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Paging Doctor Sparkle!

by Quillamore

Chapter 7: Episode Seven: Fallen Feathers

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Twilight Sparkle, M.D.

Ponyville Hospital, Day 13, morning

What would Director Celestia do at a time like this?

I’ve been through just about every set of hoops I can find to figure out how to make everything better for Redheart, admittedly even more than I’ve puzzled how to get out of this town. Right now, however, that fact doesn’t strike me near as much as my utter incompetency. And here I stand, leafing through page after page of the Canterlot hospital bulletin I still receive in the mail and avoiding the sad truth in front of me.

I have no. Bloody. Idea!

It seemed like an excellent plan on paper, ending the rivalry by acting cool and leaving Redheart completely and utterly in my debt. I was even able to stall for all of yesterday by telling her I needed more time to think, but I can’t keep doing this to myself or to her. After realizing there isn’t going to be an interview with Director Celestia in the hospital magazine telling her exactly how she keeps all her doctors on staff, I slam it shut right on the page about her new personal protégé.

Strangely enough, jealousy is on my mind about as much the possibility of me actually liking Redheart is. There’s satisfaction to be found in shoving her face back into the magazine, granted, but it’s pretty empty. Rehearsed, even.

Hope you don’t screw up too much, Dr. Sunset Shimmer. Otherwise, you’ll end up where I am and realize you can only help ponies if they’re about to die.

Just about as soon as I do this, however, the back of the publication gives me a new idea. There’s some fancy mumbo jumbo in there about some new technique or another, but what catches my eye is one thing in particular. This new innovation is all about detecting cases before they can happen, about knowing frequent clients and predicting their behavior.

In one fell swoop, I’ve managed to find my weakness—and Redheart’s strength.

Doctor Twilight Sparkle doesn’t make mistakes. Not this time.

****

Twilight Sparkle, M.D.

Ponyville Hospital, Day 13, noon

“Think about it,” I tell Redheart, simultaneously telling myself that I’m only eating lunch with her for the sake of the hospital, “who always shows up here with some issue or another?”

Any shade of the fearful pony she was just a few days ago vanished just about as soon as I told her to meet me in the office. We’re both in between patients, which gives us just enough time to discuss her future and how I can make it brighter than ever. For the most part, she seems eager to face this new challenge, though, knowing her, she’s probably hiding her sadness yet again. Then again, I shouldn’t talk as if I’m any better in that regard.

“Granny Smith, I’d say,” Redheart replies. “I appreciate what she’s done for the town, and I love her cider as much as anypony else does, but she’s sure become a hypochondriac in her old age.”

I file that bit of knowledge into my long-term memory, just in case the elderly Apple matriarch suddenly comes down with some rare disease. Still, I can’t help but facehoof at my coworker for missing the point.

“That’s not what I meant,” I groan before suddenly changing my voice to a more pleasant tone. After all, I am supposed to be getting into Redheart’s good graces and all. “While hypochondria is something we definitely have to be on the lookout for, is there anypony around here that seems to come to the hospital abnormally often?”

Redheart gives a single huff of thought before responding with the last thing I want to hear.

“Rainbow Dash. She’s always here to sell something, but lately, I feel like she’s hanging around for other reasons. Plus, she changes jobs so much that I feel like maybe her body isn’t cut out for that many of them.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Laziness is another. Something that I can’t help but think Dash probably has in spades; either that or utter stupidity. Still, she’s stayed on the tea craze for so long that I’ve almost forgotten that she’s ever done anything else.

All of eleven days. Must be a new record for her.

“Anyway, her visits have really started to peak right when you showed up. I guess I could look into her a bit more and figure out what’s up. It may not be anything medical, but if it means keeping other ponies from getting sick off her schemes, then I’d be all for it.”

The way she says this all-too-casually suggests one of two things to me: that Rainbow Dash has been at this longer than any of us have realized, and that significant casualties have been inflicted in the process. With any hope, she’ll stick to making her subpar tea.

Anyway, I swear that just about as soon as Redheart gets ready to leave the hospital, Rainbow Dash trots right in, accompanied by the same little companion who always stares at her with such adoration. Although Dash herself annoys me to no end, I feel that I can at least live with the foal’s company, seeing as she already seems quite a bit more mature than her maybe-sister, maybe-mother.

(None of this is because I’m soft on foals to the point where I almost became a neonatal nurse. Honest. Even if she does flap her wings enough to remind me of a tiny hummingbird.)

Sure enough, whether by magic or perhaps something more mundane, Redheart actually manages to predict their arrival, and I pray to the stars above that she keeps that ability in future cases.

