Starring:
Date: February 11, 2016
Summary:
Katsumi learns a few more medical skills by "helping" Kenta-sensei treat a wounded Bobo. Later, Tatsuo joins in, as well.
"Training with Bobo: No Monkey Business!"
Kenta's Office
Another hour free in his day, another chance to do some teaching. It's slightly after lunch time when Kenta sends for Tatsuo and Katsumi. The two medical students are instructed to attend him at his office via the note that he sent. By the time they reach him, probably Tatsuo quicker than Katsumi due to being a hospital volunteer, the senior medic would have already cleared all the paperwork off his desk. In their place is what looks like a large covered cage. What's inside will be part of the exercise that both Tatsuo and Katsumi will be doing. The lesson itself is slightly different for the two of them due to the experience gap, but the basics is similar enough that Kenta can teach both at the same time.
Once Katsumi had gotten the summons from Kenta-sensei to meet him at his office, the girl had positively jumped out of her skin with excitement. She always looked forward to the days when she could learn from, who she considered, the master of medical arts. Yes… She knew it would take time to become as proficient as the Sensei was. 'But I'm determined to make it happen!' she exclaimed to herself, pumping herself up for the lesson in store for her as she made her way into the Medical Facility, and onward toward Kenta's office.
Once she approached the thresshold, Kastumi knocked on the door frame and bowed her head. "Kenta-sensei," she said, rising up and looking to the man with a smile. It took a moment for her to realise that his doesk was completely void of papers. Instead there was something big and boxy, and the student had to tilt her head in curiosity.
Kenta gets up from his seat and puts aside the book that he was studying. "Konichiwa, Katsumi. Please take a chair." He moves around his desk to turn one of the chairs to make it easier for her to get into it. Looks like she doesn't have to pick which of the two to sit on after all. "Ummm… Tatsuo might be a little late. Someone came back with a message that he's finishing up assisting another medic with surgery." He steps back to smile at the girl. "How are you doing today? Hopefully, today's lesson will be enjoyment for you and Tatsuo both."
The girl blinked and went to the chair which Kenta-sensei had shifted, and sat herself down. There was going to be another student with her, today? Such was her first wonder, until she realised everything the sensei had said. A medical student was helping with a surgery!? 'I wanna do that, some day,' Katsumi thought to herself, before acknowledging what else had been said to her. "I'm doing really good!" Blue-green eyes lit up as the girl glanced once more to the covered box - cage? - on Sensei's desk, and then back to Kenta. "I really wanna know what you have planned, Sensei. I'm not used to your desk being so… organised." She couldn't help but giggle slightly, as Kenta's desk was always about half organised and have organised chaos.
"Oh! Umm… I had to move everything to fit the cage," Kenta explains while rubbing at the back of his head. He turns his gaze onto his desk and keeps it there for a few long seconds before he turns back to Katsumi. "I don't remember if you met Tatsuo yet. He's one of my best medical students and also my ward. Grandmother and I have been training him for months, both here and at home. You'll be able to help with surgeries too once you're further along." The young man removes the cloth over the cage, which turns out to contain a very heavily sedated monkey. The fur on the poor little creature's side is matted down with blood along what looks like a nasty cut. Thankfully, the blood's pretty dry, so the bleeding must have stopped a while back.
Katsumi hadn't ever met Tatsuo before, and shook her head to silently say as much when Kenta made the mention. And then, all at once, Katsumi became utterly jealous. She knew it was silly, because she hadn't been training for nearly as long - she was sure. However, she couldn't wait to be able to further spread her wings in the medical field; she wanted to be a ward, and to do surgeries, and to have everything she would ever need memorised down to her bones. Once she was assured that she would be able to assist once she was further along in training, the hot knot in her chest faded a little.
The student turned her head to the cage, as Kenta-sensei uncovered it, and felt her brows shoot up and her head tilt. Whatever jealousy she had felt before was completely vanished, concern for the monkey sedated in front of her causing her brows to wrinkle and make the crease between them rather evident. "Aww, what happened to it?" It was an automatic question; one that she hoped would give her an idea of what she was supposed to do. She hadn't worked with an animal, yet…
"Umm… this is Bobo. He's one of my patient's pets. Bobo's a bit energetic and loves to explore, but it got him into a bit of trouble. He slipped off a roof and sliced his side on a broken downspout." Kenta places a hand on the roof. "The injury actually looks worse than it is. This seems like a good opportunity to teach you and Tatsuo a few tricks of the trade. Ummm… or something like that. Since Tatsuo's not here yet, I'm going to show you how I assessed the damage. You don't have the ability to use the diagnostic jutsu yet, but it's going to be very important for your career. Brace yourself. I'm going to open a telepathic link between us." Kenta starts making some basic Yamanaka hand seals.
Katsumi felt herself relax a little, when Kenta-sensei said that the injury looked worse than it actually was. She had a feeling that anything with blood - dried or wet - had that tendency. But it was still sad to see that the little clutz hurt himself. A bemused expression crossed the girl's features as she shook her head, her focus then shifting back to Kenta as he continued speaking.
