USS NOVA: Talking It Through
Tim Meushaw
Scene: Offices of Counseling, USS NOVA
"Okay, Sandy, I'll see you next week, same time?" Counselor Weston asked
Lieutenant Katz, who was rising from her seat rapidly.
"Errm..." Katz hesitated. "Don't you think, well, maybe I'm just about cured?
Or something?"
Mark raised an eyebrow. "Didn't you just tell me in the beginning of this
session that you're still seeing little green men from Mars peeking out of your
closet?"
"Well, yes, I did say that!" Katz said defensively. "What's that have to do
with our appointments, though?"
Smiling, Mark answered, "I think we'll talk about that next week."
The Lieutenant's shoulders sagged slightly, wondering why everybody looked
at her funny when she talked about her experiences. Didn't they want to
know what was going on in her life? Katz let herself be ushered out of
the Chief Counselor's office. Walking swiftly away, she nearly bumped
into an Ensign; while she didn't know her name, she recognized her from
the ship's newsletter as the new Chief Engineering Officer. Katz also
remembered from the rumor mill how she'd gone around stunning half of
Engineering in a pique of anger. Shuddering, Katz pressed herself into
the wall as she passed, thinking about how crazy the new CEO was.
Back in his office, Weston glanced over the case notes for Ensign
Zaldibar. Mark had of course heard about the altercation in Engineering
yesterday afternoon, as well as a note passed on from Captain Brooks
about the issue. The Captain's note had expressed his intention to
have Zaldibar sent down to talk to him at some point, but apparently the
Ensign had taken the initiative on her own to discuss the issue. That in
itself was quite a rarity, at least as far as members of the senior
staff go. Mark tried to remember when the Captain had last come down,
on his own OR with a direct order; maybe back when Mark was an Ensign?
At least 10 years or so.
Mark shook his head, realizing he was getting distracted. He only
had a few minutes before Zaldibar would arrive, and her scheduling an
appointment had taken him by surprise, as he hadn't had time to think
about the altercation. The best thing to do, he decided, would be
to just ask her side of it and go from there. Mark was well aware of
Crewman Sherman's attitude towards, well, anybody, and knew he was the
one at fault here. As a result, he tried to think about what was wrong
with stunning him, besides a gut reaction that it was wrong.
However, he ran out of time, as a buzzer sounded on his desk (his chime
set to vibrate only lest he still be with a patient). Mark knew that
meant his 8 o'clock had arrived, and pushed his notes to the side as he
went to the door and pressed the release. The small woman he remembered
meeting in the senior staff briefing was standing there. Mark could
tell she was putting on a brave face that wasn't quite felt on the
inside, but he couldn't blame her. Very few people were comfortable
with talking to the counseling staff, especially on their first visit.
Mark smiled down at the new Ensign and stood to the side of the door.
"Ensign, please come in, have a seat."
Mark took the seat facing the door (not behind his desk) while Zaldibar
sat down, her hands grasping each other in her lap, her eyes looking to
her hands, Mark's face and the floor, before finally settling somewhere
behind his right shoulder.
"I admit, Amaia, I was surprised when I saw you had made an appointment.
No one's ever made one so soon after coming aboard before." Mark gave
a disarming smile. "On the other hand, how many times do people have
a need to visit so soon?"
Zaldibar looked up and stared at Mark, but saw he meant no maliciousness
behind his words, and smiled nervously in response. "I take it you want
to talk about what happened yesterday?" As she nodded, Mark continued,
"I admit to hearing a rumor or two, but rumors very rarely can be taken
seriously. I'd appreciate hearing about it straight from you."
"Uhm..." she collected her thoughts for a minute. "It was right after
noon. We had just changed shifts, I had received Ad'helion's report and
relieved him, he'd left for lunch. Topi was classifying paperwork and
said nothing looked terribly urgent. Since we're just offbase, there
isn't that much to be filled, right now, not like there is when you're
heading in. I went to take a look-around while he finished separating
the files." She didn't look so nervous anymore. Sad, worried, but
at least she'd stopped fidgeting. As she relaxed further, her hands
started talking as well, getting more lively as she went.
"I started a circuit of the ship, I'm trying to learn it by heart, plus
I get to see what people are doing and introduce myself and so forth.
