Medical Care: Volunteer Work

Kavi sighed as he drummed his fingers against Sizzle's back, looking around at the other people in the waiting room. He didn't know how long he'd be here before someone got to him about this volunteering stint-- it seemed there had been a mass injury of some kind, and several people had all been rushed through triage, leaving whoever it was that had originally going to give him his orientation frightfully busy.

So, of course, he waited.

It wasn't that he couldn't afford the credit cost of a substantial donation to the hospital-- it was the damn supply chain issues that meant that the medicines the hospital were looking for were difficult to find and exorbitantly expensive to have delivered to him. Since he wasn't about to go traipsing off into the woods to find medicinal plants, he'd decided it would be best to help out the hospital with some volunteer hours, so that the doctors and nurses doing their best to keep up with the fog fallout would burn out at least a little more slowly.

Somebody coughed. Someone else in the waiting room was rocking back and forth slightly, nursing an arm that looked... bent. Not bent at the elbow, or the wrist, or not just, at least. A baby, somewhere in what must be the pediatrics section, was crying, so quiet that most people wouldn't have been able to pick it up. The tension in rooms like this was difficult to stand-- it was a relief when one of the triage nurses called his name.

"Kavael?" He turned his head, looking to see if there was someone else standing or putting their hand up. After a brief moment of confirmation, he stood, letting Sizzle hop up onto his shoulder as he walked over.

"Yes, that's me." He smiled as the receptionist nodded, flipping through a sheaf of papers on a clipboard, choosing to stay quiet instead of engage in small talk. Whatever was going on today, he didn't think anyone would appreciate the delay.

"You're helping out the nurses in the emergency room today," the woman said, pointing to the reinforced double door next to her, "The nurse's station is on your second left and all the way down the hall-- just follow the arrows on the floor." She leaned over, swiping her card in front of an access point next to the door. As the doors slid into the wall, he stepped through, looking around as he walked forward, idly glancing at the posters and art on the walls as the floor display lit up with friendly blue chevrons.

A hallway on his right-- okay, skip that-- then a hallway on his left-- skip that too-- until he came to the open set of doors next to it. With a glance down to the curving indicators, he followed them through, and began walking until he saw an island of counters with a tired-looking man behind it. "Hi, I'm here to help out?"

"Oh thank Arc-- I mean, uh, hi, hello. Walk with me. Do you know how to work a coffee machine?" Kavi blinked, a little taken aback. "It's... pretty simple, isn't it? You put the pot in the base, swap out for a clean filter, add the grounds...?" He trailed off as the haggard man beside him let out a sound a little like a teakettle.

"You'd think so, right?" the other man said, scrubbing at his stubble, "but the last time we tried to have a volunteer help with it, we had grounds in all the cups, and the next pot was full of soap."

-~-

The coffee machine turned out to be a simple job, as was grabbing the meal requests for all the nurses and phoning the order down to the kitchen-- he didn't even have to pick them up himself. Finding the supply closet to replace the towels and blankets gave him a little more difficulty. During his break, he took the opportunity to take the nurses' pokemon out for a small walk in the courtyard, helping them burn off a little excess energy and giving him some much needed time outside. But mostly, he had been stuck to clerical work. Instead of checking out, many patients had just left when their needs were seen to, which, while nice in theory, left some of the paperwork difficult to complete, and the job had been piling up. After many minutes lost to searching, he found the solution: after consulting with the chart to ensure nothing was missing, it was mostly a matter of putting in for a special exception code, clicking through about four times, and then hitting 'Save and Quit'. He paused, calling over to one of the nurses for confirmation that he'd done it correctly, and then settled in to do it another couple hundred times.

-~-

By the end of the day, he was nursing a headache of his own. This one, thankfully, could be solved by going home to rest.