Here's the next bit of Yata's disastrous attempt at learning medicine! Please enjoy the comedy.


Fushimi went with Yata to class one night. The major motivating factor was the bruises. That is, everyone at work fussed over him when he came in with contusions between all his knuckles. He hadn't thought anything of it or even bothered to cover the marks. They represented his support of Misaki's effort. It hadn't even occurred to him that being covered in black and blue would concern others. He didn't bother to explain, in spite of their insistent nagging.

It had all started while eating hot pot on a cold night. Fushimi found a needle in a slice of tangerine. Having fruit in a hot pot was a strange enough quirk of Yata family recipes that had passed down to Misaki, but to find also life threatening foreign objects in the stew was too much to ignore.

The chef's eyes widened in panic when he saw what had appeared in his friend's bowl. To Fushimi's questioning gaze, he exclaimed, "Ah, an IV!" while reaching out to take the offending slice of fruit.

"What?" Fushimi responded in confusion.

"An intra-something infusion to increase the volume of the blood during trauma or improve hydration with salty water."

"I know what an IV is," he interrupted Yata's semi-decent definition of intravenous therapy. "What is it doing in dinner?"

"Oh that," he scratched the back of his head in embarrassment. "They told us to practice on oranges to work on getting under the skin and not into the flesh."

"Looks like you got that one wrong." Fushimi pointed at the tangerine with a chopstick.

Yata made a face of frustration like he'd been wracking his brain for a better solution. "It's so hard! In real life you know you hit the vein 'cause you get a flash of blood, but oranges don't do a damn thing!"

That was how Fushimi offered to become target practice. Yata got out his kit, tied the tourniquet around his mock-patient's bicep, and tried to find the big vein that runs through the pit of the elbow. It should have been easy with pale skin like his, but the little blue lines wouldn't appear, even if he slapped the arm lightly. Fushimi waited apathetically as the medic-in-training missed his first two attempts.

"Gah!" Yata complained. "It's all that coffee you drink!" He moved to try the hand instead, and Fushimi didn't even flinch when the vein ruptured from the prick being too deep.

"I'd die before you got this right," he taunted.

Anger over the failure caused a particularly strong stab that sent pain all the way down the patient's fingers. Fushimi pulled away with a hiss.

"Shit! I'm so sorry!" Yata excused, extracting the needle from somewhere it never should have been. "Are you okay?"

Knowing he shouldn't have been provoking a volatile friend with a weapon, Fushimi tried his best to direct his negative reaction elsewhere. "What kind of worthless teacher is instructing you?"

"I told you I'm failing!" He shouted back.

"I could teach you better myself!"

That resulted in an all night study session. They got their instructions from internet tutorials. Yata forced Fushimi to drink a whole liter of water to "combat the vascular constriction caused by dehydration," which he somehow rattled off like the words really meant something to him.

The first new tip they found was to apply pressure by "placing a thumb a few inches distal to the site and pulling traction." Yata mixed up distal at first, but once he stopped trying to remember the word and just learned the idea, it made a significant improvement.

"That's too steep an angle," Fushimi warned before Yata could blow another one.

"They said 30 degrees."

"That's 45."

"Well how the hell am I supposed to know?"

To make the concept into something he could comprehend, Fushimi compared it to skateboarding. "It's about as far as when you tic tac."

"Mm," Yata understood. "Just off straight."

With those pointers in mind, he came very close to succeeding. He felt the light pop of the needle poking into the vein; he saw the flash of blood that signified proper penetration. Then, growing excited, he pulled back too quickly, and the catheter didn't stick.

Fushimi tried to inform him in time, but the enthusiasm overpowered his reading voice so that he had to speak in crescendo. "Once you've achieved proper needle placement and you're ready to advance the catheter, remember that the hand holding the needle does not move. The catheter needs to advance forward off the needle. The needle does not move backward out of the catheter."

"I know. I know," Yata replied.

"Then do it right," his victim protested, starting to feel like a pincushion.

The next time, Yata did just that. Fushimi didn't even know anything had happened until Yata exclaimed, "I got it!" Then, he looked down at his left hand and saw the rubber tube dangling properly between his pinky and ring finger. There was that glowing expression of elated enthusiasm that drew Fushimi to Misaki in the first place. That face made it all worth it. He enjoyed it briefly until he suddenly felt rather woozy, and Misaki rushed off to make him some tea.

At work the next day, rumors spread like wild fire about the walking pincushion. Because of his unhealthy lifestyle, he had diabetes - an idiotic suggestion since diabetic shots and testing had nothing to do with the top of the hand. He had been punching brick walls, or had pulled his daggers from his sleeves in reverse. Maybe it was one of those undiagnosable chronic diseases eating him away from the inside.

Awashima did her best to shush their gossip while they worked, but that didn't stop the Special Duty Corps from bothering him about it in waves over lunch. Hidaka showed the highest level of sincere concern, asking repeatedly if his superior officer was okay and, "If you need help with anything you'd tell us, right?"

"You had better not be in over your head all alone again!" Doumyouji reprimanded worriedly.

Fushimi resolved then and there that he must vet this so-called "class" of Yata's to find out why they couldn't teach him properly. He maneuvered their plans discretely enough to make it appear he had no choice but to tag along to a class between hanging out. Yata wasn't fooled in the least, but he played along all the same.

Class began with a review quiz, through which Fushimi pretended to be preoccupied with his PDA. Really, he was stealing glances at the test, secretly over his friend's shoulder. Yata got six right out of fifteen, a wince-worthy score. The ones he did get right were the ones that really mattered: the order of treatment, the when's where's and how's. He didn't do so well with the dosing math or the scientific names.

The night's lesson was on EKG readouts. They studied a variety of graphs, normal and abnormal, which clearly depicted the different heart conditions. Whenever the teacher would ask a question, Yata would mutter half an answer to himself. He knew which heartbeat was abnormal on the spot. He knew what the pattern showed was wrong and how to treat each one. He could not manage to remember what they were called, which meant he couldn't answer a single question. The teacher made no concessions for nearly correct responses.

At least the practical application part of class brought some relief. There were several test dummies, and the students divided up equally between them (Yata quite skillfully got into the non female mannequin line). Compared to his poor performance throughout the rest of the lesson, he was the best of his classmates with the defibrillator. He made no mistakes hooking up the leads, even without referring to the diagram, correctly interpreted the readings, and determined whether a shock would help the condition at all.

Unfortunately, he was expected to explain his actions to the teacher to justify his choices. From him that sounded a bit like, "First, I couldn't feel his heartbeat, so I hooked up this thing with the wires, and it said his heart was shaking, so I shocked him."

It was the right answer, and yet so very wrong.