When Sensei made mention of the diagnostic jutsu, Katsumi tilted her head curiously. She had heard of it before, and had read the basics of what it was able to do. But she wasn't entirely sure how to execute it, just yet. It made her smile, when Kenta said he was going to show her how he had come to the conclusion of what damage had been done.
Bracing herself, as she had been told, Katsumi took in a deep breath and made sure to relax herself. Telepathy wasn't something she had practiced performing on others, but she knew how it worked.
Just then Tatsuo comes into the office, backing in as he's drying his hands on a towel still. He'd come right from the surgery and had only taken time to remove the bloodied apron he'd been wearing and wash his hands. He even still has the mask on! "Sorry Kenta-sama," he says quickly as he walks in backwards, closing the door once he's finished drying his hands. "That surgery took longer than expec…ted…" he trails off when he finally turns and sees someone else is there. "Oh, um, sorry. Am I interrupting?" He reaches up to remove the surgical mask as his dark eyes look uncertainly between Kenta and Katsumi.
Kenta finishes the last hand seal just as Tatsuo enters. Katsumi can immediately feel a link establish between her and her sensei. No thoughts flow through it yet, since Kenta turns to smile at Tatsuo and address his late student. "Don't worry, Tatsuo. Katsumi here is going to be taking this lesson with you, but learning slightly different things. Umm… I'm just about to show her how to diagnose the problems that Bobo here is facing using medical ninjutsu." He gives a brief explanation of how the monkey hurt itself. "Please perform your own diagnosis while I run her through this."
With that said, Kenta opens the cage. The top and side bars can actually be detached, which means Bobo's left laying on what's basically a large tray several inches deep. Kenta places a few fingers on Bobo's brow. This leaves Tatsuo plenty of space to work too.
As Kenta begins to send pulses of chakra into the monkey, he starts talking again. "Katsumi, the diagnostic jutsu allows us to sense the insides of a patient's body by listening to the returning echoes of medical chakra that we send into it in pulses. The properties of the medical chakra, spacing between pulses and lots of other variables matters for what you're trying to detect. Very subtle variations in the echoes also gives you important information."
Kenta lets knowledge flood through the telepathic link to Katsumi at this point. It's not as good as personal experience, but that's not something that she can produce yet. The senior medical-nin is careful to show her the most basic waveforms of the chakra pulses and how to shape the chakra first. Then, he translates the meanings of the echoes and why he's adjusting the jutsu as he works. Even via telepathy, this deluge of information is very hard to grasp. Thankfully, Katsumi would at least be able to tell that the monkey has a moderate deep cut on its side, is suffering from the beginnings of a mild infection and that there's also an unrelated liver problem that'd need surgery to fix. Katsumi would also be able to tell how Kenta's able to find all this information out, even though she won't be able to duplicate anything he does except the most -simple- stuff and only after a -lot- of practice.
With the link established between her and Sensei, Katsumi did her best to grasp and hold on to every bit of information that she was given. When a dam like that breaks, though, it's very difficult to focus enough to allow such information to take root. So much was being given to her, that Katsumi was only able to pay most attention to the things that Kenta-sensei directed her focuses too. There was a kind of deep cut, the start of an infection, and something that had to do with the liver? She did her best to try and store the information of the various chakra pulses, and what each one could meam. However, the student could easily digress to the fact that she had a long way to go before she had any of them memorised by herself. Everything was easier, when you were connected to a medical savant. "Woah…" She suddenly felt like a very small ant, who had just tried to lift Hokage Mountain.
"Oh…um, well, it's nice to meet you Katsumi-san," Tatsuo says with a nod of greeting before he turns to throw away his mask. He flicks the towel over his shoulder before he moves forward to visually inspect Bobo. "What happened?" Yeah this doesn't look like fun, nor does it look life threatening at the moment. He reaches out a hand to rest against the monkey's back gently before sending out his own bursts of chakra, checking the injury as well as looking for anything else that might seem 'off'. He was sedated. Tatsuo could feel the familiar drugs flowing through the system. "When did this happen?"
"Umm… this happened earlier this morning. About three hours ago. The cut from the broken downspout is the most dangerous injury, but it won't be a problem with all of us here. I'm going to work on that with Katsumi's assistance. But I want you to work on the liver problem, Tatsuo. You probably felt the scar mass there. It's going to affect Bobo's liver function the longer it stays there, so that needs to be removed. I'm going to show you how to do that without open surgery," Kenta tells Tatsuo. He shifts his position again, so that both of his students have more room to observe what he's doing.
The senior medic-nin points at the cut. "The most important thing right now is to clean up this wound. All the fur is a problem, which means we have to shave off the bit around the cut first. A ragged injury like this can make shaving tools tricky to use, since attempting that might even start up the bleeding again." Kenta holds a single finger up and molds a little bit of chakra around it. The exact way he does this is sent through his link with Katsumi. Tatsuo, on the other hand, should already know at least this step. "I created a very weak chakra scalpel around this finger. The amount of medical chakra I put into this means it's strong enough to take off hair, but not flesh or even skin." He carefully runs the finger along the cut. The fur comes off with his touch.
