexpectedly. "I won't go back. I need to be here with Cade." she declared, looking right at Noelle now, her face hard in defiance as if she felt that Noelle was trying to make her do something terrible.

"It was just a concussion. That's my medical opinion." She shook her head to displace any remaining tear-drops and lifted chin higher, sticking it out as if to defy Noelle to gainsay her. She realised later that she had planted her feet firmly and slightly apart as if to brace against some unseen flow.

Taking it all in, Noelle took a few moments to choose her words carefully. "Amia, you clearly just had a flashback of some sort. I'm not clear on all the details, but it's obvious you've been traumatized. I won't make you talk specifics if you're not comfortable right now, but I think you and I should see each other to address the obvious anxiety this memory has created within you. I can help you learn coping skills, so when the time is right to address whatever it is you just flashbacked to, you can face it without feeling so overwhelmed."

The medical side of Amia heard and understood this. She sat down slowly, embarrassed by her outburst. "Yes of course" she muttered. "I'm sorry."

"There's nothing to apologize for," Noelle reassured. "This is obviously a tender subject for you, and it's natural to resist thinking and talking about it to avoid pain. As I see it, it's no different than touching a physical wound. Only in this case, the wound isn't quite as visible at first glance. Now that we know it's there, we can take care to treat it with gentleness. How are you feeling now?"

"Guilty" Amia said with painful honesty. "Because I have no right to be so ungrateful."

"You tell me more about that? What's making you feel ungrateful?" Noelle asked.

"I have the most incredible husband. He is so loving and such a perfect gentleman. I adore him totally and he loves me. What could I ever want for in the whole universe and yet, I have nightmares and insecurities and I ....... I should be so happy and so grateful for all that I have. Why would I *not* feel guilty for hiding away inside my fears and spoiling everything with my own foolishness." Amia replied.

"In what way are things being spoiled?" Noelle asked gently. A certain amount of guilt and self blame was common after trauma, but Bennett was looking beyond that for the moment. Somehow, Telamon believed her feelings were actually interfering with her relationship, which suggested a problem that needed to be solved beyond helping her process her own emotions.

"My amnesia. Was it my own fault? I came here because it was what he needed to do. I love him and I wanted to be the perfect wife but our wedding was so wonderful... with all our fantastic friends there.... it was so hard to leave them all.... and our lives behind. We had a brief respite but when we set off to come here, we were allocated the job of chaperone/nursemaids" she laid some heavy emphasis to the awkward descriptions. "....to some wild Cadets who wanted to sail an old starship here to her final dock and make it a kind of project. We were their supervisory 'parents' it seemed like. It wasn't so much that as..... Cade.... he was so ... " Amia ran out of steam and just shook her head sadly, disappearing back into her thoughts silently for a while as if she was trying to work it all out.

"Cade was so what?" Noelle asked, gaining some insight into the doctor but still struggling to understand what buttons were being pushed.

Amia's eyes seemed to refocus and she looked at Noelle. "Distracted. Bored sometimes, especially in the night.... He would get up and walk the corridors. I know he was worried about the green-stick crew but he didn't seem to be himself any more. He was a man on a mission but the mission was taking too long for his liking and he was antsy about trying to keep one step ahead of it. But yet he wouldn't say what was wrong, he just kept disappearing. Physically and emotionally."

"We are all responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and behavior," Noelle pointed out. "Cade's reactions are not your fault. I'm not sure how you could be responsible for your own amnesia."

"I kept having dreams. Nightmares that we'd done the wrong thing, leaving the Nimitz. It seemed like we'd left the old Cade behind and this new version was someone else. I wanted to rewind. I wanted us to get back in contact with each other. I needed him so badly. I needed for us to be making the changes together, not separately." she didn't even stop for breath now she was letting it all out.

"Then the evacuation happened and it was chaos. People were like animals. Pushing each other out of the way, trampling on children, wild, out of control. I tried to help as many as I could but it was terrifying. I couldn't get to Cade and I knew he would have to stay and be last off the base - it was both of our duty that way but to me, ungrateful mare that I am, it was like he had been slipping away all this time and this was the final severance. Then I got attacked and shot and it was all fading away........ Noelle....... it *WAS* my fault I lost my memory because I know...... I just remember a point in the midst of all that horror and pain and I ............. "

She stopped for a moment, which was like a screech of brakes, given how much of a torrent in which that had all fallen out.

