Medical Doctor
| Medical Doctor | |
|---|---|
 "Oh, are you hurt? Here, let me kiss it better..." | |
| Information | |
| Access | Medbay, Morgue, Surgery, Cloning Lab, Mineral Storage |
| Additional Access | Genetics Lab, Chemistry Lab, Virology |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Supervisors | Chief Medical Officer |
| Rank | Sub-Lieutenant (SLT) |
| Duties | Save lives, run around the station looking for victims, scan everyone in sight |
| Guides | Guide to medicine, Guide to Surgery, Guide to Traumas |
You are the Medical Doctor. You are at once essential and useless. With the advent of "perfect" cloning, saving lives is no longer as all important as it used to be. But don't despair! You can still help people! Mostly.
You spawn with a First-Aid Kit in Medbay where there are spares along with more specialized kits. There're also two syringe guns if you can get to one of them fast enough. Ammunition in the form of chemical medication can be found in the nearby vending machine pharmacy, but it's got nothing on what chemists can make.
Bare minimum requirements: If injured people will let you heal them instead of breaking into Medical Storage, do so.
Doctor, Doctor![edit | edit source]
When you are a Medical Doctor, your job is to heal people, save them from the brink of death, and dump those that do die into Genetics for cloning. You can diagnose injuries and diseases with the help of a health analyzer, conveniently located in all medical kits, or even your PDA, but then again so can everyone else. And they will. No one waits for the medic to help, or often even for a medic to open the doors. You may have to take drastic measures to get people to stop doing your job for you.
As a first step towards becoming a professional doctor, you are recommended to read the Guide to medicine. You will learn how to treat many different ailments.
Medical Storage[edit | edit source]
The main reason you'll come into this room is to grab one of the health scanners on the table. These fashionable eyewear pieces let you see people's healthbars over their head. Not only is this useful for finding critical patients quickly in a crowd, but the red cross next to their healthbar will change to a sickly face if they're infected with a virus, or a purple xenomorph if they're infected with an alien larva. Chemists, Geneticists and many others will sometimes want these, too.
Special outfits such as nurse suits and EMT caps can be found in the medidrobe, for your special snowflake needs. You can find biosuits for when the virologist fucks up. There are also spare first-aid kits that every chucklefuck on the ship will attempt to loot, making your job harder. Try to not let this happen.
Surgery[edit | edit source]
A room with an operating table, surgical tools that will be stolen 10 minutes into the round, and an observation chamber. You will occasionally come in here to relimb patients, debrain changeling victims or repair eye damage caused by screwdriver-wielding assistants or flash-happy shitcurity. You can also forcibly sedate someone, cut out their appendix and beat them with it as they wake up groggy with a mixture of confusion and numb, ambiguous horror and revulsion.
The guide to surgery is here.
Modern Miracles[edit | edit source]
A Deep Freeze[edit | edit source]
One of your first jobs as a medical doctor is to set up the cryo tubes. Learn how here.
Clear![edit | edit source]
If a patient has died recently, you may be able to use the defibrillator to revive them on the spot. The defibrillator can be found in Medical Doctor lockers (plus a more portable version in the CMO's locker), and is usually used by up-and-coming paramedics.
To use a normal bulky defibrillator, take off your backpack or satchel, put the defib on your back and click it, get your other hand free and activate the paddles to wield them in both hands, then click on the patient while targeting their chest. If the patient is wearing a thick suit like a space suit or firesuit you need to strip it off as well. STOP DRAGGING the patient, if you are, to prevent yourself from being shocked as well.
In order to successfully resuscitate a patient, several criteria must be met:
1. The patient must not be dead for more than fifteen minutes.
2. The patient must not have over 180 brute or burn damage; 179 brute and 179 burn is fine, just not 180 of one type. Reduce their damage below 180, and you can try again.
3. The patient must not be a suicide.
4. The patient must not be catatonic.
5. The patient must be in their body (they will get a message when they begin being defibrillated).
6. The patient must have a heart. Plasmamen do not have hearts, for example.
7. If the patient has a heart, it must not have decayed completely. If there's too much heart decay, you'll need to replace it or perform a coronary bypass.
If all these factors are met, then the patient will come back to life! However, this doesn't mean they can just get right back up. Instead, they'll likely still be deep in critical condition, as a successful revival only removes a bit of each damage type. They must quickly receive medical attention if you want to keep them alive. Make sure to use a health analyzer or your PDA to check how they died; if they have harmful chemicals in their body, they most likely still do (chemicals remain in bodies after death, but do not metabolize).
Alternatively, you can disable the safeties on defibrillators in two ways: emagging it or having it be hit by any form of EMP (you can re-enable safety by doing the same thing again). The emag does it silently, but the EMP makes the defibrillator emit a warning sound. When the safeties are off, help intent functions normally, but harm intent will instantly stun the victim for the duration of a stun baton as well as doing a large amount of stamina damage.
