Jean & Laurie log

[x-wallflower-.livejournal.com]

Who: Jean, Laurie
What Happens: Laurie reports for her first day of Medlab volunteering and gets the cook's tour.



The med lab was finally returning to something approaching a normal schedule after the latest crisis. There were many reasons why Jean didn't like having patients in residence, not the least of which was that it meant that either one of her students, her co-workers or her friends was in serious enough need of medical care to be down here full time, but that kind of went with the job. But things were straightening out again, which was why she'd scheduled Laurie's first shift now - there would (hopefully) not be anything too rough for the girl to deal with on her first day, and Jean would have plenty of time to answer any questions.

Laurie for her part was just happy to be given the opportunity to help out, nervous as she was about this, her first day. She'd forgotten to ask in the lecture about ethics and the rules of the med lab as to whether there was a uniform for volunteers like the candystripers in a normal Hospital but she supposed she'd find that out soon enough.

She'd dressed in basic jeans and a t-shirt, clean since she'd done her laundry only the day before, not that she made a habit of re-wearing clothing but sometimes you ran out of clean stuff and it was always easier to get wrestle with the washing machines on the weekend then during the week.

This reminded her, she'd need to talk to Cain about one that'd been making a really weird whirring noise the last time she'd been in the laundry room. If she didn't know better, she'd have said that dryer was trying to talk to her. Probably just a prank by one of the technopath kids but it didn't pay to let electrical appliances degrade too much, they had a bad tendency to explode.

"Dr Grey, you in?" Laurie asked, knocking politely on the door to Jean's office.

Jean looked up from the seemingly unending pile of paperwork and smiled.

"Hey, Laurie, right on time." Standing up she grabbed the clipboard she'd set aside and moved to join the girl in the hall. "How you doing?

Ready for your first day?"

"A little nervous" Laurie admitted shyly, looking around her with some interest. She'd been down here before, but mostly just on her way to Forge's lab and hadn't really done much sight-seeing as it were. She was looking forward to getting a better idea of what actually went on down here. "But definitely ready."

"Nothing to be nervous about," Jean said, heading towards the central room of the med lab. "Proper tour time," she added, "since you're not one of our regulars, for which I thank you." Jean grinned, and then stopped at the door to the main room, looking back down the hall.

"Right here we've got the offices - mine and Amelia's, as well as Moira's spare and what used to be Dr. McCoy and Dr. Bartlet's which are functioning as storage/waiting areas these days. More comfortable than having visitors wait here by the door when we won't let them in."

She pointed to a spot on the ground where the floor did look suspiciously more worn than it ought to.

"People must have done a lot of waiting in there." Laurie replied, glancing at the spot and then looking around at the other spaces.

"What's a normal day like down here? I have a feeling you don't regularly have the huge crisis type situations, or someone would have said something about marking it on a calendar or something. You know, 'Tuesday, end up in Med lab after trauma' sort of thing."

"Yes, there's been a lot of waiting periods, and an unfortunate number of incidents which are very rarely scheduled. Although we did have a counter up once, 'number of days since last crisis'. But it was depressing to have to keep restarting it." Jean smiled - mostly joking, then moved into the man room of the med lab. "Normal days, when we get them, are pretty quiet. And, truthfully, there are a lot of normal days.

They just tend to get swallowed in the memory by all the extraordinary, stressful ones. During down time, we do a lot of routine check-ups, minor accident repair, sick-notes for class - that kind of thing. On weekdays, if you're scheduled during your free periods, one of your key jobs is going to be to grab whichever of Amelia or I is on schedule if a student comes in to get a note. The ones who are just trying to get out of tests don't seem to mind if it takes us twenty minutes to figure out they're down here."

"Do I get a lab coat?" Laurie asked with interest, enjoying the tour.

There seemed to be a lot of interesting machinery down here apart from the normal hospital mainstays of beds and oxygen equipment and the like.

She wondered what they all did. "And if I think a student is faking it, do I send them back to class or still get you just to be sure?"

"Get us just in case, yes. Among other things, we need to keep track of whether or not a student is regularly doing stuff like that and if there's some other problem than simply not wanting to take a test. And sorry, nope, no lab coat for you. Although you may get to wash the lab coats." Jean grinned. "Luckily, most of the time the laundry's not a big problem, but if we've had any bouts of the flu it can get icky.

