Inner Turmoil - Part 1

Posted on Fri Mar 29th, 2019 @ 1:16pm by Lieutenant Kylean Amidok MD, PhD & Commander Abigail Prescott & Lieutenant JG Casshan Kincaid

4,477 words; about a 22 minute read

Mission: Mission 2: Into The Breach
Location: Kincaid's Counseling Suite
Timeline: MD05

ON

"Thank you for agreeing to see me, Counselor," Kylean said as he started his session. Knowing fully well his counselor was also from Betazed, Kylean did what he could to allow Casshan access to his thoughts, without opening them all the way. The doctor had problems with the memories of the sights, and smells, and feelings he'd experienced, not just in the aftermath of the bombing, but in many other major incidents he had responded to.

“That’s what I am here for Doctor, helping my fellows come to terms with their demons.” Casshan said as he directed Amidok to sit on the lounge and he himself sat in the single chair facing the lounge. “As you are aware anything said in this room is between us.” He smiled before his expression became serious. “Now with your permission I will only be sensing your emotions, I will not be picking up thoughts even if you give permission as it is not how I perform my counseling style, is it okay for me to empathically read you during our sessions?”

“I understand,” Kylean said without sitting down immediately. “Of course you have my permission to probe my emotions, but I don’t think you’ll need to in order to understand my emotions. I just hope you’ll understand I may unintentionally emit strong mental images or thoughts. I’ve got a lot to get off my chest. This is going to be very difficult for me to talk about, and I hope you can understand I may not open myself fully to you. I want to spare you the visions which stare back at me when I close my eyes to sleep at night," he admitted.

Hopefully the admission didn't go too far. If the medical or counseling staff thought Amidok's mental health might place patients at jeopardy, they could remove him from duty until it could either be treated, or he be determined to be untreatable, thus never allowing him to work as a doctor again. Standing up, Kylean turned his back to the counselor and carefully studied a painting on the wall. Without warning, a picture of a boy flooded his mind, and he feared it may have been seen by Casshan's as well. If the counselor had noticed it, maybe he would think it was a memory of Kylean's childhood.

Whether it had to do with a certain hue in part of the artwork, or a darkness within him, the vision of much larger mass killing from another time and place, and of the boy began to flood his thoughts. While he was fully aware the man behind him could most surely see those images, he felt it necessary to explain it. "Do you see it?" he asked, not waiting for a response. As he asked it, he wiped away a tear with his sleeve, and began to feel the sensation of what would develop into an intense pain in his right side. "Anterra VII," he said almost in a whisper, then speaking at a normal tone of voice he continued, "it was the Thesian flu. The lowly Thesian flu," he repeated as he turned back to face the counselor, the pain in his side starting to grow in intensity. "How something as rare as the Thesian flu managed to make it to the farthest reaches of space to Anterra VII we were never able to discern, but nonetheless, there it was. There it was, and thankfully by the time we diagnosed it, only a few thousand had died."

“You did everything you could,” Casshan replied, he knew doctors took their jobs very seriously and would not voluntarily give up unless there was no way. “You aren’t a Q, and self imposed blame is counterproductive.” He said he did sense some pressures on his mental barriers but he was only allowing emotions come through. He did begin to sense pain coming from the other man but refrained from commenting on it unless Amidok showed signs of it affecting him.

By this point, the pain in Kylean's side was strong enough, it was disrupting his mental ability to drown out the thoughts and feelings of others around them. He was still not able to focus on any single one of them, he imagined it was more like the flood of voices a Borg might hear as the all the voices of the collective constantly droned through their brains. Also, the very vivid picture of the mystery boy was circling loudly in his mind.

"That's right," he said, almost as if he were arguing with a thought never sent to him, "they died. They died of the Thesian flu." Turning quickly to stare into Kincaid's eyes, he beckoned, "Did you know, on Thesia IX, it had a mortality rate of less than one in one hundred million? I was just a junior researcher then, but it killed less than 100 people on Thesia before we could isolate the contagion, and find a remedy to reverse it forever."

