To Infinity And... Not Again!

Posted on Fri Jan 31st, 2020 @ 7:07pm by
Edited on on Tue Feb 4th, 2020 @ 10:58am

Mission: S2:1: Into The Drowning Deeps
Location: Infirmary, Canopus Station
Timeline: MD 2 : 19:00

The doors to the medical bay had slid open and Aimee walked straight through, bounced up onto the biobed, and laid all the way back onto it before placing her hands down onto her stomach. "Please tell me," She started as she looked over towards the nurse that was standing there, "That there is a female doctor here on duty?" She found herself asking and dreading the answer to her own question.

"No only Doctor Jacobs is on duty at the moment," He tilted his head ignoring for the moment that this person in a Starfleet uniform looked to be twelve or thirteen years old. "You're Counselor Paulsen though right?" He asked her.

Aimee was surprised that the nurse didn't start with the too young for Starfleet prose, but managed to hide that away. "I am," She said and looked straight up towards the ceiling, "I guess Doctor Jacobs will have to do," She let out a long winded, and deeply guarded, sigh that seemed to extend for a long period of time. "Can you please let him know that I need him and I would prefer somewhere with some privacy as well..." She stated plainly.

The nurse was intrigued but said nothing to that fact, "There is a biobed back around the corner that's got bulkheads around it and a sliding door." He pointed towards it, "I'll go get Doctor Jacobs and let him know that you need to see him," The nurse then disappeared around the corner, "Doctor Jacobs Counselor Paulsen needs to see you in the private area of the infirmary she seemed to be in urgent need."

At the mention of his name three times in as many minutes, Murray looked up from his perusal of the medical supplies and his ongoing cataloguing of Things That Would Be Quietly Removed Later. He mustered up his best helpful expression and wandered out into the main infirmary floorspace to meet the nurse.

"Urgent need," Murray noted, with a serious nod and a frown that he hoped made him look a little more dedicated to this cause than he really felt. "Okay, thanks." He added, and headed in the direction of the pointing finger.

"Counselor Paulsen?" the medic asked, in that traditional tone that also meant - I'm coming around into view of you any second now.

Aimee heard the voice as she rolled off the biobed in order to find the other one. She had literally entered the room and laid back onto the biobed, "Why does this happen every few months?" She asked herself without giving any details out loud because it was rather embarrassing to her to have the situation crop up. "Idiot transporter chief," She muttered as she crawled onto the biobed in the back room.

Murray blinked twice at the age of the child lying on the biobed before him, but said nothing about that unexpected wrinkle in the whole counselor motif.

"Every few months?" He asked, a light frown creasing his forehead as he canted his head to the side. "What exactly is happening?" Out of Aimee's view, the medic's right hand lightly tensed. If some transporter chief had hurt this kid...

Aimee knew that the Doctor would react the way he did, she expected it from many people... Actually, she expected it from everybody so she was more surprised when it didn't happen, "If you check my medical profile Doctor you'll see that my appearance is a blatant lie and I am not actually thirteen years old." "Irony is that we are the same age, but not that he'd get that," She thought to herself. "A transporter accident resulted in me being forever stuck as a thirteen-year-old girl or at least that's what my body thinks. I'm actually thirty years old," She told him.

"One of the drawbacks is that my body had to go through puberty twice though when it happened the second time it was only partially complete and now every few months or so my body triggers puberty again," She said. "My hormones get thrown out of whack and my brain doesn't register that I am, in fact, a thirty-year-old woman." "The joys of explaining this is one of many things in a long line that give me sarcastic bliss," She thought to herself.

"So you see Doctor, my body seems to think that I have to redo the process of partial puberty every so often. Remember all of those weird feelings you got when you went through this? I get to re-experience that plus the added benefit of it throwing my monthly cycle all out of order. My last Doctor gave me some drug or another to help counter the effects, but when I took it the drug didn't work. I'm hoping you have a solution?"

Not an injury caused by someone else... well, that was a good start. But Murray had to admit, in all his travels he had yet to encounter anyone stuck at physical age by a transporter accident. There were, plenty of people stuck at unpleasant mental ages, but that was a whole different mental department.

"Sure," he said, keeping his tone light. "Bear with me while I check your records then, alright?" Murray paused. "Okay to call you Aimee?" He asked, having pulled up the charts on the bed's readout. Curiouser and curiouser...

"How long have you been 13 now?" He asked politely, scanning up and down her clothed form with a tricorder and checking back and forth between the current details and the previous ones. Constant recycling. Lack of ageing. Miracle girl he had here. Women would kill for a smaller slice of this curse. Enough to keep them at 21 rather than tween perhaps. "And do you have any... physical developments of this puberty, or just the hormonal and menstrual symptoms?"

"The accident was in 2386 or 2387... I can't remember it was about six months to a year and a half after I reported aboard the USS Wincott," She answered him.

Murray stepped back a bit. "You can sit up," he said. "If you've been through this before I'm not going to ask you to get strip down and show and tell."

