DISCLAIMER: All characters and property of Stargate SG-1 belong to MGM/UA, World Gekko Corp. and Double Secret Productions. This fan fiction was created solely for entertainment and no money was made from it. Also, no copyright or trademark infringement was intended. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. Any other characters, the storyline and the actual story are the property of the author.
If I may borrow a charming term from an equally charming Colonel of our acquaintance:
Waiting sucks.
I know. As the doctor, I could have insisted on going with them. But once the word came through that the rescue team had located the other half of SG1, well. There's only so much room in a helicopter, and nothing short of a general anaesthetic was going to stop Daniel and Teal'c and the General from rushing off to make sure nobody accidentally dropped Jack or Sam during the extraction. I didn't have the heart to pull rank on them. Besides. Phil Waites, the McMurdo Rescue team EMT, was perfectly competent and I was only a radio wave away and there were all the preparations to be made.
I've gotten used to not having to worry about security considerations. At SGC my patients can babble all they want about goa'uld and jaffa and stargates and aliens and wormholes. Who's to care? But McMurdo is a different matter. McMurdo is not a secure facility. Not what we call secure, anyway. That's why I'd been brought along, of course. Not just because of my extraordinary medical skill, but for containment purposes.
Dr Roger Abbot wasn't too sure. Dr Roger Abbot seemed to think my presence implied that he wasn't good enough to take care of our people. Dr Roger Abbot is one of those irritating types who think that 'Classified' applies to other people. What? Did we think he couldn't keep a secret?
Well, yes. That was the general idea.
George Hammond is a dedicated, intelligent, articulate, caring, compassionate man who can halt a Jack O'Neill tirade in mid-flight with the lift of one eyebrow. One eyebrow.
Roger Abbot didn't stand a chance.
He sulked as we waited for Rescue Team Charlie to come in from the cold. Spare me. If I hadn't needed his surgical skills I would have found something else for him to do. But I did, so I was stuck with him. Terrific. Just what I really wanted with yet another O'Neill inspired crisis heading my way at Mach 2.
Coma. Hypothermia. Head injury. Fractured tib/fib and ribs. Internal injuries. Bleeding. Frostbite. Hell's bells and buckets of blood.
Buckets. I just prayed that Jack hadn't spilled more than he could spare. Him being so clumsy, and all. I'd brought more with me, of course. Lots of little red baggies of AB neg. Couldn't risk McMurdo running out and didn't want to deplete their stores, anyway. The OR was ready, the blankets and saline were warming, the crash cart and portable x-ray machine were standing by and my little heart was going pitter-pitter-pat.
We could lose this one. This is bad. He's been deteriorating for seventy two hours. He may be strong, he may be the toughest sonofabitch you've ever met, but it's been three days and he's a mess.
Roger Abbot said, "This is an excellent facility, Doctor. And it has excellent staff. You don't have to worry about that." The scowl was gone, replaced by something approaching compassion.
"I know," I said, more snappily that I should have. Either he was more perceptive than I'd given him credit for, or I wasn't camouflaging as well I should have been. Damn. I bit my lip, took a deep breath. "Sorry. This has nothing to do with your competence, Doctor. It really hasn't. When the General said National Security, he wasn't kidding. Do yourself a favour and give your curiosity the day off."
Easier said than done. I could see all the unasked questions and speculations rampaging behind his eyes. He smiled. "That's a tall order."
"I know," I said. "But this is no joking matter. Everyone here will have to be debriefed once the emergency is over, and I promise you, it's not going to be any kind of a routine chat session. You're playing in the Major League, now." He nodded. Said, "So. I guess these people are pretty important, then?"
Pretty important. Cassie burst into tears when I told her where I was going, and why. And yes, I did tell her. She already knew they were missing. I don't believe in lying to children. They know when something's wrong, they know when you're deeply distressed. Telling them that nothing's the matter is a betrayal of trust. Besides. Cass is no ordinary child. And she loves Jack as much as she must have loved her real father, when he was alive. Loves Sam like the big sister she'd never had. She wouldn't have thanked me for lying. She gave me two paintings, one for each of them, to sticky tape beside their beds. Paintings that she'd done the day before in school. Sam's was a roller coaster. I think it was a hint. Jack's involved lots of dogs. Well. I'm almost sure they were dogs. They had four legs, anyway. The paintings were in my bag. I was looking forward to Jack's face when he saw his.
And, by God, he was going to see it.
"Yes," I said to Roger Abbot. "They're pretty important."
The radio squawked and spluttered. We both jumped. "Rescue Charlie to base, do you copy?"
