CRUSHER: Wesley's allergic to metorapan treatments. I think they'll have to use a bicaridine substitute. I should send his complete records to the Academy infirmary. Of course, they probably have them already, but you can't be too sure.
PICARD: Beverly. He's fine.
CRUSHER: I know he's fine. I know he's fine.
I was rewatching TNG and in "The First Duty," this scene is always so fascinating to me. Beverly's clinical detachment seems so obvious at first. She's a doctor, of course she's defaulting to her intellect to discuss her son's injuries, his needs.
But then I wondered...was she like this when Jean-Luc told her about Jack? Had she been a doctor long enough to switch so readily into this psychological skill? Or was it different because he was her husband? Because he was dead? Did she default to her intellect then, too, as an armor against grief?
Or had she learnt to do that as a child, after losing her parents, after treating sick and injured people with her Nana and seeing them die despite it? Did all those early losses make her detach?
Was the challenge for her in becoming a doctor not learning how to distance her feelings from the healing, but to reconnect to them?
Or was Jack's death what changed her? Did her reaction to that moment scare her? Was it so intense, so deeply felt, that loss, that she vowed she would never let herself be so overcome again?
In this moment, thinking not that she'd lost Wesley, but that she could have and that she knew that, was it the beginning of what was to come so much later? When she left rather than have to endure loss again? And in that process, losing so much more? Joy, peace, love, safety.
Doctor, heal thyself. But to heal you have to feel. And she knew that, on some level, because we saw her treat patients with empathy and compassion.
But what about this wound in herself that she could never stitch up? That she tried so hard to keep closed, but that was always getting ripped open again.
That she could hide so easily, because it never healed enough to leave a scar?
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