After a while, I got to an area that was pretty silent; I saw several
stations that were shut off. We have enough personnel to man all of
them, in that shift, but almost half of my people are new or still on
meds, so I don't want anybody alone," a rule that she had evidently not
applied to herself, noted Mark, "and many stations are shut off or in
stand-by. Everybody is working in pairs and nobody is supposed to be
working alone, whatever he's doing."
"Then I heard a noise, something I couldn't identify, but it sounded
human." She looked directly into Mark's eyes for a moment. "Noise can
get distorted real bad, between hollow walls, carpeting and whatnot. I
knew there was a pair of manned stations nearby and headed there. When
I got to the first one, I was expecting to see Sherman and Misha,
but instead it was Sherman and someone I didn't see well. Sherman had
him pinned against a corner, uhm..." she gestured, but couldn't really
explain it with words. Mark motioned for her to go on. She stood up,
saying "by your leave..."
Standing at the corner of a filecase, she moved her chair and said "ok,
this is the console, and it's set against this corner, ok, and all I see
is Sherman's back, like this," she mimicked Sherman standing with his
back to Mark and very close to the corner, left arm out of Mark's sight,
right arm raised horizontally about shoulder level to herself. "And his
arm is on Hubbard's throat, only I couldn't really see it was Hubbard,
but itsn't matter, and I can ee he's trying to hurt Hubbard bad, like
he's trying to strangle him but if he ets go enough to get a good grasp,
Hubbard will be able to get out, and Hubbard is trying to get out but he
can't, he's hitting the console and the wall with his arms", she stood
against the corner, mimicked flailing her arms.
"And I had no idea where Misha was, or who was it against the wall,
for what I saw it could have been Misha but I didn't think it was,
and someone called from the bridge but I wasn't really processing, I
think... I answered but I'm not even sure what I told them, like to wait
or sumthin'. And it didn't look like there was a lot of time before the
one on the corner got hurt bad, and I suck at fight and I said to stop
and they didn't, and I said it again and they didn't and I thought 'if
I hit'm he's just gonna get madder and I can't fight him and if I stun
him I'm gonna shut off power to a bunch'a places' and anybody was too
far..." her voice had been getting higher, as well as louder. Not good,
to be so worked up, but Mark knew it would be easier to get her to face
her fears if she expressed them - so not bad, either. He would have to
check who else had been nearby; she definitely should have talked with
the bridge. For a moment he wondered if she had forgotten how fast people
could move within the ship: it appeared likely.
"uhm..." she brought her chair back into place, sat down, strawberry
red. Mark was absolutely fascinated. In his experience, most people
required him to use the mental equivalent of a power drill, to give half
as much information as the Ensign had.
She stuttered "I sh-sh-shut off the con... console! And shot 'em, on
low. And switched it back on, and called for security and a medic. Uhm. I
shot twice, too." She rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her
hand, like it itched. "Sorry."
For a moment, Mark was at a loss for words. He normally would have had
to spend the initial sessions building trust, getting the patient to
see them as being "on the same side". This was an absolute first. He
fell back on an ancient resource: candy. There was a bowl of mints on
his desk. He took one and offered the bowl to Amaia, saying "want one?"
"Uh, no". The change was instantaneous. One instant, she'd been red;
now she was green.
"Wh? Amaia, what's wrong? Are you all right?"
"Uh, yeah, yeah, it's just, ah, bad tummy. Just nerves."
A pause. She was recovering her normal coloring already. Now that he was
looking more carefully, he could see dark circles under her eyes.
"You realize you just told the counselor 'just nerves', right?"
"Uh." She looked at the ceiling.
"Have you seen a doctor?", he asked with a smirk, leaving the bowl back
on the desk.
"Nah, it's just..."
"Just nerves, right. There is no such thing. I'm going to start treating
you for stress, but I also want you to go see the doctor," who is going
to be as surprised as I was, he thought. "It could be just nerves or it
could be ulcers."
He sighed. "I realize this is very hard to learn. We are all very
dedicated people. We want to do our best, we want to be there. But if
you're sick, then you shouldn't be on duty, Amaia. So go see the doctor
before you have to be on duty today."
"K."