Abbot reached for the handset. "This is McMurdo, Rescue Charlie, we copy."
"McMurdo, our ETA is five minutes," EMT Waites said over a crash of background noise. "Updated vitals are as follows: O'Neill, BP 70/40, pulse 24, resps 6 and shallow, temp 82.5 degrees. Carter, BP 110/70, pulse 76, resps 14, temp 93."
"Copy that, Rescue Charlie. See you topside in five."
"Don't be late, McMurdo," Waites replied, and not even the background eggbeating of the chopper blades or the radio wave distortion of his voice could disguise his concern. "Rescue Charlie out." Abbot pulled a face. "Let's suit up and get out there. It's rude to keep guests waiting."
"God forbid we should forget our manners," I agreed. Thinking, 70/40, 6 and shallow, 82.5. Oh, shit.
I still find it hard to believe that Jack watches ER. You'd think he had enough crises in his life without inflicting more on himself in the name of relaxation. He says that watching someone else's disasters makes a nice change from living his own. Clearly Jack subscribes to the 'I bang my head against a brick wall because it feels so good when I stop' school of recreation.
I don't.
Besides. It's all hyped up for the purposes of ratings: God forbid they let the medical facts get in the way of a good story. No real ER has that many unusual incidents every day, and nobody races around the corridors bellowing 'Emergency! Get out of my way' in a real hospital.
Having said that, if the producers had seen the way I rocketed over to the helicopter as they unloaded Jack onto a gurney, they would have hired me on the spot.
82.5 degrees. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? I mean, that's only ten degrees or so below normal. What's the big deal?
Well. The big deal is that the human body is a perplexing kaleidoscope of inter-connected checks and balances. And there's very little leeway for error. 82.5 degrees meant that Jack's body was almost too cold to function. That the proteins and hormones and neurotransmitters that keep us alive, that keep the marvellous machine ticking, were on the brink of breakdown.At 82.5 degrees the heart can barely pump. It develops arrhythmias. It starts to fibrillate.
You die.
Sam was fine. A couple of nasty lacerations on the right cheek that would need plastic surgery once we were back home. Assorted bumps and bruises, a little touch of frostbite here and there, hypothermia, of course, but mild, compared to Jack. Nothing life threatening. Sam was fine. Sam could wait.
But Jack? Oh, Jack.
Naming no names, there are some people at SGC who think that my feelings for Jack O'Neill have strayed a tad past the professional. Which is nonsense. I am his physician, and by definition know more intimate things about him than anybody else alive, including his wife. I have to. It's my responsibility to put him back together again after an excursion's gone sour.
If, when SG1 returns from a mission and there's been some kind of medical compromise, if I tend to check him out first, it's for a reason. I've read his full medical file, and you haven't.
I'll bet you didn't know that an entire military medical seminar was devoted to discussing his survival of a top secret mission into Iraq that went wrong back in ... well, let's just say the eighties, shall we?
Twelve of the military's finest surgeons, four top psychiatrists, two behavioural psychologists and assorted Generals, Colonels and Staff Sergeants, every one an expert in survival trainng, all trying to work out how Jack O'Neill managed to crawl across the desert for nine days with a fractured skull, a smashed arm, blown knee, broken collar bone, fractured cheekbone, assorted broken ribs, dehydration, malnutrition, sunburn and heat exhaustion. They thought perhaps there might be a few things they could incorporate into their Special Forces training programmes. Things that could help another soldier should a similar accident occur again sometime in the future.
Unfortunately, Jack's particular brand of bloody-mindedness doesn't come in vaccine form, and he wasn't really amenable to the idea of Sara marrying anybody else.
He still isn't, but that's another story.
In the end, the seminar was a bust. They attached the notes and the slide show to his permanent medical file, though. I just wish someone had warned me about that before I sat down to read it over lunch.
What's more, the Iraq thing isn't the only hair raising item in Jack's medical file. Oh, no. So if I tend to get a little concerned when Jack O'Neill returns from a mission with more holes in him than when he left, I have good reason. Jack used up his last Get Out Of Trouble Free card a long, long time ago.
But it's not just his physical well being I worry about. It's also my job to keep an eye on his emotional barometer, and take action if there's a storm brewing. Jack's sustained some pretty savage blows in that department, too, over the years. He hasn't always handled them well. If you look closely, past the self-assured sarcasm and the aura of invincibility ... you can see the cracks. The bottom line is ... I'm the logical one for him to talk to. I'm his doctor. I've already done a headcount of all the skeletons in his closet, so there's not much he needs to explain. I'm not in his direct chain of command, up or down. Even though he's a Colonel and I'm a Captain, the fact that I have the medical authority to ground anybody, up to and including Hammond, means that we're on a strange kind of equal footing. He knows he can trust me. And in his line of work, that's rare.
