O.O.C. InformationName: Blueorchid (Blue for short)
Age: 21
Contact Information: AIM: juuhachi43 or PMs please
I.C. InformationName:Devyn Marie Catherwood
Age: Age: 30 [Born April 3rd]
Gender:Female
Nationality:Born in the European Union (specifically France) raised in the former United States
Occupation: Devyn has a PhD in medicine from an accredited university that was once known by the name Johns Hopkins. While the school resembles nothing of the institution of the 21st century, it still has the prestige of being one of the top learning institutions of medicine in the western hemisphere. Devyn specialized in trauma surgery and studied under the famous surgeon Dr. Horace T Marschall, one of the founding fathers of the Thymate II a revolutionary cybernetic thyroid gland. Hence her occupation title on the DsECV ‘Nomad’ is Ship Surgeon (she’s one of many).
Personality: Growing up in a large family, Devyn learned at a young age she would need more than just a polite smile to get whatever she wanted. That same passive aggressiveness carried on into adulthood and college when she used her wit to get the internships, the teachers, and the jobs she wanted. She has very little problem saying things that most other people would carefully ignore, though she applies tact when needed. This has lead to a rare brand of cynical humor which amuses her and many of her friends. And those who don’t understand it? Well she prefers to overlook them anyways.
Such an attitude leads many people to have a love/hate first impression. And Devyn likes to keep it that way, an old habit reminiscent from living with her parents. When her father was on active duty in the military, getting too close to anyone was a bad idea because she never knew where their next assignment would take her. Though the wars of the 24th century were long over, the military still gave an average of two years for any family moving to a new base. However, having settled down in her adulthood, she has definitely become more approachable…at least enough that she has a handful of friends she feels she can count on. She’s also extremely protective of said friends and on certain occasions…dare I say…caring?
Her attitude has been known to cause problems at work- medicine is a world filled with straightforward decisions, single minded perseverance, and sometimes cut-throat actions (did I mention the occasional tirade in French?). Thus she has a certain authority she maintains in the OR, one that has lead her to be an effective surgeon and a pain in the arse authority figure. Regardless, Devyn is considered a knowledgeable medical source and a highly intelligent woman. However while she loves her job and the work itself, the friendships she built up over the years have been strained the more she puts into her job, a fact that affects Devyn deeper than she lets on.
Currently, she finds that her job removes opportunities to have a social life however she still has an assortment of hobbies she tries to keep a hand on when she has spare time. One of her favorite pastimes is exercising and while the hours spent at the gym don’t exactly show on her petite figure, her muscle is just about as defined as she can get it. Fitting her job title, Devyn also has a fondness for bladed instruments, though you’re not going to find her carrying something pointy around on all occasions, she just appreciates the use a good scalpel can provide in many different situations. Leading past that, when she’s not scheduled for a surgery she can sometimes be found in the kitchen forgoing prepackaged and processed foods for the occasional hand made meal.
Physical Appearance: 
Standing at 5’3’’and weighing 110 pounds, Devyn has a slight build healthy enough to be called slender without really looking calorie deprived. Both her arms and legs have wiry muscle tone but her strength and movements are often compared to that of a gymnast or a dancer as opposed to someone more athletic. While her job doesn’t really call for any manner of self defense, it does take some strength to do clean up the remnants of a burst appendix, standing over an open body for five hours and she’s proud to do it. With a flat stomach and a moderate chest somewhere around the low B-cup range, her figure is shapely enough to be called attractive though she knows beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Her finely boned face and angled features work well with her short stature but they also provide her with a frail-looking appearance, as if one good hit to the face would knock her backwards. High cheekbones, a sharp chin, and a button nose suit the ivory complexion she inherited from her father though there is often a healthy pink glow to her cheeks with full lips pursed in a rather impish grin. Coffee-colored eyes match her smile and hold a slight twinkle to them unless you make her mad.
She keeps her dark brown hair cut in a messy bob which currently falls a few inches below the tips of her ears. When she’s working she often pulls it back into a tiny ponytail and clips her bangs to the side of her face. Her clothes are like her hair, functional and convenient. At work she wears a clean set of purple scrubs which, while they might look like pajamas, can sometimes be covered in ‘god knows what’ from the human body. Off duty she prefers blue jeans and snug t-shirts in colors like blue, black, and purple which she sometimes layers one over another and comfortable flats or sneakers.