Medibots - Replace you, will they?[edit | edit source]
Medibots are the bane of any Doctor - their very existence is to replace you!
Not to worry! You can simply do your job by managing the Medibot. Move it to a location where you think it will do the most good and set it to stop patrolling.
No Respect[edit | edit source]
Nobody respects most of Medbay or the MDs. You'll run into this in many shades - an assistant that doesn't know when to stop pissing you off, shitcurity coming in to stun or flashbang at random, a traitor that wants Chemistry access, or an engineer who needs geneticist superpowers for space exploration building his autism fortress while his butt-buddy chain-recalls the shuttle for over half an hour because "WE CAN FIX THIS LAGGY SHITFEST GUYS COME ON."
You will, inevitably, have invaders. If you give the slightest damn about doing your job, you're going to have to beat into these invader's heads that you intend to do it. Otherwise, they intend to ignore your existence and do your job for you. Your best defense, here, is your coworkers - with up to 5 Medical Doctors, the CMO, Virologist, two Chemists, two Geneticists and countless patients, Medbay is packed, and all of them feel the same sting of disregard cast at them by fellow crewmates. If you band together, you will usually far outnumber any lone threat that wants to break down every window and grille in your workplace.
If your invader doesn't listen, remember that you are a holy warrior in one of the most unholy places on the ship. While most of the chemicals you have access to don't do jack (and if you're running around with a syringe gun, it's better in the hands of chemists) you still have a strait jacket, some handy-dandy morphine that acts like horse-tranquilizers (don't overdose!), and I hear the surgery room goes woefully unused nowadays...
Invaders often seek the medbay's soap, space cleaners and syringe guns. You may want to move these things from the general Medbay area into the Medbay Storage so that assistants can't simply run in and grab them.
Tips[edit | edit source]
- The medical belt can store all surgery tools.
- You can cut bedsheets with a scalpel or wirecutter and use the resulting cloth to craft a chemistry bag
. - Bedsheets work as drapes for surgery.
- If you implant a guy with a flashlight, he can still use it as a flashlight, and even toggle it.
- Bruise packs and ointments are not 5-use items, but 5-item stacks of 1-use items. Never give science a full stack of packs again.
- Raw carrots heal eye damage.
- You can use a health analyzer on a body to see the time of death.
- Star-Kist is just cola with orange juice. Thus will metabolize a bit faster and can be used as a very poor man's medicine to speed up CPR.
- Cryo won't work on you if you have cold resistance:
- Insulating items like hardsuits, ins. gloves, gasmask, firesuits - they all slow down cryo or even stop it from working entirely.
- If the patient in question has cold resistance, you may want to try go old-school and actually apply some medicine yourself, lazy bum.
- That is, of course, if there's only cryoxadone in the tubes, since those need cold body temperatures to work.
- Wearing earmuffs will heal ear damage.
- Wearing a blindfold will heal eye damage.
- You can clone people that have been turned into an alien, by extracting the alien's brain and shoving it into a human body.
- Attach a stethoscope on your neck slot and it'll make you look like you know what you're doing.
- R&D almost always has some downtime between finishing mech research and getting Mining delivery. Bitch at them to upgrade cloning.
- A fully upgraded cloner negates clone damage and retardation. It can also clone husks.
- Showers (wrenched to be cold) work just as well as cryo, as long as you have the drugs in your system.
- People with hardsuits on cannot be defibbed.
- You can scan people with a health analyzer to see if they've been dead for a short enough amount of time so they can be defibbed. Health HUD shows the same thing, but maybe you lost yours.
Tips for Traitoring[edit | edit source]
- The stethoscope can be used to break into the safe.
- You can replace the cryoxadone with acid, so instead of healing people cryo will melt them to death.
- Syringe gun is one of the most lethal weapons on the ship. A simple 15 unit lexorin syringe will kill unless the victim receives medical care. Anyone with a thick suit will block syringes though.
Hello, I'm Dr. Death[edit | edit source]
So, you are a traitor? DON'T HIT SUICIDE JUST YET! There is so many wondrous, terrible things you can do. When people are injured, they are taken to medbay to be "doctored" by you and other people. You can then shoot them up with poisons, take them some place private in medbay and take what you want, or go for malpractice to end them. This is very good if you happen to be in a crowded area and stab the XO and drag them back to Medical when people are in a panic. You can hide victims by putting little notes by morgue trays saying "This man has been borged" or "This man has been cloned" and no one will bat an eye at why they are naked, and why they are there (and often the chaplain will cremate them, or the chef will take some meat).
To Conclude[edit | edit source]
You are a Doctor. Your job is to help people - sometimes forcibly - and dealing with the fallout from the numerous violent calamities that inevitably descend on the ship. You serve both as go-between for the ship and large and the more specialized medical departments.
If you seek respect in this job, you have to go out of your way to earn it. But never forget the damage you can inflict on the unwary.