So please. Enough with the raised eyebrows and the knowing looks, okay? We're friends. End of story.
Doctor Roger Abbot took one look at my friend and said, "Oh, shit." We were wheeling him down the corridor towards the McMurdo Infirmary like he was made of spun glass. Like sneezing too close would shatter him.
Bodies suffering from extreme hypothermia are fragile. It doesn't take much to shut them down completely. Treating them is tightrope medicine, you don't get a safety-net .... and more often than not, one end of that tightrope is unravelling as you go.
It was going to take every ounce of skill I possessed to stop Jack from falling. I left Phil Waites and his team to take care of Sam in the second treatment room. They knew what they were doing, they had fluids in her and heat pads round her. She was in no danger of dying.
We couldn't say the same for Jack.
There's a kind of rhythm to dealing with an emergency. After a while it becomes second nature, and even if you've never worked with a particular team before, if they've danced the dance then it doesn't take long to get into sync. Within seconds, Roger Abbot and I were dancing up a storm.
"Onto the table on three," he said. "One, two, three." And delicately we swung Jack off the gurney and onto the exam table. Intubated him. Started him on warmed humidified oxygen. Hooked up more ivs, poured a few units more blood and warmed fluids into him, attached the EKG patches, took blood for screening, re-checked his vitals. I was peripherally aware of Daniel and Teal'c and the General hugging the wall opposite, still bundled in their snow gear, silent and staring and scared. They shouldn't have been there, really, but when Roger opened his mouth to clear the room, I shook my head. To his credit, he didn't argue, just shrugged and continued hunting for another vein. After the first glance I ignored them. Couldn't afford to be distracted by their distress.
"Scissors," I snapped, and snatched them from someone, and began cutting off Jack's clothes. Where's a nurse when you need one? Damn military issue fatigues. My wrist and fingers were killing me by the end, but at last he was naked and we could get an accurate picture of what we were dealing with.
He looked like an extra in a horror movie. His eyes were sunken, his lips blue. What little of his body that remained unbruised was dead white, plastic and unyielding like a refrigerated corpse.
"Christ on a bicycle," Roger Abbot said in disgust, bending over Jack's chest with a stethescope. "Decreased breath sounds on the right, with rolls. The lung's collapsed. I need a chest tube, now."
I kept half an eye on what he was doing as I ran my fingers lightly over Jack's cold body, testing for give where it should be strong, rigidity where I wanted give. Roger inserted the chest tube, hooked up the suction. Pulled back to remove the invading air. The syringe filled with blood.
"Dammit," said Roger. "We're looking at pneumonia for sure, here." Discarded the syringe and listened again to Jack's lungs. "Nope. No reinflation. I think it's perforated. What about you?"
My discoveries were no better. Three ribs definitely gone. The right leg. Maybe some bleeding into the belly. Bruising around the right occipital that may or may not indicate a hairline fracture. He needed exploratory surgery. He needed an orthopod. He needed a fully equipped ICU. He needed a miracle.
"What's his temp now?" Roger said.
I checked. "85."
"We've gotta heat him up or anything else we do'll be a waste of time."
I nodded. "We'll put him on heat pads and pack him with blankets. Continue the warm fluids and oxygen."
"What?" Roger said. "That's not enough. He needs a peritoneal lavage. Blood dialysis, even."
"No," I said. "That'll raise the core temp too fast."
"Too fast?" said Roger, belligerent. "The man is a popsicle, Dr Fraiser!"
"I know that!" I snapped. "Look. His medical history is -- unorthodox. His body is subjected to unusual biomechanical stresses on a weekly basis. They've resulted in some chemical changes. There's no telling what affect optimal reheating will have. I'd rather play it safe. Lavage and dialysis as a last resort."
"That'll mean maybe three hours before we can risk a general anaesthetic," Roger pointed out. "I'm not sure he's got that long. Are you?"
I looked up, then. Straight at Daniel, and Teal'c, and the General. "He's tough," I said. "You'll never know how tough. My decision stands."
Roger wasn't happy. "Fine," he said. "It's your call. Let's just hope it's not his funeral, too."
We took pictures of Jack's skull and chest and leg. Passed them down the hall to be developed. Slid heat pads underneath him, laid heated blankets on top of him. Poured more blood into his starved body. Rechecked his vitals. Stepped back for a moment to breathe, just breathe, and wipe the chilly sweat from our faces.
He arrested.