He stopped speaking, filling the room with an awkward silence for at least 30 seconds as he pondered it. "Unfortunately, the Anterrans weren't so lucky. For the Anterrans, the mortality rate was practically 100%. The virus was so foreign to anything the species had ever encountered, their immune systems simply could not cope. The only savings grace the Anterrans had before we could reach them, the ONLY thing to save them from completely dying out was having such a low population density."

He stopped for a moment, almost hoping to regroup himself. Silently he sat down again, but trained his gaze again on the artwork as his tears continued to stream down his cheeks, the pain in his side had finally passed his pain tolerance threshold. "We were all so proud of ourselves," he said smiling, belying the very meaning of his words, "you see, we had the antidote. It was me. I was the one who isolated the virus, broke down its genetic structure, and found a patient who seemed to be able to resist the onset of the disease. That's the patient I found the first antibodies in.

"Using those antibodies, we had the ability to create both an antidote and a vaccine. Using our knowledge and the treatment readily at hand, we felt safe trying it out on the Anterrans. Of course, we followed the book on how to use them. We started with a limited selection of people, especially the stronger of the people, and when there were signs it was working..," he stopped, the pain in his side so intense, he was finding it hard to breathe. "When it was shown to be working, and there were no signs of harm, we started to administer the vaccine to the women and the children, then to the elderly male population. And, it was very successful in reversing the epidemic."

“I think you should go to sickbay and get that fixed Doctor.” Casshan said sliding forward in his chair with concern for Amidok. “We can come back to this after you are physically healed.”

“There isn’t anything they can do. The pain is psychological stress manifesting itself as physical neurological symptoms. I believe in centuries past, they referred to it as something like, ‘Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder,’ or ‘Conversion Disorder.’ Even though I specialised in infectious diseases, I remember my rounds in psychiatrics enough to recall something about it. I don’t know how I managed to repress so much for so long, but in the end we all have to pay the piper his due.” By this point, Kylean nearly doubled over from the pain. As the pain increased, so did the sharpness of the face of the boy in his mind. He could sense Casshan's concern, but he waived the counselor off. "It will pass in a moment," he said aloud. Within a few minutes, the pain had quieted back to a dull ache as the image of the boy in his mind faded.

Then silently, he started contemplating the colors on the artwork again, trying to regain composure. It was the way a boundary of a certain shade of red almost blended seamlessly with a sea of blackness, a blackness almost as deep as the color of his eyes. That was what he felt creeping within. He turned his gaze again to Kincaid for a moment, "Do you know children are medically extremely resilient? It can take well more than half the time it would take for an adult to show the onset of an illness, or to succumb to the effects of an injury than it does in a child?" The sobbing seemed to accelerate as he spoke, and the pain started swelling up again. "We were so proud of ourselves. We were so proud, we held a party in our own honor, having vaccinated or given the antidote by that point to nearly 80,000 Anterrans. As we sat there, just down the hall from the main medical unit, celebrating ourselves and our accomplishment, the nurses continued to inoculate more and more of the Anterrans in makeshift medical units there and all around the planet."

He grew quiet again, and an anger started to well from the pain deep within. "I didn't even have to wait for the first calls from the nurses watching over the patients to know something had gone wrong, horribly wrong. It started with one elderly man. I could feel his pain so badly, I don't know if I can ever forget his agony. It took twenty-five minutes for him to die. Almost ten minutes later, I started feeling it coming from all around me," he stared into the eyes of Kincaid. "It wasn't long before I could feel an even worse pain in my gut coming from a 12 year-old boy," internally, he said (the boy) as the fully focused death mask of the child flashed through his mind, soon to be replaced by a picture taken of the same boy, just days before he died. "That boy was more than 30,000 kilometers away. 30,000 kilometers!" he exclaimed. "I hadn't felt such a vivid torment as strong or raw from anyone so far away, ever. Then like a line of dominoes, one after another, virtually all of them started having the same reaction and then died."