Rainbow, oddly enough, appears with none of her usual businesspony swagger, even as the filly remains blissfully ignorant of the situation. She doesn’t utter a single word to either of us as she’s guided into the nearest room, not even a “Doc Twilight.” Whatever’s gotten to her has to be the moment of reckoning Redheart mentioned. And now comes the hardest part of my task. I have to let Redheart take them into her office and trust in her with everything I’m going to have.

Yeah. Like I’m going to let that happen.

****

Twilight Sparkle, M.D.

Ponyville Hospital, Day 13, afternoon

Some clarification on that last statement: I may trust her more than most ponies, even after just a few days of really getting to know her, but that’s not saying much. I’m built to trust the patients who come into my life for a few hours, after all. But deep down, I know—anything more than that doesn’t come easy for me. I’m not sure where or when I stopped trusting anypony else, but that’s an issue I can’t fix just yet.

Thankfully for me, this building has terrible insulation, and I’m able to pick up a few bits as I examine my patients. Enough for it not to be considered eavesdropping, at least.

Most of the ponies I have today just require short, simple checkups. For example, one random colt with a propeller hat screams “I need healing” at me for at least five minutes straight without specifying his condition, at which point I push him straight out of the room. One needed a physical for the hoofball team. Yet another followed up with me on their chronic indigestion, which I chalked up to all the pills their past doctors had been prescribing them. (Note to self: I should really figure out whose bright idea it was to prescribe a pony five ibuprofens per day and hand them over to the Crown at once. At least reporting their utter incompetence out of Equestria would take some of the pressure off Redheart.)

Just after I get out of a particularly long and equally infuriating appointment, in which I had to repeatedly lecture a middle-aged stallion about how I can neither treat his erectile dysfunction within a day’s notice nor give him a day’s supply of “performance-enhancing drugs” so he can lie about a particular engagement tonight, Redheart finally comes in and relieves me of my misery.

As it turns out, the insulation might be terrible, but Dash’s voice has been so low the whole time, I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of her. I hate to admit it, but I might actually be kinda worried about her.

“For the love of all things holy,” I yell right when Redheart trots in. “Just tell your goddess-forsaken wife!

“Um, bedside manner?” Redheart mutters, glaring at me intensely. Or she would be, if I wasn’t so scared by her sudden intrusion that I can barely look at her.

“Oh, sorry. What I meant to say was that, in a stable relationship—“

Redheart facehooves as if preparing for impact, and just about as soon as I say it, the stallion laughs in my face. This town never gives me a chance to forget how much everypony loves puns, does it?

“You know what I meant! Not the ‘stable’ like the place we live, the ‘stable’ like the type of wife who won’t leave you due to a diagnosable medical condition. Which should be obvious!”

The stallion practically laughs all the way out of the hospital, and Redheart cautions me on using that word again. Apparently, all the doctors here have had to buy thesauruses just to avoid making the same mistake I did.

I’m going to have to put a moratorium on any and all words that could be construed as puns, if today’s any indication. Anyway, just after lecturing me, a grave look sweeps onto Redheart’s face, something I haven’t seen since the big scene a few days back.

“The tea factory burnt down when Rainbow Dash was in it,” she explains. “None of the burns were particularly intense, but she didn’t get them treated soon enough, and…”

I challenge myself to recall the last time I saw her enter the waiting room, and come to think of it, most of her body had been covered. Whether out of embarrassment or otherwise, Dash clearly wanted as few ponies as possible to know about her condition. Which, of course, explains why she didn’t want to come to us as soon as possible, but still makes her an absolute idiot.

You see, while most minor burns can be treated at home, ones inflicted by such things as chemicals or an entire damn building being razed to the ground tend to require a bit more care. The fact of the matter is, ponies like Rainbow tend to make mistakes that turn ordinary burns into disasters, and disasters into cataclysms. From the smell she emits all over the hospital, either butter is the newest scent craze in Canterlot, or she fell victim to one of the most dangerous old pony’s tales around. And, judging from the way she managed her business, I severely doubt the former.

From what Redheart’s been able to tell me, the factory was an incredibly makeshift operation constructed out of an abandoned hut, someplace that was already very susceptible to fire otherwise. Turn that place into a factory and tasting area, and any mistakes with that kettle could prove as catastrophic as they did.

“Thankfully, Sugarcube Corner was doing an event the day it burnt down, so only a few ponies showed up,” Redheart explains. “Ms. Dash says she received the brunt of the damage, so most were already treated by the firefighters. Most of her damage will go away on its own, I think, but her wings will take quite a bit of time and surgery to heal.”

