Dr. Henriques is used to centaur patients who may not be fluent in English or Shess (the language of the region she was working in), may or may not understand what a vaccine is, may or may not be used to injections, and may or may not be cooperative. Caring for Talita is EXTREMELY easy in comparison, even if she's a bit of a whiner.
Transcript
Anonymous asked: Dr. Henriques, do you provide medical aid for all the sophonts on Ixion? What's the extent of medical care you offer, e.g. can the med team do surgeries on planet?
Dr. Henriques: Oh, heavens, no. I’m just one of the team. I am the only returning employee xenophysician, though. We get a lot of exomedicine students here, who will stay for a season to get field experience. Often it's avians training in human or centaur medicine! We have a fully equipped medical team, surgical bot, and facilities and can handle the vast majority of procedures no problem. The main issue is supplies… in the past we’ve had temps not tell us their medication needs before arrival, then they're shocked when we don’t have the prescription drug on hand...
Image: Three humans in scrubs are labelled "Human Medicine." Three avians in scrubs are labelled "Avian Medicine." Dr. Henriques and two avians are labelled "Exo Medicine."
Anonymous asked: Dr. Henriques, where and how did you learn about centaur medical care?
Dr. Henriques: So my exomedicine specialty was originally avians, but 20 or so years ago there was a big push on the centaur homeplanet to get more people immunized. The embassy put out an open call for xenophysicians to travel to the planet and assist in research and distribution. I trained under a bug ferret family while I was there, and ended up learning a lot about practical care for centaurs. After that ground stay I applied to Ixion, expecting to be going back to avians, but surprise! They actually wanted me for my centaur experience! Talita is such a culture shock to work with, in comparison. The book-learned temps who come here to train for centaur medicine have NO idea how easy they’re getting it. She’s a sweetheart.
Ave Zancuda asked: Dr. Henriques, what other stickers do you give to well-behaved patients?
Dr. Henriques: Ha ha ha! Oh, the stickers! Several years back we had a temp who arrived with her husband and two young kids. Everyone on the medical team was so determined to make them feel welcome, we ordered a huge box of stickers so the kids could get rewards for putting up with us. That temp and her kids are long gone, but the sticker box is still mostly full. When the other workers learned about it, they started asking for stickers too. Anything to make life more exciting out here, I suppose!
Image: Dr. Henriques holds up two stickers. Rasheed, who has a bandage after getting a shot in his arm, points to one and says "Gimmie the clown."
57 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 27”
Montydragon
ahhhhh i love her!! so excited to get some more medical lore here too, furiously taking notes
oodl
dr. henriques is so beautifully drawn here. i love her
SNUFFGURLL
GOD the stickers. It is a really effective reward for something small but annoying. Difficult task? Sticker for your efforts. My doctor always gave out jellybeans, but it’s a similar principle, I think.
gliesedragon
So, because she was stationed in the Shess region but had to deal with a lot of patients who didn’t speak that language, was the vaccination plan more to get them to the nomadic populations than the more settled ones? I mean, by transmission vectors reasons, I bet the people who travel all over the world every year would both be at more risk of encountering some weird disease, but also as potential carriers. Hmm: was “brings plagues/misfortune with them” a common historical stereotype and source of friction between nomadic and sedentary cultures?
Also, I’ve got to wonder if there are also more short-range nomadic cultures amongst centaurs that only range a couple hundred kilometers between seasonal territories, as well as the “all the way around the globe” ones.
Sen
That is such a cute backstory. Yay for stickers.
An avian doctor treating a centaur, has similar vibes as fantasy stories where a tiny animal doctor treats other much bigger animals.
Also I wanna see an Avian riding on Talita now.
Paroxysmall
there’s a drawing here that Jay made if you don’t mind old art/ characters not introduced in the comic yet
https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/156123919373/the-two-avian-protagonists-in-runaway-to-the/amp
holly...!
i bet you could fit like. 2 or 3 avians on talita’s back and still have her be able to walk comfortably
Chase Wanderstar
I bet she’s been asked at least once to be Ohwitiil’s stepstool to stand on to yell at somebody else from higher up. That seems like a favor that angry little fella would ask of somebody.
halley
<333 i love her
Solidago
It seems like centaur society wasn’t very medically advanced at contact? Seemingly hadn’t discovered vaccination, and the people training Dr. Henriques on centaur medicine weren’t even centaurs.. Maybe they’ve had the most benefit from exposure to other sophonts’ technologies.
Jay Eaton
Centaur society is extremely fragmented due to clan politics and pre-contact “advanced” technology tended to be products of skilled craftspeople, with knowledge dispersing slowly through apprenticeships and marriages. Medical technology was largely the same boat. In major population centers, innoculation immunity may have been an emerging science, but wide scale vaccine programs and mass produced medicines were unheard of.
Hunter
Wasn’t it established that the centaurs had only just discovered radio or something when first contact was made? It’s one of those things where technology rapidly outpaced social development.