“Doctor,” Casshan said firmly. He got up and walked over to the lounge, sat down then padded the lounge inviting Amidok to join him. He hadn’t come by this Conversion Disorder before and was a little gratified to learn it wasn’t actual physical injury pain just the mind’s translation of a way to outlet stress. That fact greatly troubled Casshan as he would have to do his own research on the disorder and what other counselors have done for those suffered from it in the past. But first things first, calming Kylean would be the best course of action.

“Doctor,” he repeated. “I want you to clear your mind, focus on my voice and simply breath in for 2 seconds and out for 2 seconds,” he waited for his patient to comply.

Kylean tried hard to focus and to follow the counselor’s instructions. In the moment, he felt ashamed, as this was basic Betazoid mind control 101. As he followed the counselor’s instructions, he stopped to gather himself, and to let the pain in his gut subside enough to continue. Instead of following his instinct to just plow forward, he decided to let Kincaid do his job, afterall it was the reason he asked for an appointment with the Counselor.

“Counselor, I feel it’s time to be completely open, no matter how good or bad it may make me look, both as a Betazoid, and as a doctor. I’ve not only been neglecting to actually deal with my emotions, I’ve been purposely trying to control them through alternative methods. I’m so ashamed to say this, but I’ve been treating myself with a drug named Bitrotriazyline for some time now. It inhibits the receptors in the brain from receiving strong emotional signals. It doesn’t quite do the trick on its own, but it does allow me to focus my mind enough to take care of the rest.” He was looking right into the eyes of Kincaid, who’s black eyes stared back at him. The gaze was so intense in the moment, it just added to Kylean’s shame. “As long as I take the Bitrotriazyline on a twice daily basis, I can normally block out just about anything. However, with the tumultuous nature of things over the past 2 or 3 days, working long hours, getting little sleep, and sometimes forgetting to even wash my hands before treating the next patient.” He felt full disclosure was the most important option if he stood any chance at all of beating his inner demon. It was something he should have started working on with a counselor many years before this appointment.

Casshan signed, “Doctors make the worst patients,” he muttered. He quickly checked his chrono and his eyes momentarily widened in surprise. He turned to Amidok and smiled. “Okay Doctor, this is what you are going to do,” he pointed at the doctor to make sure that Amidok understand that the following was considered Counselor’s orders. “One: You will take an extra hour off your shifts to relax, no and I mean no work related activities.”

He stood and crossed to a stack of padds, picked one up and cleared its contents then began to transcribe his instructions. He faced the Doctor again. “Two: Reduce the dosage of Bitrotriazyline by half and before you start your shifts will meditate on strengthening your mental barriers to block out emotions and thoughts. You will meditate in your office and delegate to your staff more.” Casshan said narrowing his eyes at Amidok. “You will sleep no shorter than 6 to 8 hours until I am satisfied that you are getting enough, if you are unable to I will supply a neural suppressant,” he chuckled, “from another doctor.” He made notes on the padd as he spoke.

“When you do go to sleep you will put on a REM sleep indicator that I will get from medical, it will show me how long and deep you were asleep for. I’m sure you are aware of how one works Doctor,” Casshan smiled. “Once we have established a balance between relaxation and work I will start to address your emotional state for you are useless to anyone if you do not take care of yourself first. If your mind and body are not stable then you will make mistakes, causing damage to those you are medically responsible for. Do you agree? A simple yes or no.”

He crossed to stand next to Amidok. “I will be informing the Executive officer of the reduced duty I’m placing you on as it affects the duty rosters. I suggest you rearrange your staff accordingly.” His expression softened. “Any nightmares you contact me and make notes as soon as you wake as they could explain things and assist me in getting to the cause of the matter. Yes you have already explained a lot but not everything is what is appears to be with the mind and its ways of expressions.” He grinned. “I have a few mind focusing techniques that we can do to assist with emotion and thought blocking.” He didn’t want to say games as that sounded unprofessional at the best of times.

