Lacking sufficiencies of data.

Posted on 12 Dec 2023 @ 5:51pm by Lieutenant JG Hannah Wagner
Edited on on 06 Feb 2024 @ 10:07pm

Mission: M4 - Falling Out
Location: Sickbay- ACMO's Office
Timeline: M4 D3 Late afternoon
1499 words - 3 OF Standard Post Measure

There was a screen in front of Dr. Hannah Wagner where she was charting her ideas as they ran through her mind. The first page was full of a diagram that had many legs, that all encircled a single word. Trauma. It all came back to trauma, and how it had been inflicted. Trauma as with all life's major experiences had an effect on the brain for every individual, in individual ways depending on that person's unique grouping of past experiences. And like each individual, the effect of trauma was different. Some people externalize their trauma, and are able to talk it through with mental health practitioners. There was a subset of those people who would hyper-verbalize, and not stop sharing their traumas in a spate of verbal diarrhea that never seemed to end. Other people internalize their trauma, never speaking of it like a festering wound that was never properly able to heal. This seemed to Hannah, to be the most common kind of traumatic response, though it was something she didn't quite understand to the fullest extent she probably should. She saw it in the form of PTSD in many people, and she was sure that the counselors as a whole saw it in still more ways that she couldn't begin to fathom. Still others block out their traumas so completely that it's like the trauma never happened, except in their nightmares. Sleep was always a gateway into the traumatic events, even in those who had entirely blocked it out of the conscious mind.

She noted 'concious vs subconcious states' in her notes and tapped at her lips with a stylus. A sleeping vs awake study might be very helpful to see what her brain did while not being actively stimulated by the demands of her changed life. Hannah's mind was spinning in a million different directions, and she had to find lanes of focus in order to assist her patient.

Focus.

The focus itself matters because when it's just one event, the brain is more elastic. More able to heal the psychic injury that something like a single death creates. Is that much that, at least singular traumas to the brain and psyche had been studied before. Death is the one constant in the universe, it just requires patience in order to scan people in the state of mind of grief and loss.

Those past experiences though, they mattered. Someone who was loved, intensely and fully as an infant and child had a different kind of brain development and psychosocial development. Hannah didn't want to delve too deeply into Freuidian developmental levels, but that did play a part in how she might proceed. Perceptions are key.

There was an elasticity to the brain, especially in those that were sending and receiving telepaths that allowed for more resilience to trauma due to telepathic injury. There were fail safes written into the system that should have cushioned the chief, had she been able to rest and recover in between stretching her abilities to capacity. How many times has she pushed beyond her normal operating capacity to stretch that ability before it broke. And how much did the virus actually have to play on this? There were multiple documented studies of viral infection in betazoids causing the loss of sensation. In children, the damage could be permanent if it was laid down in areas of the white matter that were normally used for telepathic communication. It could greatly diminish the child's use of their gifts. In adults, usually it was a temporary thing. Brief disruptions in their ability to either receive thoughts or transmit them, but rarely both. Such a temporary thing in a body in such stressful conditions...

She was getting ahead of herself. Start with what you know, and work from that. She knew that the Chief had been sick, and that had affected her telepathic abilities. Hannah knew that viruses could easily lay down scar tissue in the brain, that much was documented, whether or not she had it in the Chief's brain, that was part of what the scans that she was compiling were for. There were several scans to do, and she wasn't quite sure yet of just what she should be looking for.

Physical defects were often easier to fix than those psychic injuries which had to be healed from the inside. They could only be healed by the person with the injury, and their willingness to share with a counselor or other physician. That's assuming that the lack of ability means there is physical or psychic damage. It could just be blocked, or psychologically inactive the way humans sometimes have stress cause seizure activity. Psychic injury might not even show up on the kinds of scans she wanted to do, but it could possibly be felt by a sensitive practitioner, if one was present to observe the testing from a psychological point of view. Another bullet point was added to the growing list of questions she had for the more advanced neurobiological practitioners.

Could lucid dreaming and other psychokinetic therapies of that ilk, aid her in repairing the damaged regions of her own mind? It was possible to initiate repair of internal imbalances with that sort of therapy. She noted that as well on a separate line.

Jai would know. Hannah allowed herself to feel a brief pang of sadness at the thought of her friend, turned lover who'd left with naught but a letter. At least the pretty words left behind had given her some closure, if not any freedom from pain. Pain was a tool, it let you know you were still alive and that an injury needed to be healed. How often had the chief worked past the point of pain, to injure herself to the point of an inability to use a sense?

Focus

She's suspected that no matter what she found the chief would be willing to at least try any therapies that she suggested, however she had to let the scans first get done, then have the finishing work percolate through the computer.

Was it more like tearing a muscle where the ends just had to be reconnected or was it like pouring from a wine skin; where when it was empty it shriveled to a much smaller size but only needed to be refilled? Was it like a burn injury where the dead tissue had to be removed before regrowth and healing could start? It was possible, that the microvasculature itself had been effected and that she was behaving as if she'd had a stroke in that area. There were areas of neurorehabilitation that she could call on, if she needed. That might be a good question for Dr. Aslanov. That too she made a note of.

Hannah knew, in a generic roundabout sort of fashion what the initial physical scans should say. A recovering prisoner of war should have some deficiencies in vitamins and electrolytes that behaved in ways dependant on where they were held. Could she even call the Chief a prisoner of war? It was the closest thing to what they were seeing, but Starfleet wasn't fighting a war. Yet. Hannah was not fully prepared for what the results of her preliminary scans did say.

The neuropeptides that allowed for telepathic communication were absent entirely from the Chief's blood. All of them. Nor, were there the neuro inflammatory pathways present that indicated the injury was new enough to be causing swelling of that area of the brain. Some of her other electrolytes were dangerously low, and some of the normal receptor proteins were not even present at low levels. The immature ones and partial structures, the sort that existed in pre-pubescent betazoids were in such low levels as to be considered zero, but the neurotransmitters whose purpose was to stimulate the others were present in such high levels as to be dangerous. They'd have to do some very specific neurotransmitter reduction or there would be no hope of recovering function. Those levels would overload the system before any sort of recovery could be made.

Another note on her terminal: Could regeneration of function occur if we were to force another neural puberty on her? Is it possible that radiation or chemical contamination could have caused this? That would have left biomarkers that she could look for, and a tap of a button set the system to analyzing for those telltales which would be visible at the cellular level. The chief didn't look like she was suffering from such a thing, but sometimes contaminants hid in the places one didn't think of to look. The computer would leave no stone unturned.

Hannah wasn't knowledgeable enough, so she went to those people that were. The collected research of the Betazoid Neurobiologist Rasmusin Keylir was currently displaying on her primary screen. There might even be a specialist aboard that she could bounce the problem off of.

Focus.