Katsumi had managed a small smile, when Tatsuo approached Bobo and began to work flawlessly alongside Kenta-sensei. Only a small part of her felt that she was being rude, in not giving a proper greeting. But as soon as he got to work, her guilt retreated. They were both a little focused on the lesson at hand - proper and more friendly introductions could happen later. Probably.
As Kenta formed the chakra scalpel on his finger, Katsumi watched with fascination at its explaination pouring into her brain. Her eyes widened as she watched Sensei glide his finger along the injury, the matted hair falling away in its wake. "So, umm… The greater your chakra control, also means the stronger tools that you can make yourself?" She knew that one needed good control simply to keep a balance while healing or repairing an injury. But adding in the factor of making your own tools only showed her that she would need as much control as she could muster to be able to split it in such a variety of ways at one time.
Kenta nods his head up and down at Katsumi. He pulls his finger away from Bobo, who's almost completely shaved of fur around the wound, except for an inch or two. "Good chakra control is needed for this, because tools made with chakra are very difficult to maintain. What I just showed you is the most basic way of creating a chakra scalpel. It's actually very crude. The more complicated versions also require strong shape manipulation abilities. At that point, you might be able to learn how to form other tools out of your chakra too, like tweezers and probes and needles." He points at the tiny strip of fur that's left. "I want you to try to remove the rest of that with some shaped medical chakra, Katsumi."
Kenta turns to Tatsuo. "Umm… as for you, I'm going to show you how to extend a chakra scalpel under the skin without breaking it." The young man places his hand the spot where Bobo's liver is. "Use the diagnostic jutsu to watch while I do this please." Kenta molds more medical chakra, but much stronger than what he used to scrape off the hair. The "cutting edge" of the chakra doesn't form yet. Instead, he carefully eases the chakra into Bobo's body, the same way that's done when using a healing jutsu. The difference is that he's not infusing his patient with chakra and telling the body to heal itself. That won't be useful here. Instead, Kenta extends the medical chakra until it touches the scarred portion of the monkey's liver. He changes the characteristics at -that- point to form a cutting edge and only at the very "tip" of that mass of chakra. "If you caught that, I want you to try to duplicate the feat, Tatsuo."
'Chakra shaping?' Katsumi thought to herself, nerves starting to try and crawl up her spine even as excitement made her eyes sparkle. It was something that she had been very curious to learn; now more than ever, she wanted to see if she was even capable of such control. However, as soon as Kenta-sensei told the girl to make an attempt at shaving the rest of the fur from Bobo's wound, she felt her excitement stumble to meet her fear. 'Oh, man…' Self-doubt probably flowed from the girl as she straightened in her seat and looked to her hand, gnawing on the inside of her cheek as she gave herself a pep-talk. 'Come on. You won't learn without trying. Besides! Maybe you'll catch on really fast!' Katsumi could feel a cloud of gloom trying to develop over her head. Clutching her fist, Katsumi pushed it away and tried to remember that she was a student on every which way. Failure only existed where she didn't try.
Huffing a breath of determination, Katsumi focused on the information that her sensei had given her in how to control chakra into basic shapes and looked at her index finger. She directed her chakra and energy to the digit, envisioning a scalpel in her mind, and it wasn't long before she was able to feel a minour tingling sensation enveloping her finger. What he had shown her was supposed to be the most crude and basic of chakra medical tools that could be made. With what chakra control Katsumi had, she knew that she had to at least be able to make somthing weak enough to cut hair. The question was whether she could maintain it.
She reached out, as her finger tingled with chakra, and began to run it along the length of fur Sensei had left for her to cut. She actually managed to cut some of that hair away! But then, probably due to her inner turmoil and excitement, it stopped working - the tingling sensation in her finger now gone. She continued to try and focus, the feeling of her chakra flowing and focusing where she needed it to remaining rather inconsistent as she practically chipped away at her task.
Tatsuo blinks when Kenta asks him to 'watch' through the diagnostic jutsu and he nods slightly before putting a finger on the monkey, leaving plenty of space for Kenta to work while he pulses out his own chakra to watch not only how the monkey is doing, but also what Kenta is doing. After a few moments, when Kenta asks him to try and mimic the move, he takes a deep breath, then moves to place a hand gently on Bobo. He closes his eyes to focus, not needing to physically see any of what he's doing at this point. Carefully, he extends his chakra into Bobo, waiting until it's near the liver before finally solidifying the point into a sharp tip. It's certainly not as fast as Kenta, but after a little extra time he /does/ manage to do it.
Kenta follows along with his own eyes, thoughts and diagnostic jutsu. He watches both of his students attempt their respective tasks for a while before he starts nodding to himself. "Umm… both of you are doing pretty well. I mean, you still have a lot of work to do, but I can see that you've grasped the gist of what I'm trying to show you. It's only practice that you guys need now. A lot of practice, as always." He gives them smiles of encouragement. Then, he continues to observe and give tips through the rest of the lesson. Everything may take practice, but Bobo's probably not going to complain that some of that practicing is going to benefit the monkey himself.