"Yes, I agree. At this point, I’d do just about anything to regain my mental control. By the way, what should I call you? Do I call you by your first or last name, do I just call you Counselor, or do I call you Lieutenant? Of course I know you have a duty to speak with..," he stopped. Did Kincaid not know of Prescott's promotion to CO? He wasn't sure, so he didn't volunteer any information. "Just for full disclosure, I talked with Commander Prescott already, so she is aware I'll be either on restricted duty, or completely removed from duty until deemed fit. I specifically asked for you as a counselor, because most of what I suffer from is related to emotion. Who better to understand emotion than a Betazoid? I honestly don't know what to do. If you want to know about my dreams, I don't have to make a list, I have the same dream every damned night. Every night, I have the dream and wake up in a cold sweat. It doesn't matter if I've been in bed for 10 minutes or 10 hours, once it has woken me up, I could not get back to sleep again.”

“Counselor, please.” Casshan said with a nod, he gestured to the exit and began walking out but before they passed the door threshold he continued. “Yes but you shouldn’t judge counselors on species alone, we all trained for years to be of psychological and emotional assistance to the rest of Starfleet. Feeling the emotions of others doesn’t necessarily dictate how best to help heal one’s inner turmoil.” The doors opened at Casshan’s motion as he stepped forward. “Unfortunately our session has come to an end but,” he walked a meter in the corridor before turning back. “Please accompany me to get that neural suppressant and R.E.M. monitor, then you should return to your quarters and follow these instructions every day until our next session which I will schedule with you after a few days.” Luckily there wasn’t anyone in the corridor or just beyond as Casshan had performed a quick sweep for any emotions but his and Amidok’s before putting his barriers back in place. “Now imagine yourself in a glass box that only sound, smell, light and air can penetrate in your mind. It helps me deflect others’ emotions and thoughts, I will go into better techniques in future sessions.”

He gestured towards the nearest equipment locker that would have the two devices he wanted and wondered what else Amidok would throw his way; especially now that they were no longer in the comfort of his suite.

Kylean tried to keep an even look upon his face, and to hide a sense of disappointment. He didn't feel the counselor understood why he wanted another empath for a counselor. His issues were deep, and not just any counselor could help pull them to the surface, especially since he had buried them so far, he wasn't even sure if *he* could pull them out. He wasn't even sure if he *wanted* to pull them out.

Before they could get to the R.E.M. monitor, Kylean said, "Counselor, I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I have to tell you... if I am to reduce the Bitrotriazyline by half, I must refrain from any medical duties. It's been a long time since I've meditated, as I'd resolved to just stay medicated instead. There's nothing evil inside of me, it's just anguish. Even now I can feel it, almost like a cloak that pervades deep into my psyche. Whether it's by your call, or my own, I think I should be relieved of all medical duties until we can find a center of balance for it all within me. I think I'd be okay handling administrative duties, but I don't think I should see any patients. I know you are purposely blocking reading my emotions, just as we are all expected to, but I give you full permission to read as deep as you can into my thoughts, both the lucid waking ones, and those that only visit me in my sleep." Kylean took the two devices from the cabinet, and turned back to the counselor. "I think you should have the Commander, or someone else with higher access than my own, to only allow the system to give me half of the Bitrotriazyline than I would normally have synthesized. If not, I am afraid I'd be too inclined to take the full amount as I have before."

Casshan folded his arms over his mid chest and eyed the Chief Medical Officer. "You'd disobey a counselor's order? And it sounds like you are on your own way to finding what's bringing you all this trouble, so why do you need me?" He asked and quickly added. "If you feel unable to follow my instructions then by all means go to the First Officer and make the request. I think taking initiative against addictions is very well on the path to beating them. I cannot do it for you."

"I am sorry but I have other patients and diplomatic responsibilities to tend to. After the time I have allocated you to regain a regular sleep pattern, I can schedule another session if you like. But I prefer talking not telempathic methods." Casshan said he'd rather not mention that he was on restricted terms for counselling. "I may have to schedule you with my superior unexpectedly as I may be unavailable. Please excuse me Doctor." With that Casshan left Sickbay and headed back.