A light sigh. "I don't have a magical potion, but have they tried giving you contraceptive medicine before? It might sound odd, given that..." He wasn't sure of the rules here. 30 but 13? Surely that was a romantic minefield no one was about to start crossing. "You know what, never mind. But that should relieve some of your problems."

She had contorted her face because the Doctor seemed to be acting almost the same way as that Petty Officer had though at least he didn't ask her about her dating life. And, there was that strange creepy Betazoid counselor she had back at Starfleet Medical ask her about her sex life following the accident. The short answer was that it didn't exist anymore. The long answer was something that she wasn't about to get into with anyone, much to the disappointment of the Counselor apparently...

"You mean these?" She pointed at the top part of her chest as she asked her rhetorical question, "No they've pretty much stayed this size each and every time. It seems to mainly throw my cycle off and my brain chemistry gets all out of whack," She told the Doctor. "Starfleet medical tried birth control in an effort to better control the extreme swings that comes with puberty, but the result was well..."

She paused for a moment, but not for dramatic effect. She didn't know if he wanted that answer or not, "Let's just say that my hormones went into overdrive and I didn't sleep for a couple days," Aimee was horrified remembering what had happened to her.

"Yes," said Murray. He thought of the little girl he'd left back in Cargo Reef and he kept his tone utterly serious as he added. "Those."

If it hadn't been for the medical data evident in the station logs, and the reality of the information coming back from his own readings that matched it, Murray would have assumed this was a wind-up. The jump in the young woman's pulse that followed her pause helped convince him otherwise, but did nothing to aid his own confusion or sate his curiosity.

"I can't figure this out based on a 'let's just say'," the medic declared, again with gravitas to his words rather than any sign of humour. "What exactly are you saying happened here - that the birth control made you... excited?"

Aimee stared at him in blank disbelief, "Is he really going to make me talk about this... Again?" She thought to herself as her cheeks flushed. Aimee had been embarrassed by her outward appearance since the accident one of the many side-effects of being turned into the thirteen-year-old representation of yourself she assumed. She wondered just how descriptive she needed to be to get her point across, "My breasts were uncomfortably sensitive to... Well, everything..." She started as she sank further into embarrassed anguish.

"What's the medical word... I was so heavily aroused that I..." She paused again, "That I couldn't sleep. The Doctor finally had to give me a sedative after two days, and I was swiftly taken off the birth control. Nobody is entirely sure how it did that something about my cells and hormones being in a constant state of flux that the interaction between the two were... It just didn't work very well okay?" As she continued to spill over her voice had gotten softer almost to the point of inaudibility.

"Does that answer your question?" She managed to ask. By this point she was staring off at the bulkhead and away from the Doctor it was a very uncomfortable and sensitive subject regardless if he needed to know to help her out.

That look. Damn. But he had to know what she'd meant in order to do anything about this. That was assuming there was anything that could be done... He felt bad as the kid blushed, but right now Murray's only interest was in helping Aimee, not shaming her in any way. This process was all part of the joys of diagnosis, and with tweens, all the more tricky in the talking.

"It does answer my question, yes," he said, keeping it simple.

"Well, aside from the obvious lack of normality in your personal situation," Murray stated gently, rolling on through the explanation as if they were simply talking about a common affliction. "That's fairly standard for puberty, if admittedly wildly enhanced by the addition of the chemical boost from the contraceptives." He sighed softly. "So, yeah, no more of those then."

The Rish medic considered this matter in its entirety for a longer moment, then shook his head. "Unless you're suffering from pain or something's so out of sync with normal that it's affecting your day to day existence, I think you're just going to have to deal with it. The recurring puberty, I mean," Murray decided. "Sorry. But giving you anything else is only going to make things more complicated, or worse, or both. And I really don't want to be sedate you unless it's absolutely necessary."

He smiled, with more warmth than humour. "If it helps at all, hey, at least you're not repeating the menopause over and over," he said. "You're not in pain, are you?"

She eyed him knowing he had made a joke about the menopause, but found herself wondering if it were even possible for her to experience that. "I'm not in any pain no," She said and had her arms crossed over her chest. Well, since the drugs had quit working for her it meant her hormones were going to be all over the place, "So what you're saying Doctor is that doing my job as Counselor is going to be very challenging?"

Murray exhaled softly. This was definitely not what he had expected when he'd been drafted into Starfleet service, but as first days went, it could have been so much worse. "What I'm saying is, not being in pain is a Good Thing. Puberty is just a trade-off for being 17 years younger than you're supposed to be, and sooner or later we'll figure out how to age you again, and you'll have something else to complain about." He frowned. "Counselor huh? Well, that's a really important job. It's definitely going to have challenging times, yes. But you're 13, right? You don't have to work for a living."

Aimee sighed heavily, "Right thirteen," She muttered under her breath before jumping off the biobed. "If you'll excuse me Doctor I'm going back to my quarters to get more wine and to read a holonovel or something," She waved over her shoulder as she left the infirmary. This time she would make a point to prevent unwelcome visitors from disturbing her...