Do say if there's anything you're not comfortable with doing, at any time." The two of them reached a series of doors on the far wall, opening into smaller examining rooms. "So, one of the big rules - if one of these doors is closed, you don't open it, even if the schedule says you're supposed to be cleaning in here and particularly if you think Amelia or I is in there with a patient. If you need us, knock and wait until somebody says it's ok to come in. If you just need into the room and don't think there's a patient, come find Amelia or I and check, just to be sure. The same is going to go for the private rooms if a patient is in residence, nine times out of ten."

"There's not much that can squick me out. Violence usually, but that's usually only when it's directed at me rather then just someone freaking out in a spectacular fashion." Laurie responded, following along behind Jean with an interested gaze and filing away all the instructions in a part of her mind she had begun mentally labelling as 'Med lab'. "Will I need to do stuff like feeding and bedpans? Mum was telling she had to do that when she volunteered at the local hospital when she was a teenager."

"It's a possibility, yes," Jean admitted. "We always hope the answer is 'no', but it's come up before and, given our propensity towards head wounds, I can't help but think it will come up again. But most of the time the volunteers' duties lie more in the general upkeep area - cleaning, standard supply inventory, etc. Basically, making life easier for Amelia and me so we can focus on the things that only we can do. And we come to another no-go area," Jean said, stopping in front of what looked like just another room. Setting her hand on the door, she jiggled it, showing Laurie it was locked before pulling her keys out and opening it, revealing the medicine supply. "Amelia and I do supply inventory in here ourselves. Anytime we're not in here, this room is locked. If you ever come down here and the doors open and we're not in range? That's a big problem and you come find one of us immediately. If you can't find us, you go to Mr. Summers or Ms.

Munroe. It's better to interrupt any of us over what turns out to be an oversight that for one of the little kids to come down looking for aspirin and pick up the wrong box."

"Will I get training on what the medicines do or is that more a nursing thing?" Laurie asked, looking about inside. There were certainly a lot of different names in there, although she recognised some of the more common labels. She wondered if there were 'mutant specific' medications that the school had that a normal hospital might not. It stood to reason that they might. "I did a first aid course when I was at the other high school. You know, with the CPR stuff and what to do if someone gets a chunk of something through a part of their body. I can make a really good circular bandage if I do say so myself. Although, that's more for the 'What will make this person stable so we can then call 911?' stuff then anything else."

Jean grinned. "We can do that, if you want, as an independent study.

There's the basic set of chores that all of you volunteers will do that are the same, and then we tend to tailor individual work around what you're actually interested in. Medicine's a pretty big field, and whether or not you're just dabbling or actually thinking about it as a possible career, there are going to be areas which appeal more to you than to Crystal, for instance. Clarice, obviously, was more interested in emergency response, while Rahne made an excellent nurse."

"Well, I did kinda have an idea for using my power to help people. I know I can do things like that pain away, stuff like that. But I wasn't sure how I'd handle the whole blood and bedpans thing, so I wanted to see first before I set my heart on anything." Laurie replied, blushing softly at this admission.

It seemed such a silly thing to worry about, especially considering how many other things were out there but she didn't want to set her mind on a career if she would end up not wanting to carry on with it.

"Well, the blood, I admit, comes with the territory, and there can obviously be accidents, but as a doctor in residence at a hospital, there are staff to deal with bedpans and the like and, similarly, a normal private practice isn't going to have patients in residence.

We're a bit of an odd situation here. In many ways. But it does mean you're going to get to see a range..." Jean smiled again, this slightly ironic. "And there are fields of medicine other than being a general practitioner like Amelia and myself that often don't involve blood at all."

"Well, I didn't freak out that time that Yvette accidentally cut me, so I'll probably be alright." Laurie replied with a bright smile. "So, where to next?"