For a moment after Casshan left Kylean's side, the doctor just stood there, with a blank expression on his face, looking like he had no clue what he was doing, or where he was to go next. As other doctors passed him in the corridor, he would nod at their passing greetings, but had no words to say in response to them. He felt like he would vomit. He had hoped Casshan might have been open to his need for someone to dig deep into his psychological state as only an empathic person could. Kylean understood why the counselor would refuse to do so, but it didn't do anything to help Kylean along with his troubles.

He also understood the gravity of not calling a superior officer to halve the amount of medication Amidok had been abusing to keep from feeling emotions from others or from his own feelings, for a long, long time. Making the doctor responsible for contacting the Commander was a great way to not only show he meant business as a counselor, but he also understood the nature of substance abuse. Kylean knew he had to get someone to change the dosage of the medication he was abusing, or else he could fall back and intentionally take the full amount as he had been for a while.

He felt as if this was his only opportunity to get real help.

=/\= Dr Amidok to Commander Prescott. I'd like to meet with you for a few moments when it's most convenient with you. =/\=

=/\= I am in my office, Doctor, feel free to stop by at your convenience.=/\= Mint's voice sounded neutral, almost flat, yet more like she was distracted than unfeeling.

Kylean immediately went to the CO's office with the medical equipment still in hand. Before he stood before the door to announce his presence, he decided to leave the equipment on a table in the outer office. Once he entered, he greeted the Commander, and wasted no time in getting down to business.

"Sir," he said, squaring right between the chairs opposite her desk, "I've been ordered by Lieutenant Kincaid to follow several new therapy options, and to limit my duties for now. I will continue in my administrative roll as a department head, but won't be seeing patients." He kind of did a bit of a jig in place trying to dance around the larger issue. By this point the Commander offered him a seat, and he chose to take her up on the offer before he completely fell apart in fear. He had worked with many COs and many people at the rank of Commander, but this was a new one, and with the latest circumstances, he had no way of knowing what to expect from her as far as temperament went.

"Ma'am, err, I mean Sir, for some time now, I've been self-administering a drug known as Bitrotriazyline. It's an experimental drug I came across a few years ago. It's not really known in most medical circles, as it's only real use is to suppress the empathic receptors in a few specific species, including Betazoids." He really didn't want to explain the whole situation to her, so he opted to give her the Cliff notes version. "I've been told by the Counselor I am to reduce the amount of Bitrotriazyline I take by half per day. I need your help with that, as I do not trust myself to limit my intake to such a small amount after being on it for so long...

"Sir, I need you to order the computer to reject any requests from me to dispense Bitrotriazyline for any reason, and to instruct it to only allow Dr Sinclair Arrowstein to request the medication, twice per day, at 200 mg per injection. Of course, I now make myself available for any questions you may have."

She blinked and leaned back in her seat. This was by far the strangest request she'd ever received. "Will this drug interfere with your ability to do your job?" She tilted her head to the side. "And will cutting the dose in half cause any ill effects?"

"No, sir, it shouldn't interfere with at least handling only administrative issues, as long as I either avoid or keep very minimal any patient interaction. As to ill effects, unless you count actually having to deal with my feelings instead avoiding them?" he held his hands up, so as to make the motion a question, rather than an answer. "As long as I don't miss any appointments with the counselor, or one of his designees should he ever be unavailable, It'll make acclimating much less shocking."

"Alright," she held up her hand. "I will get these changes in the system, and will confer with Kincaid about the dose," she smiled. "Not because I don't trust you, but I want to verify these facts with him. Once he's confirmed, I will program the computer to deny any request from you for this medication and only allow the specific dose at specific times to be withdrawn by Dr. Arrowstein only."

He nodded to her, and asked for permission to depart so he could start his treatment, starting with a healthy dose of much needed sleep.

Mint nodded. "Dismissed, Doctor," she said simply, wondering how she had managed to get the strangest situations cropping up all at the same time.

"Thank you, Commander," he replied while returning to his feet. He didn't need a prescription for the sleep... he was ready for it already, and no sooner had he hit his bed and attached the devices, he was out like a light.

 

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