saveourearth | Not Quite General Practitioner [closed and backdated network (voice) / log]

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Not Quite General Practitioner [closed and backdated network (voice) / log]

Date: November 6th, 2018 (more dates may be added)
Characters: Network: {number to be determined}, Action: Russell and Mary Ann

After a few conversations emphasized the importance of getting checked on by a doctor while he could, Russell takes the leap and contacts the networked doctor recommended by friends and family alike.

He could use a phone, could risk the mysterious military-looking forces maybe still being in the area and monitoring strange and suspicious communications... but he opts for the network instead. It's not as though the mysterious network communications were less likely to be tapped somehow - whatever causes them to stay saved and accessible, months after the fact, means that they're somewhere that someone might somehow get into. Someday.

But, if nothing else, calling her directly on the network implies why he's calling her, rather than his usual doctor.

"Uhh... Hello! Is this Mary Ann...? I'm Russell, you might have seen me around. On the network? I was told you're a doctor, and you might be able to... take new patients. With our, uh, unique concerns, going on."

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"I am, and I will.

Hello, Russell." She pauses for a moment, trying to sort her thoughts. This was a bit sudden, and the network is not her usual source of patients, but still - being professional is a kind of coping mechanism to fall back on, too. And a useful one at the moment. So she does.

"Can you tell how urgent your concerns are? And give me a brief idea of what they are?"

"Not too urgent," Russell begins, then reconsiders how his priorities might compare to a proper doctor's. Something impacting his appearance matters to him, and it needs to be looked at... But his health hasn't suffered.

"Sorry, I mean - it's not urgent. This isn't an emergency. It's only that... I've been losing weight, for months. Even though I'm eating as much or more, and working out. Fat, muscle, none of it's sticking."

It's not on the level of shark-like teeth or grey skin, but...

"It's gotten to where people are noticing."

"...I can't really do a distance diagnosis, and that sounds like it can wait a few days. Would you mind making an appointment to see me? I'm at the Folkton Road Surgery."

She rubs her face. "Don't worry about who'll see the results, they're confidential and I'll make doubly sure that they are not going to be looked at by more people than necessary.

Not that I can reverse echoes, but we might at least be able to treat some symptoms or make things less noticeable." She chuckles, though there isn't any joy in it. "At the very least I should be able to come up with a suspicion diagnosis that you can tell those who notice and ask."

"Mmm. I don't know if it's an echo, it might not be... But a cover story, a cover story would be good."

He can and has borrowed a page from Stone's book the last few days and used makeup to hide some of the worst signs, de-emphasizing the hints of gauntness in his eyes and cheeks, but it can only cover so much. Unlike tinting grey skin, the powder can't just make flesh appear at all angles and lighting conditions.

"I can make an appointment," Russell decides with a little more cheer. Optimism, rather than happiness. "Shall I call your office, with the proper phone number, and set it up with them?"

"You're right, it could be something else. And I'll run all the relevant tests. It's just..." It's just with all this insanity going on, she's quickly starting to assume that anything weird and new that a Numbered experiences is an echo. "Can you pin down when it started?"

As for the practicalities: "Yes, just call the surgery and say that you want an appointment with Dr Tilly."

It's honestly a sensible assumption, at this point. Not safe to rule out other possibilities, but...

"Dr. Tilly," he mumbles to himself, making a note. People using given names in impersonal contexts is fine, but if he wants to blend in with the rest of her patients, making anything odd as he makes the appointment wouldn't be helpful.

It feels a little repetitive, and unhelpful besides, but he answers: "I don't know. It's been slow, I noticed a few weeks ago, but it might have started... September? August? Maybe when the network started."

"So not longer ago than that, likely." Which makes the whole 'it's an echo thing' hypothesis more likely to be correct.

Well.

"I'm looking forward to seeing you here, then."

He smiles ruefully. When she puts it like that, yes, it's probably an echo thing. But for the sake of being sure...

"Right. I'll call the surgery, and make an appointment, and... see you then."

When making the appointment, he'll aim for something sooner than later - the better to continue not putting this off.

When she sees him come up on her computer screen, she turns towards the window to shut the blinds against someone looking inside and then turns back to the door.

Once he's opening the door, she smiles at him and gestures to the other chair while her eyes give him a once-over, looking at his face, his hands, and everything else that might be visible of him under his clothes. "Please close the door and take a seat.

To start with, could you tell me again what the things are that you've observed? I'm not going to put them down in my computer like I usually would, so no worries about that."

"Right... Thank you, again," Russell says with a weak smile as he comes in. There's a thin layer of makeup on his face, hiding the deepest hints of shadow, but the prominence of his cheekbones is still visible when he turns to look around.

Once situated, he steps to the chair, removes his jacket, and settles down with it in his lap. His arms, hands and neck are somewhat thinner she might have seen of him, in previous videos to the network. It's nothing supernaturally thin, but bonier than his build's inclined to.

"I've observed that, uh, I can't seem to gain any weight. Not if I try to bulk up, not if I just eat anything... Normally I had to keep up a routine, and watch what I ate. But I don't feel tired, or sick, or anything."

