Hey all! This is my first SCP, so apologies for any newbie roughness. Thank you to Yossipossi,
CorpseOfBixby, and
Malakite1708 for giving crit!
This is good. The theme of "mother and son/daughter" is something I've seen before in other SCPs to some extent, but I don't think I've seen it pulled off this well.
A minor quibble - I don't particularly like the fade out effect on the logs as the article goes on. I get what you're trying to do, but it just feels out of place in the context of formal documentation.
I'm just vibing
I'm glad you like it :D
I'll admit that the fade is not particularly formal, but it was the best way I could think of to get the effect I wanted.
I ended up revisiting this piece with fresh eyes because of the Reviewers Spotlight (congrats on that, by the way!), and I've changed my opinion of the fade. I interpreted it almost as the reader's eyes just skimming more and more over the failed attempts at help.
I'm just vibing
In terms of the dosage, there is zero chance that they would jump from 1mg of morphine to 0.5mg of fentanyl (not a real dose either. Fentanyl doses are in micrograms not milligrams. mcg not mg. A half a milligram of fentanyl would kill a large grown man if he wasn't strongly opioid tolerant) There is no chewable source of fentanyl. The normal way of receiving fentanyl is in a transdermal patch for safety. There is a buccal option, but not for babies because it must be retained unswallowed for thirty minutes which a baby cannot do. I understand that maybe the idea is that a transdermal patch wouldn't do anything, but the dosage jump is still absurd.
The lowest buccal dose is 100mcg, if you decide the little rock baby can be trusted not to swallow it and choke. You might consider your initial suggested dose of 0.5mg be converted into mcg and then used as an attempt at physician assisted death, but it's definitely not a rational dose for infant pain relief, even where rational doses of lesser meds don't work it's still a completely nuts dose that would only be intended to kill.
It's a good story, I like it, but anyone who knows pain medications is gonna be distracted by that killer dose.
I'm not very good with pharmacology and was spitballing on the dosage, so thanks for the feedback on this! I went and changed it to 100μg buccal held in place with tape, since transdermal almost definitely wouldn't do anything.
This is a really, really impressive debut. There's a deftness here in your balance between realism and SCP-pseudoscience that's rarely seen, AND it all works to enhance the body horror, AND it culminates in a subversion of established tropes in the medium.
Great stuff, basically. More please.
I love that digital signature request. Great job for a first SCP.
Short and simple, yet intriguing to read. I was wondering where that article would go and really didn't know what to expect of it, the story it told was in itself complete and well executed.
I liked the short change of tone at the end from the cleanly written scientific standard to the more personal tone and the inclusion of the DNR request.
I liked the content of the article. A lot of the format things kind of take away from the quality in my opinion. First the last two treatment records I had to up my monitor's brightness and then highlight the text to read it. Light-gray on white is not easy to read and it might improve readability to introduce the fading effect later in the records. The one thing that I didn't care for was the use of non-Latin units of writing to approximate a signature. For a brief second while reading Hawthorne's name, I thought I was seeing Cherokee text. Instead it was just Faux Cyrillic but with a few different writing systems smushed together. I don't know how possible it'd be to do but creating actual signatures by hand would be preferable to me. No vote