Slowly and so very quietly, ashamedly and with no small amount of red cheeked, head hung admission of guilt, she croaked almost inaudibly the terrible truth.

"I didn't want to come back."

The silent moment that hung after that confession was raw, like a wound that was too painful to touch.

Noelle let Amia's words hang in the air for a few moments longer, out of deference to the breakthrough she had just made. Then, Bennett offered quietly, "No matter how stressed or depressed you were, you didn't choose to give yourself amnesia. No one consciously chooses to check out psychologically like that. If it were true, we'd all be zombies most of the time. What you're telling me is that you were extremely concerned and stressed before you were shot, and the shooting pushed you over the edge. To cope with what had happened to you, you literally had to forget everything else. You're not the first, and you won't be the last. What we need to do now is figure out how to help you let go of this guilt. Your mind is connected to your body. Would you judge any part of your body for shutting down because it's become overwhelmed by injury or infection, for example?"

Amia looked up, her eyes still full of pain for what she had just admitted. "No." she admitted quietly. "I would understand that. It's different."

"You don't believe mind and body are interconnected and psychological conditions affect physical ones and vice versa?"

"Yes of course I do but I think it's exactly because they are interconnected that one can shut the other off if it doesn't want to come back" Amia replied in a hushed tone.

"Even when they aren't just interconnected but interdependent?" Noelle asked gently. She wasn't trying to get lost in the weeds by engaging in a philosophical discussion, but she was trying to engage Amia's intellect as a doctor. If she could focus on facts, she would be less inclined to judge herself so harshly. "You may not treat your patients' emotional well-being in the same way I do, but I know you understand emotional well-being is just as critical when treating a person's physical injuries. Think of how much harder it is to get a patient to calm down and accept treatment if you weren't willing to reassure them they're safe and to give them an opportunity to express their fears. Think about what you know of trauma. Trauma isn't just something you feel in your body, in the form of adrenaline and fight or flight, is it? Isn't it as much about emotion as it is physical reaction?"

Amia's 'inner parent' still insisted on blaming her but it was weakening in the face of such lucid and difficult to deny, medically sound, arguments.

She would love to find some peace from whatever it was that was haunting her. Did it really have to do with her father? Could it be that?

Or was it something to do with her mother instead? She flashed back to the days when she had first left BaKu in a rage of grief and had almost died as a result of that rashness. It had only been when the Starfleet Medics had fitted her with a multiphasic-radiation systemic balancing neuraliser that she had been able to have any form of future away from her home planet.

There was so much that it could be but why was it all surfacing now?

"Do you really think it was just the trauma of being shot? Is it from my past? Does it have nothing to do with my concerns about coming here? I can't bear to lose Cade and it haunts me..... am I superimposing that fear? Isn't that a self-fulfilling prediction of doom?" she asked, finding herself melting into a need to hear Noelle give her permission to push some of this out of a mental air-lock, if that was at all possible?

"I do think your amnesia stemmed from the trauma of being shot," Noelle acknowledged with a nod. "Even if you can't be entirely sure of that, the fact you can verbalize your fear of losing Cade now means we can address it and you can work through it without letting shame overwhelm you. The important thing is that you understand you wouldn't consciously choose to run away from your responsibilities or who you are."

"That's true" Amia agreed, finding something to cling to that she was sure of. She knew she wouldn't run away deliberately. "Thank you. I do understand that distinction and it really does help".

She took in a deep breath. "You're right, of course. I'm so glad I finally came and got it out in the open. You're good at what you do Counsellor, I never had reason to doubt that but now I have first hand proof. Even if I did secretly fear what might happen, I came anyway and I came back from the amnesia too. I love Cade so much and I would never abandon him, nor my job. I love my work and I was SO proud to be promoted recently. I couldn't leave any of this. I just want to leave the nightmares and the inner fears behind. I'd be grateful and very glad to work on those, with your help....... "

Noelle smiled in appreciation of the doctor's compliment and out of pleasure to see her relief. "Absolutely. I'll make sure I'm available any time you're free to see me. You did all the hard work, I was just a guide and cheerleader of sorts."

"You're being very modest." Amia smiled gently. "Thank you. I'll make a new appointment on the way out."

A JP Between:

Lieutenant JG Noelle Bennett, M.D.
Chief Counselor
Deep Space 5

and

Cmdr Amia Telamon
CMO - DS5

 

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