Star Wars_ MedStar 01_ Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves [26]
Barriss Offee had agreed to do a rotation in the ward because her use of the Force was particularly well adapted to this kind of medical treatment. The Force could not in itself close a gaping wound-at least she did not have that kind of control-but it could help a sick person’s weakened immune system overcome at-tacks from pathogens.
As she scrubbed down, the Padawan had other things on her mind. That the transport had blown up had not been an accident-this she knew with certainty. Was that sabotage somehow connected to her mission regarding the bota? There was no logical reason to assume so, but she felt that it was. Was that the Force prompting her? Or was it simply intuition, or even mere imagination?
Her contacts with the staff on Drongar had not pro-duced any dark undertones in the Force thus far. The doctors, surgeons, nurses, and support people all seemed to be more or less what they claimed. Yes, there were things going on behind their facades, tensions that they hid, passions that they suppressed, but nothing that smacked of espionage or thievery.
Of course, she hadn’t met everyone yet, and there were some species that she simply couldn’t read at this point in her training. The minds of Hutts, for instance. Hutts’
inner selves were very slippery; when she reached for the core of one, it felt as if she were trying to pick up a transparisteel ball covered in ramjet lube. She was best with her own kind-so much so that at times during the last couple of years she had felt hope-lessly provincial.
An FX-7 med droid handed her the flatscreen chart of the patient in the Green Bed. Because the clones all looked exactly alike, each wore a Rimsoo ID tag around his right wrist. The staff had also taken to putting little colored pulse-stickers on the beds, and so, it had been explained to her, most of the nurses and doctors tended to refer to them as the Red Bed, the Blue Bed, the Purple Bed, and so on.
The man in the Green Bed had an MUO-malady of unknown origin-that somehow caused his blood ves-sels to dilate suddenly, as if he were plunging into deep shock. The causative agent had not yet been found. The result kept his blood pressure so low that if he tried to stand, or even sit up quickly, he passed out from lack of blood feeding his brain. The planetside specialist in xenobiotics, a human woman named Ree Ohr, called it orthostatic hypotensive syncope of idiopathic origin - which, translated, meant: "somebody who faints every time he tries to stand or sit up quickly, and we don’t know why." Doctors put great store into labels, as if naming an illness were in itself somehow going to cure it. The Jedi healers tried to be more holistic in their ap-proach to treating the ill.
Let’s see how well it works here, she thought.
She went to his bedside. The trooper-his designa-tion, according to the chart, was CT-914-seemed fine as long as he was lying down. They had just put him on a histaminic retardant whose side effect was to de-crease blood pressure. If they could not cure the illness, they would treat the signs or symptoms as best they could.
"Hello. I’m Padawan Offee. How are you feeling to-day?"
"I feel well," he said. He did not amplify that.
"Sit up, please."
He did so. Two seconds later his eyes rolled up to show white, and he collapsed back onto the bed, un-conscious.
So much for the new medication.
After a few more seconds, the trooper recovered. He opened his eyes.
"Tell me what just happened," Barriss said.
"I sat up and blacked out. Again."
She had not been on this world very long, but she had learned that the clone troopers tended to be somewhat literal and taciturn in their communication.