lover/fighter - Finnick Odair

Chapter 4 - Swimming against the current

Rhea's night was even shorter than usual. She knows that today she cannot work late as usual because her presence is expected at the annual celebration. She has to take the evening off for this unnecessary event and that is why she has brought forward the working time that she will lose later to the early morning.

She wouldn't have minded if the patients she treated in the late hours were also just rich Capitolites whose most common reason for going to the doctor is a failed body modification. Rhea still can't believe what people in the Capitol do to their bodies. Of course, it's everyone's right to do what they want with their own bodies, and she wouldn't really care, but Rhea is a doctor, and as such, she has some unbreakable principles.

When she graduated from the TCMP, she was encouraged to become a plastic surgeon. After all, she had been the best in her class, and the rich and beautiful of the Capitol wanted only the best to work on them. Of course, if you're a doctor who decides to work in this field, you can look forward to a salary far higher than what she currently receives. So it's no surprise that fresh graduates are fighting over this opportunity, especially since job numbers are low. Rhea had been only too happy to leave it all up to her esteemed fellow students.

She could never understand why you get more credit at the Capitol for ruining a perfectly healthy body than for actually healing sick people. It's fair to say that reality at the Capitol is kind of upside down. Everything is completely twisted, but since the same is true of the people there, Rhea is probably the odd outsider who just doesn't fit in. She can live with that, but unlike the others, whose rules are set only by money, she has professional ethics. So when she started her job a year ago, she made 2 rules for herself. She became a doctor to help people who are sick, injured or unwell in any way and need her help to get better. She has vowed to treat anyone who fits any part of this description. Rule number 2 is that she will never use her skills to harm someone's health.

That is exactly what someone who gives in to the degenerate desires of Capitolites does. If people were meant to have colorful skin, scales, horns, or whatever else people here find appealing, then it would be so. But the imagination of the people here knows no bounds. It may be true that medicine in the Capitol is very advanced, but what many don't understand is that this doesn't change the fact that there is always a risk when you try to change something natural to your own liking.

Although Rhea would prefer not to have anything to do with these abstruse beauty trends, she can't help but be embarrassed to welcome the victims of these fads into her consulting room. When the damage is done, rule number 1 applies, and no matter how much she curses these people for having done this nonsense to themselves, she still has to take care of them.

After only one year, she can claim to have seen just about everything. Every possible color, every possible shape, in every conceivable place. The whole thing had already led to many an unpleasant situation, but she doesn't want to go into that... medical confidentiality. Most of their problems were self-inflicted and often the result of unhealthy nutrition, lack of physical activity, frequent alcohol and drug use, and generally irresponsible handling of their own bodies.

Her compassion for these people was limited for obvious reasons, but their money financed her practice and the work for which she had the evening, while the Capitolites had long since all gone to the next party. The work for which she had studied, she found among the people with whom she had grown up. The poor and socially weak, the workers of the Capitol all too quickly forgotten.

These people are the ones who really need the advanced medicine of the Capitol. It is possible to heal almost any injury and almost any disease, or at least to treat it to the point where a good quality of life can be achieved. The possibilities are almost unlimited nowadays, and yet resources are wasted just for the amusement of the rich instead of helping those who really need it.