"Good... OK, back to that fight. What do you think you did that you
shouldn't have?"
"Shoot them."
"OK. What else?"
"Uh?"
"Can you think of anything else you did wrong?"
She thought. "I should'a paid attention to that call?"
"That's also true, but, as you may recall, you were a little stressed.
Not answering a page while you're in the middle of a crisis situation is
pretty standard procedure. On the other hand, you could have asked for
Security to send someone down. Aren't there several Security stations
right near where you were?"
"I noted them, but there was no one there."
Mark raised an eyebrow. "That's highly unusual, but I'll ask Lieutenant
Flynne about it. Now," he said, staring at her, "I'm going to tell you
something that I highly doubt the Captain would have, and that I ask
you not to repeat outside of this office. This is just for you and me.
Understand?"
Amaia gulped, fearing what the Counselor was about to say. His gaze
was fixating, penetrating her to make sure she understood the gravity
of what he was about to say. Dumbly, she could only nod.
"Ensign, what you did in Engineering. I want you to know that you
handled yourself well. Brilliantly, in fact."
Taken aback, she stared at Mark for a few seconds, unable to respond.
She had been dressed down by the Captain, and spent the entire time
since the incident thinking about the mistake she'd made, and this entire
session being told (she thought) how wrong she had been. Weston's words
completely threw her for a loop, and for the first time jarred her out
of her self-doubt. Which, non-coincidentally, was *exactly* the effect
the Counselor was trying to achieve. Mark knew what Amaia didn't; that
if this cycle of self-doubt and self-pity continued, she'd be useless
to the NOVA and to herself. Any time any kind of emergency situation
came up, she'd be frozen with indecision, not wanting to screw up again.
She'd spend so long trying to figure out the *right* answer, whatever
crisis was occuring would escalate, perhaps to a fatal level (like the
ship blowing up because she wants to be sure venting the core is the right
thing to do before doing it). Mark's task was not only to help her think
of the right thing to do in these kinds of situations; it was to help her
to rebuild confidence in herself.
"You've been on this ship for a day. You just got out of ALB.
You've found yourself as a senior officer of a SOLAR-class starship.
And you walk into your new assignment and see one of your team trying
to kill another one. Do you know what most people would have done
in that situation?" Without pausing for an answer, he continued,
"they would have stood there frozen. Completely unable to take in what
they were seeing or how they should stop it. Who knows how far things
would have gotten had you not acted at all. But you DID act. Did you
act appropriately? No. But that just comes from a lack of experience.
There's an expression I one heard: 'Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgement.' Don't just dwell on how wrong
you were. Learn from this experience, and next time, you'll act
appropriately. Oh," Mark smiled, adding as an afterthought, "watch out
for Sherman. He's crazy, you know."
While it was important to analyze what had happened and how to act
differently in the future, Mark didn't want to dwell on it too much. He
knew that she was going to be thinking about it a lot; he wanted her to
focus on dealing with her stress and on improvement, not get stuck into
a mental loop about "the twenty-five ways I could have stopped Sherman
from killing Hubbard without stunning both." So he changed the topic
at that point, asking about her hobbies and found out that she liked
to swim: she'd even been in a synchronized swimming team. Exercise,
sunlamps (good to combat depression) and staying away from her office
when not on duty should help. They also set up a series of appointments:
for the first week she'd be dropping by daily, not for normal hourly
sessions but just short ones. Mark didn't want to start her on meds,
specially if she had something physical as well.
He chuckled when the door closed after Zaldibar. The Nova had its
fair share of "characters", some of which absolutely refused to visit
anything resembling his office, but the talkative Ensign was still an
interesting addition. She certainly was a scrapper, even if she "sucked
at fight". Sitting at his desk with a smile, he wondered if maybe she
had picked the wrong branch of service altogether...
========================================================================
Notes:
JeffT: Definately Kattan. ;-) -- Tim
========================================================================
Respectfully Submitted,
Commander Mark J. Weston, M.D.
Ship's Counselor, USS NOVA (NCC-1776-A)
a.k.a.
Timothy A. Meushaw
meu...@pobox.com
and
Ensign Amaia Zaldibar
Engineering, USS NOVA
a.k.a.
Mariluz Ochoa de Olza
och...@yahoo.com
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