Medical:The only medical ailment Devyn appears to suffer on a regular basis is exhaustion from long hours in the OR and the fact that she and her coworkers can always be on call. On a ship carrying over 10,000 people there is always someone bound to get hurt and while she isn’t always reattaching severed limbs, there always seems to be that one particular case that keeps her up for hours. She has self-medicated in the past with a variety of caffeine products to stay awake and has been known to sleep for hours on end during her days off, but so far she would like to think she’s kept the exhaustion down to a fairly controlled cycle.
However one unfortunate side effect of working as a surgeon is that Devyn has begun showing the occasional signs and symptoms for carpal tunnel syndrome, a condition where the medial nerve is compressed at the wrist leading to pain, paresthesia, and muscle weakness in the hands. While she knows that the full blown symptoms of CTS don’t usually appear until adults have reached their mid-40s, she has occasionally felt the familiar tingling in her hands during early hours of the morning or late night.
History: Born in the city of Clermont-Ferrand, Devyn was the fifth child of Madeleine and Derrick Catherwood. Her mother was a professor at the local college and her father was a physician assistant in the military. Traveling from America to France, he’d met her mother one night in an officer’s club and six months later they were married. By a stroke of luck, Lieutenant Catherwood managed to stay within the confines of the regional UEC base after he’d married her mother and continued to work as a civilian. Her birth came as somewhat of a surprise to the Catherwood family, having had four boys already they were certain that this, their last child, would be another son to carry on the family name. She was to be named after her great grandfather, Devin Catherwood, but when the screams coming from the crowded hospital room were distinctly feminine, Derrick Catherwood in his shock signed the birth certificate for their new baby girl “Devyn.”
Growing up a “half breed” in Western Europe was unusual to say the least. While France and the United States were both under the United Earth Coalition and xenophobia appeared in the former “eastern” countries under control of western nations, many people in France still saw Devyn and her family as foreigners.
Still, as a child, Devyn never wanted for anything. There were times when money was tight, she had four brothers and parents that worked two jobs. And with the migration of humans to colonies in space, prices weren’t always cheap, but somehow her mother and father always managed to make things work. Being the baby of the family, Devyn was well protected by her brothers and spoiled by them as well. She grew up a tomboy learning how to play baseball, wrestle, and throw rocks at the neighbor’s cats. Yet she also learned culture from her mother as a professor and the occasional bit of science from her father. Feminine things like dresses and tea parties have and always were a foreign concept to her, though over the years Devyn has learned to set her own path.
When she turned seven, her family made a move across the Atlantic to the former United States and her father resumed active duty. The oldest of her brothers, James, had just had his first child and with her second oldest sibling on his way out the door, the Catherwoods decided it was time to make a change for the better. They believed that work in the states would be more profitable than that of France and for a time it was. However unlike their situation in France the Catherwood family moved quite frequently in the States, enough that Devyn had lived in Maryland, Georgia, North and South Carolina by the time she turned sixteen. Learning English was no problem for an intelligent girl like Devyn, it was her social skills that needed work as she grew older. Her family never stayed in more than one place for a few years and with her brothers gradually leaving the house one by one, Devyn kept more to herself as time went on.
Which of course all changed by the time she finished high school. Even though her mother had been a professor in France, she had insisted Devyn go through public school in order to get the overall “experience.” Though Devyn didn’t particularly enjoy her primary and secondary school years, never staying in one home long enough to make friends, life changed once she hit college. In order to cope with the constant moving Devyn discovered interests within her own family developed from her tomboy days as a child to a curiosity of medicine like her father. Going to college gave Devyn a chance to settle for the first time in her life and she completed an undergraduate degree at one of the top international universities double majoring in Biology and Chemistry. Of course she didn’t stop at a bachelors, she found work as a lab tech in the nearby area for several months before passing the MCATs and applying to medical school. She was accepted to an institution that was formerly known by the name Johns Hopkins at twenty two and completed a specialized MD-PhD program.
Medical school quickly became the hardest thing in her life. But over the seven years she attended she slowly developed and fine tuned the personality she has today. By excelling in her studies, making friends with the “right” people, and studying under her mentor Dr. Marschall Devyn stayed at the top of her class. Upon graduation and after finishing her med-school rotations she stayed with Dr. Marschall finishing exploratory research on the Thymate II before accepting a job off planet. Although she was wary of space travel having lived on Earth all her life, at twenty nine she took her first job flying solo as a surgeon on a DsECV craft with several of her med school colleagues. At age thirty she is one of the younger surgeons on ‘Nomad,’ but she has earned the respect of her seniors with her credentials, research, and ability to hold her own.