"The last two no-go areas in here," Jean said, re-locking the medicine closet and moving so she could rest her hand on the large file cabinet, "are this cabinet," she tugged on the handle, proving it, too, was locked, "and the secure computer system. Again, it's more a situation of, if you come across either one and it hasn't been properly secured, come tell Amelia or I. You'll have access to the volunteer login on the computers - that will have scheduling information for who's working when, as well as any scheduled check-ups so you'll have an idea who should be hanging around down here when - so if you come across a computer not showing that or the general login page come find us. It's a simple rule," she added with a laugh.

"Anytime something seems weird, come find one of us. And finally,"

Jean opened the last door, revealing another corridor, "we have the private rooms. If anybody's down here long term, they'll almost certainly be in one of these."

Laurie looked past her curiously, noting that the hallway beyond seemed to be painted in a slightly less glaring shade of white. She supposed if you were going to be somewhere longterm, you'd be looking to give them a more calming atmosphere.

"Have you had many long termers?" Laurie asked, wondering briefly if this was something she should know. She'd had times when she'd asked a question and had the feeling that it was a rather silly one. She just didn't have that much time to read back through the entire history of the school, and wasn't particularly that interested in it, even if she had.

It wasn't that she minded history of course, and some things needed knowing but why read dusty books and sit in front of a computer screen when she could just ask the flesh and blood people around her?

Jean didn't act as though she thought the question was silly. "More than a few, yes. Times when things have gone very badly for someone, and they've needed significant recovery time. It's not an easy world for mutants to live in, sometimes, and, well, you know that some of the staffs' second job makes it that much harder for them personally, in order to make it a bit easier for everybody else. Generally, though, it'll be an overnight stay or, at most, a couple of days. It's not that hard to get upstairs, so we release people to their own rooms as soon as we can. We've only had seriously long term residents a handful of times."

"This all seems pretty straight forward." Laurie replied, pulling out her notepad and jotting down a few notes so she wouldn't have to ask again later. "So, do you have a schedule for me yet, or do I need to fill out any paperwork or anything first? I know in RedX we had to sign off on a couple of legal type things before we could join as a fully fledged member."

"Yep, there is paperwork, and you'll need to join our weekend ethics discussions at least once, although if you think it's interesting you're welcome to come more often. But we can still get your schedule worked out now. It's largely your choice - you schedule around your classes and free time. Here." Jean handed Laurie the clipboard she'd been carrying, which had a printuot of the weekly medlab volunteer schedule. "You might want to come down the first couple times when one of the others is here, for company or question answering."

"I think I can do that." Laurie responded, taking the clipboard and looking over it. It was all neatly laid out and names were listed against various times. She could probably ask Crystal if she didn't mind her tagging along the next time she was down, although perhaps the other girl would be taking it easy with her broken leg and all.

"And I don't mind ethics discussions, it'll be interesting to see how it's differs from Prof. Xavier's class on mutant ethics."

"Well, the approach is remarkably similar, since I may have lifted his style wholesale from when I was getting ethics lectures from him, but the focus is different, obviously."

"Obviously." Laurie replied, grinning. She looked over the clipboard again and made note of several times during the week that she'd be able to fit in a Medlab shift. That was good, what with Cain now wanting her to help with a summer project and Lorna's proposal, she was going to be a very busy Laurie.

"I always get the feeling he's trying to tell me something though. I'm not sure if it's just me but it always feels like he's waiting for something from me. I hope I'm not disappointing him."

Ethics lessons were interesting, to say the least. She liked a good discussion about right and wrong as much as the next person. But like she said, she always got the feeling that Professor Xavier was waiting for something from her, and she wished she knew what it was.

"Oh, well, the professor figured out long ago that expecting good things was the best way to get good results," Jean said, smiling, which was true, although Jean knew that Charles probably had his eye on Laurie for other reasons as well. It had been years since she'd last seen Zach Garrison, but he was not someone easily forgotten.

"Well, hopefully I'll live up to his expectations." Laurie replied with a smile, before frowning slightly as her watch started to beep at her. "And I've got to go, otherwise I'll be late for my next class. I'll come down and sign all the paperwork after classes?"

"That's fine. Here." A small pad of paper floated across the room and Jean snagged it out of the air, quickly jotting a note. "Don't actually run in the halls, kay?" she said, handing Laurie the late slip.

"I won't!" Laurie replied as she took the slip of paper with a grin and then walked at a fast trot out of the med lab and back up the stairs.