Jay Eaton
I don’t know if I’d consider them socially underdeveloped. They’re just different than humans and avians with our tendency to form hierarchical nations and empires, and different than bug ferrets with their tendency to form concentric legislative bodies. What an uncontacted centaur society that reached its space age would even look like socially will forever be a mystery now.
Tentament
Thanks, bfgc 🙁
Viashino_wizard
The thing is, Centaur society is very decentralized. They don’t really have nations or countries, and multiple clans sharing a single territory together is a relatively new development.
Joysweeper
Dr. Henriques is so cute. Book learning avian temp is also real cute. Sorry, Talita, it’s for a good cause!
I love the sticker lore. And huh, Dirtball providing for families of temps! Certainly they’ve got the space to house them.
cinna
you know, i’m generally okay doing my weekly self-injections, but this makes me think i should really be giving myself stickers for it!
Atuada
I find stickers help with a lot of things! Just a little bit of extra whimsy in our lives haha. I’ve abandoned doing this now that needles don’t freak me out so bad but I used to bring a stuffed animal to my infusions for comfort when I first started getting them. I’d go back to bringing one in but I’m more concerned about needing to decontaminate it with my immune system being as wonky as it is.
Anyway grab a pack of stickers! Slight nudge towards JetPens just for the sheer variety and quality haha
Marcie
Imagine designing medical PPE for a centaur. Presumably a human-style face mask wouldn’t work on their faces (especially if they had their antlers grown out)
rustbird
human-style PPE definitely wouldn’t work, but it’s interesting to think about what their needs WOULD be. they don’t breathe out through their mouths or their intake nostrils, but they have their trunks and their exhaling nostrils on their sides. so maybe something that goes over the trunk like a sock and then over the intake nostrils like a human mask, tying behind the head + some kind of cummerbund-like thing for their exhaling nostrils?
jdeltia
but wouldn’t you have to consider the safety of the medical worker too? like making sure they don’t ALSO get whatever infectious disease they’re dealing with? so it would probably be a combination of both a face shield and a cover for the excurrent nostrils
theplushfrog
The trunk sock/mask, with a shirt/tube mask that goes around their back “hips” where their nostrils are–those would cover breathing in/out anything, I believe? Then a mask or repurposed teeth guard for their mouth if you’re worried about saliva or accidental ingestion. Goggles/eye protection at least would just need to be bigger and shaped to their heads rather than remade completely it seems like. Gloves and boots would probably need to be interchangeable to deal with walking styles. Then just a suit around everything else? Or Centaur-fit scrubs, perhaps.
jdeltia
i think you’d need to cover a bit more though, right? i believe centaurs breathe in through the little white part at the bottom of the eye-trough, so covering just the trunk doesn’t account for inhaling… maybe a trunk sock and a band type thing to go over the eye-trough nostrils where air comes in? like a mask where the loop parts are fused to make a band (since they don’t exactly have ears that it could be looped around)
jdeltia
now i’m wondering what a centaur’s sneeze looks like, if they have one…
mossrabbit
i imagine that probably the first centaur face masks were probably woven cloth sheets tied around the intake nostrils and special outtake blankets, maybe draped down into various decorations to denote medical skill/social rank/clan. centaurs have big ol nostrils, meaning airborne germs have way more surface area to potentially attack and get into, so i can see them probably getting into miasmic theory of infection pretty quickly. even with how decentralized their society is, i imagine more than one guy was like “hey hold on hanging out near sick people will make you sick. maybe sickness is poisoning the air?”
so a modernized centaur face mask might be a similar principle, just one that also covers the trunk and mouth. an alien-designed one would probably look pretty similar to what the bug-ferret design is here. a centaur handcrafted one is probably more like a lower-face helmet with a trunk sock like other ppl say, cause the trunk is important for fine manipulation.
outtake nostrils could be a variety of blanket wraps that can be fitted and made of differing filter materials depending on how contagious the centaur is, with the final level being exhaling directly into some kind of portable air cleaning machine? benefit of having separate intake and outtake nostrils, id say. you dont have to worry as much about exhaling all your germs into the space youre breathing in
JoB
… I wonder, did the good doctor know, even use, the sticker method back when dealing with recalcitrant centaurs on their homeworld?
[imagines them to have become so engrained in current-day centaur medicine that they effectively serve as prescription( pad)s]
Jay Eaton
I mean, surely the stickers couldn’t have hurt…
JoB
… matter of fact, using stickers for Rxes could be quite advantageous …
EnchantressEmily
Stickers for everyone!
gigithebear
lordt help those poor temps who do more field work only to find out talita isn’t anything like home planet centaurs
blythe
oh my god the little avian students!
also first time weve seen a non-skimmer!
Vinemaple
Where? In the first panel? Is that a diver bright on the far right?
blythe
looks like it to me!
bug
realistically any good medical department needs a sticker box. its the little things in life, like a sticker put on your clothes or your arm.