Other:She likes to listen to old music when she performs surgeries (provided they aren’t emergency trauma.) Although she has classical tastes everything from salsa music to classic rock have been heard from her OR.
Roleplay Sample: [OOC: So I was kind of thinking this could be an explanation of what happened to Devyn in her last few minutes before unconsciousness]
It was a complicated surgery. An aortic dissection took almost 20 hours to complete if it was done properly, and that was usually if the dissection was under 6 centimeters.
Jacob Thompson’s was up to eight.
The aging security chief from the sixth deck wasn’t doing anything particularly strenuous when it happened. He happened to be pushing 45 in fairly good physical condition…except for the little problem with his blood pressure. The doctors on Earth had explained his hypertension was stress related. He’d been taking Lasix for several years but he wasn’t always diligent about when and where. And when he’d collapsed on the floor from severe chest pain in the grip of a myocardial infarction…the delicate walls of his aorta began to tear and blood flowed in between the gaps.
When Devyn entered her OR the patient had already been seen by Doctor Howard and Doctor Clyde. While both physicians were her superiors, they had tried their best to repair the tear and failed. The arterial pressure beginning to rip through the smooth muscle cells and elastic tissue of the tunica media was too much for the patient to handle. As a younger surgeon, they had essentially given up on the case, providing Devyn with a chance to do exploratory surgery and learn from the mistakes. But when she scrubbed up and learned the conditions of the security chief, she was still bound and determined to make things work.
Entering the sterile room, there was no sound of music coming through the OR speakers- as an emergency surgery, there was no time for enjoyment. Pulling the wrists of her latex gloves, she carefully stepped up the stool to get a better view of her patient, his insides open for the world to see and the delicate muscle of his heart fluttering in a weak attempt at a heart beat. He had been placed under general anesthesia and a heart lung machine in an attempt to keep him alive but his vitals were fading fast.
“How long has his systolic been under 100?” she asked a nurse in a rapid tone.
“Up to twenty minutes. We’ve been holding him at 94 over 60 but he’s fading fast. The dacron just isn’t holding,” the nurse replied.
A smattering of French curses came from under her breath as she delicately manipulated the hemostats that were holding the delicate vessels around the heart closed, preventing excessive bleeding. “There was further damage to the arterial wall than just the dissection…they must have found him too late to prevent anything more than initial damage…” she muttered in a harsh tone, stooping over the patient as her tiny frame worked diligently next to her taller coworkers.
Solutions ran through her mind left and right. ‘Nomad,’ didn’t carry any spare organs so installing a new heart valve was out of the question. The David procedure would have been possible if the patient hadn’t been out for over ten hours. Little did she know she was muttering under her breath, some of the senior nurses were smiling and shaking their heads behind her, admiring her candor. Brown eyes raked over the internal organs deep in thought…a graft? Something to stabilize the patient? They weren’t going to be able to pump him full of drugs for too much longer without suffering brain damage unless…
“A stint! Its late but a metal stint might hold off complications. We can keep him in a coma for a day and see if a replacement valve can be ordered.”
“But Dr. Howard and Clyde…they already,” the pulmonologist on the heart lung machine started.
“I know!” she interrupted with a harsher voice, hands twisting together in anticipation as a curl of her dark brown hair fell out of her surgical cap. It was terrible that she could never tell her coworkers faces apart when they scrubbed up for surgery…she had to go by voices alone. And his name was…Kyle…Kerrick…Ken?
Yes Ken. “I’m sorry Ken…” she said in a softer tone, her eyes crinkling up into a smile. “I just…I know the others have written this man off but I…I want to try,” she admitted. It was still a far cry from gentle words but this was the OR. And as the older professional nodded his approval Devyn clapped her hands together, preparing to order a sterilized stint when the entire room gave a great lurch forward.
Devyn fell forward, bracing herself on the stool she stood as the room shook and the others around her staggered in a similar fashion. “Someone figure out what that…” she ordered before a second lurch occurred, stronger than the first and she fell forward onto Jacob Thompson’s open chest. Her purple scrubs became covered with blood, introducing bacteria and foreign matter into the body cavity with one swift motion. “Shit…help me stabilize this guy!” she yelled, pushing herself up on her hands as she scrambled upright only to come face first with a surgical lamp…
She swore she saw stars as her head exploded in pain and she wobbled backwards. Feeling a pair of arms wrap around her, she vaguely remembered being dragged away from the operating table, hearing the beep of vitals crashing, reaching a blood covered gloved hand out to the body on the table before…
Everything went black.
Catherwood, Devyn Marie, Ship Surgeon, PhD
