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01.
The dilithium crystals. If it wasn't the warp drive or the Jeffries tubes, it was always the dilithium crystals. Bones stared at the pair of ensigns on his biobeds as they argued over which of them should have reversed the polarities and whose fault it was that they both had freezeburns that would take days to heal. "Doc, settle this for us. When the ship's under warp--"
He hit the kid with a hypospray just to halt what was sure to be a spate of jargon. "Do I look like an engineer to you?" He stomped back to his office. Kids in uniforms playing with toys they didn't understand. What a galaxy.
02.
Shore leave was always a problem. Not so much shore leave, actually. The problem was recovering from shore leave. Bunch of idiots running around and acting like they'd never been off-ship before. Not twenty minutes would go by when he wasn't getting another set of barked knuckles, black eyes, or loosened teeth. Bones tossed aside a PADD and groaned as the nurse peeked into his office to inform him of the arrival of a trio of lieutenants who'd been in a fight over a poker game. Bones stood and rubbed his temples. "I didn't go to medical school for this."
03.
Some people said humans made the worst patients. Some people said Vulcans. Bones determined, after just one observation, that the worst patient in the galaxy was a very drunk Scot. A Scot who, after the seventh round of whisky, sprouted magnetic trousers or his own gravitation field, because there was no moving said Scot once he'd staggered over the threshold and collapsed. Bones muttered and cursed and threatened to infect the man with Rudellian brain fever, but nothing would pry him off the sickbay floor.
Nothing moved a Scot who didn't want to move until he'd finished the last verse of Loch Lomond. Bones gave up and left him to it, muttering to himself as he headed for his office. "This is not in my job description."
04.
Jim Kirk was getting a reputation in every spaceport and station in the Federation, and Bones had sometimes wondered when that would come back to bite him in the ass. Today he'd found his answer, almost literally. More of a spike in the ass. Forty-seven spikes, to be precise.
He clicked a pair of medical pliers next to Jim's ear, morbidly pleased at the flinching reaction. "Told you not to mess with that one. Females are beautiful, but the males?" He gave a low whistle and yanked a spike from Jim's left buttock. "Bet you wish that had been a pet porcupine now."
"If you'd been at my OW back like you were supposed to be, this wouldn't have OW happened."
Bones tossed a spike into a receptacle and thumped Jim in the head with his pliers. "You don't pay me enough for this."
05.
The dilithium crystals. Again. It was enough to make a man take up drinking. Every damn week something broke, self-destructed, or gained sentience and rampaged the ship. There was a reason man was never meant to go into space.
Both ensigns - god only knew who they were, the ship's roster went through them like a phaser through cheese - tried to involve him in their argument. He hit them both with McCoy's Special - a hypospray filled with a cocktail of sedative, broad-spec antibiotic, analgesic, and a little something that cured hangovers in Andorians but went straight the other way in humans. He left them slumped on the biobeds, holding their heads and groaning, and stomped back to his office, practicing just what he wanted to say to the captain. "Keep these kids out of my sickbay. I don't want to hear one more word about warp differentials, static barriers, phase pulses, or anything that ends in ium for the next two hours or the entire ship gets a dosing of Tanzian flu and you can all suffer. My job is to take care of patients, real actual sick patients, not a bunch of toddlers who threw tantrums. I am a medical professional."
He hailed, and when Jim answered, Bones roared into the comm. "Dammit, Jim! I'm a doctor, not a babysitter!" He slapped the comm off and leaned back in his chair. Not what he'd intended to say, but it had felt good. Damn good. He'd have to remember that one.