Hilda Hexenmeister
January 21, 2020 11:57 AM
Hilf mir! by Hilda Hexenmeister
Hilda had been nine the last time she saw her mother. She liked Uncle Karl, he was a good guardian to her and her brothers. Well, maybe he was better guardian to Hans than to Heinrich but she was pretty sure that was at least equally Heinrich’s fault as it was Karl’s. But that wasn’t the point. The point was Hilda liked Uncle Karl just fine, but he was, well, a guy. More than that, until his brother’s kids were thrust unexpectedly into his care, he had been a hermit in the middle of the dessert who interacted with snakes more often than humans.His understanding of what adolescent human girls went through during puberty was approximately, let her think about this, oh, right, nothing.
And so he had told her nothing about what teenaged girls could be expected to experience. Hilda had never really thought too much about that. She didn’t know there was anything she wasn’t being told about.
But she had just sat down on the toilet and there was blood. It seemed like an awful lot of blood. And Hilda was terrified. And she had no idea what was happening.
She was probably bleeding out from some internal injury she hadn’t realized she’d taken during Quidditch practice earlier.
Fortunately, it seemed like a slow(ish) leak rather than a gushing wound, so she managed not to scream or panic too badly. She tried to remain calm and rational. She didn’t feel dizzy yet so she probably wasn’t in immediately danger of death by exsanguination. She finished peeing, then wiped away as much of the blood as she could. She was definitely still bleeding.
Her underwear and pants were already ruined, but she tried her best to bandage herself with toilet paper.
Then she went to the hospital wing, moving a little faster than her normal walking pace but she was trying not to draw too much attention to herself. At least her pants were black and didn’t show that they were all bloody at a casual glance.
But went she burst through the doors to the hospital wing, her eyes were definitely widened with barely controlled fear. “Healer!” she called out, and her voice shook slightly with urgency and fear. When she caught sight of the woman she explained quickly, in the best words she had to explain her problem in English, “I have blood! Much blood! Here.” And she cupped her hands somewhat awkwardly over her privates. “Small bludger hit, at two hours. I think not bad. But now, blood!”
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Hilda Hexenmeister
Hilf mir!
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Aisha Kapoor
January 22, 2020 3:19 AM
Of course by Aisha Kapoor
Help, I’m bleeeding as Aisha parsed the sentence to be, was not, as sentences went, a great one. Still, the patient herself was walking and talking and that put her a good deal ahead of several who came the medic’s way. That meant it was reassuring gentle medic time, not wand blazing emergency time. Aisha tried to keep a calm, reassuring demeanour as she stepped out to meet the girl and - oh. She didn’t alter her expression but her mind abruptly changed direction as the girl indicated what the problem was.“Okay,” she stated calmly, hoping that a lack of panic in her own demeanour would help calm her… patient? Student? Admittedly, the child had mentioned a Bludger hit, but Aisha thought the odds were they were in for a talk - The Talk - rather than a diagnosis here. “Would you be more comfortable sitting down?” she asked, gesturing to the examination bed which of course had its thin film of paper and wipe clean surface. Still, it was a genuine question. She remembered the anxious self consciousness of having her period as a teenager, the first few times it happened, being unsure whether she could trust the protection she had, the fear that she would get things messy. And this girl, presumably, had none if she didn’t know what was happening. Aisha did not judge. It was a rule, as part of her profession, but she also remembered finding out more from whole class talks than from the vague mentions her own mother had given her. She did not tut or ask whether this girl’s mother hadn’t told her about this. Clearly she hadn’t. Later, when she got around to retrieving her file, and seeing her guardian listed, she would be further glad that she had refrained. “Blood is scary, but you’re going to be just fine,” she promised her. “You’re walking and talking,” she pointed out. “And sometimes… Sometimes blood in that area can just be your body getting rid of something it doesn’t need,” she suggested carefully, trying to introduce the idea, strange as she was sure it would seem, that bleeding could be okay. She was also aware that there might be a considerable language barrier here, and tried to speak slowly.
“Let’s work out which one it is. Show me where exactly the Bludger hit you?” she asked. She doubted it was internal bleeding. The thing with internal bleeding was that it tended to… well, stay on the inside. But she thought it might be a good idea to start with what the girl thought was the problem and work from there. “What’s your name?” she checked.
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Aisha Kapoor
Of course
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Aisha Kapoor
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Hilda Hexenmeister
January 22, 2020 8:05 AM
Mein Bauch tut auch weh by Hilda Hexenmeister
“I am Hilda Hexenmeister,” she answered the last question first. It was the easiest and least embarrassing one. As for the injury, she pulled her shirt up slightly and her pants’ waist down a little to show the healer a faint newly forming bruise on her hip. It was fairly small for a bludger hit, the metal ball having only barely glanced her after her bat took the brunt of its momentum. As a beater, though, she wasn’t really supposed to get hit herself and faint spots of pink showed on her cheeks at this physical evidence that she’d angled her bat all wrong one time during this afternoon’s practice. Still, as Quidditch injuries went, it looked hardly worth mentioning, and normally she would have already forgotten it was there. It didn’t even hurt unless she pressed against it.And yet she was bleeding.
Though maybe it was the other thing the healer had said. Hilda still didn’t think the injury seemed serious other than the bleeding, so maybe if the healer thought there was another explanation, it could be that. She wasn’t sure she had entirely understood what the other explanation was, but she followed enough to grasp that another cause was possible.
“Say in small sentences,” Hilda requested. “My words is more than my grammar. Long sentence is confuse. What other make blood here? It is bad? I am sick?”
She did have a stomachache but that had started before the bludger and before the bleeding so she hadn’t thought it was relevant. Maybe it was. She held a hand low over her midsection. “My stomach ache since morning. Blood come from stomach not bludger?”
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Hilda Hexenmeister
Mein Bauch tut auch weh
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Aisha Kapoor
February 05, 2020 8:59 PM
... not sure by Aisha Kapoor
The bruise was on her hip, which was really too far around to be related. As Aisha had suspected anyway, although examining it had served the purpose she wanted, not only of ruling that out, but also giving them some time to introduce this other idea.“You are not sick,” she confirmed. That was the easy part.
“Sort of,” she offered, when Hilda asked if the blood was coming from her stomach rather than the Bludger. It was definitely closer to the right idea, even if her stomach wasn’t quite the right body part. Aisha felt like taking small steps towards the right answer was going to be the right way to go about this. And there had been a request to keep her sentences short, after all.
“First, you need to be comfortable,” she suggested, “Then I will explain more.”
She went to the cupboards at the back of the room. They held all the things that were necessary for dealing with a school full of teenage witches and wizards. Bruise balm for Quidditch injuries, calming draughts for exam time, antidotes to classwork gone wrong… All the things to deal with both elements of that population - the magicalness, and the teenageness. She pulled a box from one of the drawers, taking it over to Hilda.
“We can’t stop the blood. Your body needs it to come out. You put this in your underwear,” she explained, holding out a sanitary pad. “You will change it a few times every day until the blood stops. Do you want the elves to bring you some clean clothes?” she asked. “Then we will talk about why this happens.”
That was going to be tricky. But there were visual aids. She was also pretty sure that she could write to family planning centers and get a copy of the information in German, which she would be sure to do. They could go over as much as Hilda wanted to in English today, to help her get started, but Aisha would make sure she got the resources to fully understand. It was her body, and she needed to know how it worked.
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Aisha Kapoor
... not sure
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Aisha Kapoor
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