I almost didn’t hear it from the fuss my last patient was making, but I do recall hearing Rainbow Dash screaming from the other room for at least a minute straight. While Redheart goes on to explain that only the edges of her wings were damaged, and that they wouldn’t have been as damaged as they were if she hadn’t put butter on the wound, I can hardly imagine what any wing injury would feel like. If she still planned on using that tour guide idea she chatted me up about on my first day here, she wasn’t going to get too far with it.

“Why are you telling me all this?” I finally ask, trying to be as reasonable as possible. “You seem to have everything handled, and if you can sense patients like you did today, there’s no way they’ll fire you.”

Redheart’s eyes go straight to the ground before finally turning to face me. She gestures to Dash’s door, guides me to the peephole. Our patient is clutching her filly companion as hard as she can, crying as if her life was on the line.

“Where am I gonna to find the money?” she whispers. “Oh, stars above, what am I gonna do? I certainly can’t work in this condition…”

She strokes the filly’s wings, holding them like a particularly trusty security blanket. I can only see them for a moment, but they’re deathly small for her age, and even when she flapped them like there was no tomorrow, she still couldn’t lift herself off the ground.

“There’s something bigger going on here,” mutters Redheart. “I asked her about Scootaloo—that filly over there—and Ms. Dash said she’s being treated at the Featherfall Clinic in Cloudsdale. Supposedly, they haven’t been able to make heads or tails of her condition, even though she’s gone to them for years.”

I can’t help but steal another glance at the filly, wondering if things could really be as easy as they seem. Certainly, Cloudsdale doctors would be able to detect this far quicker than I could with today’s advances in wing technology. Right away, though, I can tell that something about Dash’s story isn’t adding up, and for once, it has nothing to do with the mare herself.

“They have to know,” I murmur, almost too low for Redheart to hear. “Even though she can’t fly, she doesn’t show any extreme signs of sickness. I can’t say for sure, since I haven’t looked at her yet, but if I’m right, she probably just has growth hormone deficiency. That has to be something they’ve treated before.”

“I was running tests on her while you were working, and while I did, Ms. Dash told me that she was diagnosed with it six months ago. Exactly the same time she started her schemes, if I recall properly.”

It takes everything I have not to curse as soon as I hear this. Even though she doesn’t say it, Redheart can already feel the gears turning in her mind, just as hers must have done just minutes ago. In any other situation, the idea of Rainbow Dash holding a stable job, or at least some vague facsimile of one, would’ve come as a shock, but it already pales in comparison to the plot unraveling in front of me.

Redheart may very well have found the pet project that’ll anchor her here. I only wish it didn’t have to come with the kinds of repercussions it brought on everypony else.

“She says she won’t be able to afford both her burn treatment and Scootaloo’s hormones,” whispers Redheart, as if the truth wasn’t obvious to me already. “Now, correct me if you’re wrong, but that isn’t how hospitals work where you’re from, is it?”

I solemnly shake my head and launch into an explanation of what she surely already knows. As part of the Crown’s reform plan and as part of our own responsibilities as working ponies, no medical treatment carries a charge in Equestria. That means that anyplace that attempts to do so—even for the relatively complex procedure that goes into transplanting one pony’s growth hormones into consistent daily doses for the other—has no right to exist. And, all too likely, no license to operate.

Hospitals like this were thought to be a thing of the past—a passing scam that faded as quickly as the dew itself. But here they are, right in our backyard, possibly keeping an innocent filly from ever leaving the ground. Or, if worse comes to worse, even earning her cutie mark altogether.

Anypony who would still say I never cared about my patients should stare at me right now and say it to my face.

With a heavy heart, I tell my fellow doctor that she was right about everything. That her suspicions are not unmerited. And then, I go into Dash’s room, leave Redheart to her investigations, and trust that she’ll be able to push through. Because really, it isn’t just about her anymore.

And by trusting that she’ll be able to push through, I mean that I walk towards the filly as if nothing I just heard ever happened. As if just looking at her doesn’t make me want to burst into tears.

Author's Notes:

I realize this could be a controversial part for some people, but this isn't so much a political statement as it is headcanon about how Equestria works. After a lot of thought, I figured Equestria would be the type of place that doesn't pay for healthcare, and since it is another world, what may seem normal to us Earthlings (and especially those of the American variety), could very likely be considered a scam there. Different worlds have different morals, and Featherfall is about as trustworthy as a for-profit college there. Just some world-building about the medical profession in Equestria, is all; this story will not have any political rantings about either side of the IRL health care issue. Guaranteed!

On a lighter note, I don't even play Overwatch, and somehow I still couldn't resist making that joke at some point. :rainbowlaugh:

Next Chapter: Episode Eight: Bad Medicine Estimated time remaining: 2 Hours, 19 Minutes
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