Vinemaple
Oh! There’sastorybehindthestickerssssss!
This webcomic, I swear, it is the BEST online experience I have ever had, in my entire life.
Lilac
It’s interesting to think about how much of being a doctor involves talking to your patient and keeping them calm and reassured. I remember both times I went to go get cavities filled, my dentist guy kept talking the whole time with random little stories or anecdotes to try to keep me from internally freaking out by giving me a different thing to focus on than The Horrible Sounds. It didn’t really work either time lol, but it’s the thought that counts, and he’s definitely probably dealt with much worse reactions than me just trembling and crying a lot.
Though I suppose there are some doctors in hospitals who don’t talk to their patients much at all and just do surgery while they’re unconcious, and it’s others who do the talking part. I dunno fhdhdhds
Vinemaple
I used to have to get blood draws some ridiculous number of times per year, for my job. And I’d have to get them done at facilities all over the country, and overseas, as well. And I get shocky very easily, when I think too much about myself bleeding or losing blood.
I learned to wrangle medical techs at the same time as they were wrangling me, so I could convince them that I needed to lie down for a simple little blood draw. But for the longest time, I tried to get the TECH talking while they worked, because I wanted to focus on their voice, and didn’t realize the tech was trying to get ME to infodump on them, which makes more sense, as they’re trying to concentrate!
Joysweeper
One time I was getting something gynecological checked out by a newbie and I sensed the doctor being supervised was more uncomfortable than I was (my feelings about my body vary widely but on that day I had no shyness or shame, it was great) so I said “So… either of you did your taxes yet?” and it was a hit. I got such a good grade in being a patient.
hessian
DRE HENRIQUES SWEEEP💥💥💥💯💯🤎💖
Ave Zancuda
🗣🗣🔥🔥💖DR.HENRIQUES SWEEEP
The Opossum Witch
DR HENRIQUES SWEEEEEP
1d4-nadg
Ok but wow, we are so lucky to be able to mask. Whatever that full head helmet equivalent for bug ferret is made for, it must be so much harder on them. Sure, their nightmare pinchy mouth would tear up any fabric, but they can’t even touch each other faces! It must be super hard on them
Fallingfeather
It reminds me of the full face shields that we had to wear in Covid labs back in the day. I agree it would be way more annoying for folks that have to touch each others’ faces to communicate, though.
KD
I expect “no touching faces!” is WHY they’re wearing those. There were folks during Covid who wore face shields because they couldn’t stop touching their own faces…
Vinemaple
And the *whisker fatigue* it must give them!
Tumorhead
I love the bugferret PPE!
creetur
Ha! Funny to think about it but a little gift from the doctor helps regardless of age
Would exomedicine be comparable to veterinary medicine? Curious
Chase Wanderstar
*Talking* veterinary medicine, so a good bit easier, I’d assume.
Vinemaple
On the other hand, there’s multiple unique biochemistries to learn, which brings the difficulty of learning the discipline back up.
Eux
oh god i love everything about this page. such lovely world building. such lovely hair!
spicomellus
one thing is universal: getting a little reward
Matt
Whew, that page description about the vaccine job though, that gotta be a hard sell. Unrelated, how do you draw the concept of a vaccine into the dust with a stick? Anyone? No?
izimb
I guess you can illustrate what a vaccine does, if the recipients can read your illustrations
* draw people, draw a sick person between them, draw everyone getting sick
* make a connection of a healthy person with the vaccine injector, make a new graphic shorthand for that, a ‘special person’ illustration
* then draw the scene with the people again, with the vaccinated not getting sick (or not as much)
I know that in India, mass vaccination against smallpox did not work well enough – the strategy then was to find cases and then immediately vaccinate the social neighbourhood of the patients. I think that if the illness is already spreading in a community, it may be easier to convince people to undergo a weird procedure if they have any sort of belief that the illness may get to them too. (the history around smallpox vaccinations is extremely interesting to read about)
JoB
> I guess you can illustrate what a vaccine does
I can’t find any photos of it online, but I suppose that such material already exists here on RL Planet Humans, to be used by doctors in areas with a notable illiteracy rate. (They would still be able to talk to people, but that’s supposedly the same as with the centaurs, too.) I remember seeing a photo of a wordless illustration on the outside wall of a doctor’s office in India, but that IIRC wasn’t about vaccination but some other recommended medical procedure … prenatal care, if memory serves well …
Pringus
I mean, the centaurs were in their radio age, so communicating with them was probably more sophisticated than THAT.
…That being said, considering how much of a struggle we (unfortunately) still have, even with with our cultural HISTORY of vaccines, I can imagine saying “These aliens from the sky wanna inject you with something!” would be a bit of a hard sell.
malmo
They may have used wordless animations they could show anyone on their tablets/laptops, and other premade materials like pamphlets.
bisexual
i get the feeling learning the Shess language came sooner than producing vaccines for a completely unique biochemistry