"Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?" His hand lies possessively over my stomach. We're exhausted, sated in the wake of our lovemaking. It's early enough that we can watch the sunrise over the field as we lie in bed.

"Not yet. Soon."

I'm struck by the beauty of the moment as I lay here with my husband watching the morning sky light up in hues of orange, deep pink, and blue. I feel a kiss on my shoulder, "I love you," I hear him whisper.

"I love you, back."

And, like always, once isn't enough.

/

It's my first day at work and I feel like a kid on her first day of school. I remember when Nana would send me off to school at the beginning of every September. She always had this funny tradition of standing me in front of the door and taking a holo-picture of me. She loved to look at those photographs to see how much I changed from year to year. It's certainly a tradition that I'm going to carry on with this little one.

Hope's given me a full schedule today – 30 patients! I have no idea what to expect. But, I'm excited. The office is only about a 10-minute drive from the house. Soon, we'll need to get a second ground car soon so that Jean Luc can make his way to and from the center of town. Since Yakima is a 2-hour and 20-minute drive from UW, he'll take the transporter to and from the campus. But for now, Jean Luc will work from home, making his syllabi, choosing his course material, and writing up his own archaeological findings.

"Okay! As usual I am running late!" I run over to my husband and kiss him briefly on the cheek. Like always, I should have known that Jean Luc wouldn't let me get away that easily. However, I wasn't prepared for the fervour with which he kissed me.

"I love you."

I slow down, calmed by his presence, "I love you. Now, before I get lulled back in by your charms and end up even more late, I have to get to work!"

He smiles, "be safe in the car. Look both ways before pulling out, and follow the speed limit, Beverly. I'm serious."

"I will. I will. Bye." I give him one final kiss and run out the door.

/

It's my last patient of the day and I'm absolutely exhausted. Truthfully, for the past seven years, longer really, my days have been tough, but temporally languorous compared to this. On the Enterprise, I pretty much set my own schedule. In the absence of a crisis, I would at most see 10 patients a day and mostly for routine things like plasma burns or contraceptive booster updates. I was completely dependent upon bio beds and advanced medical tricorders for most diagnostic work. To be perfectly honest, it made me a bit of a lazy physician. I lost basic diagnostic skills. I failed to see the value in touching my patients and really working them through and logically coming to a concrete conclusion.

Here in the practice, we have the use of basic medical tricorders, but Hope has made it a point to get away from using an excessive amount of technology. She says that although she's grateful for the state of medical advancement, she thinks that it makes for idle doctors. And she's correct.

My first day at work has been essentially a crash revision course in the rudimentary skills I learned in my first few years of medical school and residency. I'm using fundamental medical devices that have been in use for centuries. Instead of waving a tricorder over my patient to confirm a diagnosis of a suspected otitis media, I now have to use an otoscope and look for signs of rubor or erythema. Similarly, instead of scanning my patients with suspected tonsillitis, I depend on a tongue depressor and a simple light. It's very elemental and it's a system that I find myself enjoying.

We're not dealing with anything out of the ordinary. We have mostly parents coming in bringing their babies for Well-Baby Appointments, teenagers coming in to ask about dermatological issues and birth control, minor scrapes and burns, and simple ailments like earaches, coughs, and colds. I had one expectant mother today come in to ask about different supplements and prenatal vitamins. Traditionally, mothers in this area would go to an OBGYN to keep track of their pregnancy. But here, we do it all.

Hope keeps trying to apologise to me because she thinks I'm bored without what she thinks was a burgeoning, fast paced, challenging career. And to an extent it was – at times. But this – I am relishing this.

It's funny, this morning I came to work and immediately Hope knew I was pregnant. Hope is starting to make me feel a little inferior! I see the way she is with patients; they take to her immediately. She says it's just practice and that soon patients will start to warm up to me. You always think that it's the students who are at the top of the class who aren't going to have any trouble in their career. But Hope wasn't in the top and here she is: one of the best physicians I've seen in a long time.

"Well," I plop myself down in my chair. Hope and I share a small office space. It's just large enough for two desks and two chairs, a small replicator, and bookshelf bearing old fashioned paper copies of Grays Anatomy, the Thieme Atlas, and different diagnostic reference texts.

"What a day!"

"You did great today, Bev. The patients were raving about you! I heard it from Betsy – and she's a reliable source."

Betsey is the front office manager who oversees appointments and hospital bookings. "I still can't believe you, Hope!"

"What d'you mean?"

"Well," I turn in my chair to her, "for one, you run this place on the bare minimum of technology, but you still manage to make diagnoses with the speed and the accuracy of the latest med tricorder model!"

Hope shrugs her shoulders as she takes a bite of a brownie that one of her patients left for her. "It's just practice, Bev. You've been doing other things for the past 20 years since we graduated – I've just been doing this. And, for your first day, you caught on quite fast."

"Still, I'm impressed." I take a piece of the caramel covered brownie, "mmm, these are really good!"

She smirks, "I know! Marla Hutcherson makes the best brownies in the county! Oh! Bev, I can't forget, I have a present for you."

"For me? Hope you didn't have to get me anything! You've already done too much."

Hope rummages in behind her desk to pull out a large paper bag, "open it."

I swallow the last bit of brownie in my hands and very unceremoniously wipe my hands on my pants before attacking the big white bag. It's a lab coat with my married name on it and the picture of a bear holding three balloons in the top right corner, "Oh Hope. It's wonderful. I don't think I've had a white coat with my name on it since the ones we got in medical school! Thank you, but this is too much."

"Nonsense, Bev. Now, we're done for the day, why don't you go home to that gorgeous husband of yours and I'll see you tomorrow."

I give Hope and hug before I leave and I hang my white coat on the door next to hers. I can't wait to get home and tell my husband about my day.

When we were younger, Jean Luc would always ask me about my patients. He's never been truly interested in medicine, but he loved hearing the reasoning that I went through in making a diagnosis. He stopped asking on the Enterprise, and I stopped telling him. But that's one more tradition that I can't wait to resurrect.