She nods at his description. "Let's start with the routine things then." Since they should both be quite relevant. She gets up to wrap the armcuff of the machine that takes blood pressure around his arm.

"Do you need to drink and let water a lot?" Despite the hypothesis that it is a Numbered thing, it just would not do to ignore other possible reasons for such drastic weight loss.

"Mmm..." He takes a moment to think the question through, as he glances at the blood pressure cuff and half-interestedly watches that process. "As much as ever, really. Some days more or less, but I haven't been going every hour, or anything. Seems pretty normal."

She nods and once the blood pressure is taken inserts it into the system before calling up the information from previous years. Thanks be to central information.

"Nothing unusual here... let's see about your weight." She glances at the screen briefly to check what he weighed at his last visit to a GP, and then leads him over to the scales.

"I don't know whether to be glad or not, hearing that," Russell tries to joke as he follows over. "Normally you want a doctor to say there's nothing unusual, but... you know."

He steps on the scales, and there's no question that he's lighter than he was before. It's more than ten pounds from his last visit nearly a year ago, more than would be explained with the usual fluctuations of water and current clothing.

"That's almost a stone." She frowns and puts the weight down on a sheet of paper. She wants to learn some more before she decides what of the whole thing to input into the system.

"Have you had strong fluctuations of weight at any point in your life before this started?"

"Oh, there it is. That's what I get for talking rubbish..."

Russell twists around to check the weight himself, and grimaces as he steps off the scale.

"Nothing like this. I lost and gained some weight at university, but, I know why - I wasn't eating so well."

Alternating between eating his disappointment over things not working out, and undereating to compensate... Unlike the current problem, where he's been obsessively careful about eating more than needed calorically, and yet.

"We'll have to do some blood tests.

Has there been anything else at all that's been different since this started? Being exhausted easily, or anything along those lines?" Her eyes stick to the weight on her sheet. That's a lot of weight loss...

"I don't think so..."

While she stares at the chart, he shifts back and forth uncertainly, then slowly walks back to the chair to settle back down.

"I've, uh, felt lighter on my feet," he jokes, voice light and strained with it. "But no, I'm... I'm energetic, no trouble keeping up with everything I normally do."

"Well, let's wait for the blood testing then. I can't really order much else without a strong indication that would make it seem necessary without having blood test results first, so..."

She shakes her head. "Let's wait for that before we come to the preliminary conclusion that this is an echo." But she can't shake the feeling that in the end, that is the issue. Still, it will be good to have ruled out it being an illness that he can actually seek medical attention for.

"Right, right..." He grimaces a little, because blood test, but what can you do. "Is there anything else I should do, in the meantime? Uhh... Keep a record of what I eat, or exercise, or anything?"

Russell's fingers tap irregular patterns on his knee. Being proactive enough to come, only to be pushed back into the wait and see game, doesn't sit right. Even if it's just something to feel involved in the process.

She looks at him for a long moment, considers it, and then nods. He obviously needs something to do himself, and it might be helpful.

"Actually yes." Mary-Ann gets up and walks over to a drawer on the other side of the room. She pulls out a small notebook. "Please keep this one. You see here's a space to put in the dates, and there are various categories in here to fill in every day - times you ate, calorie intake, times you exercised physically, sleep, blood pressure... you can ignore this category, I don't need to you test blood sugar, it's a multi-purpose thing."

"That's... a lot of categories." He half-smiles, not sincere enough about it for that grimace to disappear. On one level, he already regrets asking. Keeping regular updates of anything isn't something he's ever really had the discipline for...

But, maybe, if he thinks of this when he starts getting nervous about things, he'll fill this out to distract himself. "I'll do my best."

"Don't worry if you miss some or miss days. It's more to try and track a general pattern, after all." She shakes her head. "Even if we find no medical causes, it may be able to tell you something about what's going on."

Russell taps the small notebook on his knee, flipping through a few of the pages to be sure they're consistent. It looks like it is, and the columns and rows neatly labeled.

"Oh, well," he says with a sigh of relief. "Alright then. I'll just... track these things, until the blood test. Thank you, again."

She smiles and gets up, holding out a hand for a handshake. "It's no problem. I'll see you once the results are in.

Please wait in seating area C, a nurse will come to take the bloods."

He stumbles a little in his rush to stand and extend his hand, following through on the handshake before too long. "O-Okay, thank you. You, uh, know how to contact me, either way," network or mundane phone alike, now.

With their meeting settled, Russell nods again and makes for the doorway, glancing at her to doublecheck they're good to go, and then follows her instructions to that seating area. No one likes their blood being drawn, but it's a fact of medical care, and he deals with it.

It'll be eleven days after this appointment - likely after the blood test results come in - that he gets some undeniable proof that the changes are due to echoes; even filming the transition at the boundary, though he's careful not to post the video anywhere.

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Not Quite General Practitioner [closed and backdated network (voice) / log]

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Sadly this log is set five days before she gets life sight

It's about ten days before the border test, so it keeps the timeline consistent this way

Re: It's about ten days before the border test, so it keeps the timeline consistent this way

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