AN: This is my entry for sg_fignewton's Gen-Fic Day - Janet Fraiser Alphabet Soup.
Spoilers: Vague for all seasons.
Rating: Kid friendly.
Summary: What was she thinking?
xxx
X is for Xenopathology
When she was in med school, they played a game.
It wasn't actually a game. It was an "exercise" run by everyone's least favourite professor that involved identifying the species-of-the-week based on a collection of body parts in trays at the front of the classroom. It smelled terrible and Janet was never sure that it was entirely humane, but this was not the sort of professor one approached with ethical questions, so she let it pass.
She likes to think that the doctor she is now would hand him to the regulatory board and march off for coffee without a second thought.
She's probably right.
xxx
When they tell her about the job they are recruiting her for, she thinks it's a game.
It wasn't actually a game, of course: it was deadly serious. But it SOUNDS so ridiculous that she is grateful she's never allowed to tell anyone about it, because she's pretty sure they'd laugh in her face. And now there she is, up to her elbows in Neanderthals who were totally rational people when she had breakfast with them this morning, and she's wondering if it isn't a game after all.
She likes to think that after she learned a bit more about Neanderthals and their culture, she would have treated them differently.
She's probably right.
xxx
As the years roll by and things stay crazy, she realizes it's actually a game.
It's insane, she knows this, but she prefers the crazy to the serious, because the serious is usually something she doesn't know how to fix. Alien bugs and electric entities and radiation and memory implantation devices threaten her friends on a semi-regular basis, and she almost looks forward to the times when her biggest problem is that Daniel Jackson sneezed during a religious ceremony and SG-1 was chased back to the 'Gate under fire for breaking the sanctity of the rite. Scrapes and cuts and bones and blood are all things she was trained in, all things she feel comfortable with, all things she knows how to fix.
She likes to think that even if she could go back and tell that girl she was to stop guessing what was in the trays, stop being so gosh darn GOOD at everything that she came to the attention of the recruiters and maybe think twice before agreeing to the job, she wouldn't listen.
She's probably right.
xxx
finis
Gravity_Not_Included, May 18, 2009