Broken Bones (Tag: Anna, etc.)

At the sound of the doors swinging open, Anna looked up from behind the visor she was wearing, the bone saw in her hands whirring for a few more seconds before turning off. She was just about to start cutting into the sternum of the latest corpse to visit her morgue when Riku suddenly burst in, his face pale and his arm hanging at an unnatural angle.

“Swiss cheese and crackers, Riku! What happened?”

Anna quickly put the saw down and pulled the visor off her face as she walked towards the BPD officer, her blue eyes wide with shock and concern. One glance at his arm told her that it was broken, but that wasn’t anything unusual. She saw broken bones all the time in the bodies she examined, but they were dead. Why had Riku come to the morgue if his arm was broken?

Anna stared for a moment as Riku explained his reason for coming to the morgue instead of a hospital, how he couldn’t let his family find out about it and he needed her to treat him instead. This struck her as incredibly silly and somewhat stupid. So what if his family found out about it? What did it matter when he had been attacked and injured by a demon?

However, when he sank to the floor with a look of agony on his face, the words dried up in her mouth and instead she went towards him, kneeling down and putting her arms around his uninjured arm.

“Well, I can’t help you at all if you decide to pass out on the floor. Come on, up on your feet. I need you on one of the tables so I can see how bad your break is.”

Secretly, she still felt like calling the hospital so that he could get help from a real doctor, but she could at least make him comfortable until she figured out what exactly she was going to do. Part of her knew he needed to go to an emergency room, but another part also knew what his family was like. It left her feeling uncertain as to what to do in that moment.

"Well, powders or no, they still dealt some damage."

Anna stood by Riku as he rose to his feed unsteadily and went over to the metal table where she normally performed autopsies. Thankfully, the table was unoccupied and she was always extremely detailed when she cleaned. She kept her arms slightly raised in case Riku started to faint or lost his balance due to pain, but he made it to the table and was able to lie down on his own.

"One mo."

Now that he was laying down, Anna went over to the counter where she kept her supplies and rummaged around for a moment before returning to the table, a pair of scissors in one hand and a jar of pills in the other.

"Here, take these. They won't stop the pain but they should at least take the edge off of it. Also, I hope you aren't fond of that outfit, cause its coming off with these."

She snapped the scissors together rapidly before she poured out two blue pills and handed them to Riku. With that done, she knelt down and began to slowly but carefully cut away the fabric of his jacket and shirt from around his arm. Soon, a small pile of fabric lay on the table and his arm, along with the shoulder and part of his chest, was exposed.

Moving the scissors and fabric aside, Anna quickly put on a pair of gloves before looking at Riku, her blue eyes focused but also filled with sympathy for the young man.

"I have to examine your arm to determine the type and location of the break. This is going to hurt."

Anna nodded when she was certain Riku had prepared himself before picking up his broken arm in her hands with the greatest gentleness and care. Slowly, she began to examine his arm from the wrist upwards, her fingers softly probing the bone under his skin and feeling for any breaks. She frowned lightly as she worked but didn't say anything.

It wasn't until after she had looked at his arm up to the shoulder that she finally put his limb back on the table and went over to the length of cabinets along one side of the medical examination room.

"You have a single nondisplaced oblique fracture of the radius bone in your left arm."

"You have a clean, angled break though your lower arm."

Anna threw away her gloves and the clothing she had taken off of his outfit while washing off her scissors. Once that was done, she turned to face Riku as she leaned against the skin, her expression sympathetic but also worried.

"Look, Riku. I'm not a doctor and I really shouldn't have even looked at your arm but I did it because you asked. However, setting a broken bone is a completely different thing. I don't have the proper training or certification to do it AND I don't even have the exact set of equipment needed to do so. Plus, I don't have anything strong enough relieve your pain. AND don't lie to me and said you're not in pain. I can see the sweat on your face from over here."

Anna knew that Riku didn't want to go to the hospital because of the big uproar it would create with his family. Tensions there were always high, even if he didn't talk about it much. However, she knew the danger it would pose to him if she tried to set his arm and made a mistake.

"Look, if you really don't want to go to the hospital that bad, why not go see Sunshine? She could heal your arm faster then I can whip up a cake."

"Not in that much pain, huh? Then why don't you go ahead and get up and flex your arm for me, hmmm?"

Despite her childish tendencies and nature, Anna was no idiot and knew perfectly well that Riku's claim about his pain was about as real as zero-calorie chocolate cake. However, he was right about Sunshine not being present at the station at the moment. She and several Other Unit officers were currently involved in a large-scale sting operation of some kind that had to do with a new drug group. There was no way to tell how long she until she would be back at the station, and it wasn't as if she could tell Riku to wait until she was.

Letting out a sigh, she went over to her counter and began to gather the materials she would need in order to make a decent cast and sling for him. While it was true she wasn't certified, she had originally begun her education with the idea that she would become a doctor. And she had enough knowledge about broken bones and setting them that should could at least make a temporary cast for Riku until Sunshine returned and could properly heal him.

"Well you shouldn't have let a simply robbery turn into a broken arm. Seriously, you're gonna owe me big brownie points for this, Riku!"

With that said, she wheeled over a small table laid out with a bowl of plaster, tape, scissors, a basin of water, padding, a stockinette, a bottle of sanitizing liquid and several gauze pads.

"And you're lucky we even have some of this stuff on hand in the morgue."

She continued to mumble to herself as she began to mix the water and plaster together before pouring some of the sanitizing liquid on a pad and gently beginning to clean his arm from the knuckles up to just under his armpit.

Anna suddenly reached over to her counter of rubber ducks and handed one to Riku, placing it in his good hand. This particular duck was dressed to look like a princess with a pink dress, plastic flowing hair and a mini crown on its head.

"Look, I need you to relax and hold still while I put this cast on, ok? So just focus on Rapunzel the Duck and start squeezing it if you start to get stressed."

With that said, Anna returned her attention to Riku's arm and began the long process of getting a cast on it. The longest part would be waiting for the cast to set, so hopefully Riku could manage being still until that was gone. She gently put the stockinette over his arm before placing padding around the whole limb that would keep the cast from restricting the blood flow in his limb. With that done, she deftly and skillfully wrapped the gauze around his arm until it looked like it belonged to that of a mummy.

Wiping at her forehead with her arm, she finally moved on to the last part of the procedure, putting the plaster on and letting it dry. She brought the bowl over and went to work. Soon enough, her hands were sticky with plaster but Riku's arm was completely coated in the off-whitish material.

"There, now sit on the table and relax until the plaster sets. That should take about thirty minutes."

As she spoke, she began to gather up the supplies and clean the space where she had been working only a second before.