“You think they're going to get divorced?”
“You think that she's going to kill him with a scalpel?”
“She didn’t kill him before.”
“Any psych interns here to tell us if this is how we should cope with emotional trauma?”
“We have a psych intern next month. And PMR.”
Lillian cleared her throat. “How many children have you killed?”
That shut them up pretty quickly.
“Exactly.” Being cranky and mean was kind of fun. She pointed to the triage screen. “Get your brains back on the job. Stroke patient is on their way, and they’re probably out of my age range.”
Chapter22
Dr. Marcus Doyle arrived shortly after, and Lillian felt like she was meeting an older more Irish version of Sean. He was polite to her, but he had plenty of fires to put out on his own service.
She headed back upstairs to the general peds, as there weren’t many pending deliveries waiting in the nursery, and they had a full staff for deliveries.
As the evening progressed, Lillian stopped by the PICU to transfer a patient out.
The transfer was straightforward. An infant who was on nasal cannula after a bout of RSV bronchiolitis.
Clarissa was doing patient turnover and suddenly burst into tears.
“What happened here? Our oil divers look fine.” Both boys’ mothers were now at their bedside and the boys still were on the masks, not intubated, which was encouraging. Still, the night shift nurses were decidedly grim.
“They're stable. I thought they were going to get worse, but they haven't.”
“So it's not them. Who coded this morning?” Lillian guessed.
“Madison. She died.”
“I don’t think I know her.” Lillian guided Clarissa over to an empty family consult room. “Tell me about her.”
“I met her my intern year. She was six. Her mom brought her to the ER because she wasn’t getting better after six months of Lyme disease treatments.”
“Lyme disease?” Contrary to its multiple celebrity sponsors, Lyme disease didn’t cause nearly as many bizarro symptoms as people claimed. It went in and out of Vogue as a diagnosis and a whole unscrupulous cottage industry had sprung up catering bogus Lyme treatments. To say nothing about how rare Lyme disease was in Ohio.
“Yeah, I doubted it was Lyme since she’d never gone to the Northeast, but she had something wrong. The way she moved wasn’t right. She had spotty deficits in a bunch of different places, but I couldn’t pinpoint one lesion.”
“What did you do?” Lillian asked, anticipating the horror story to come. If a doctor was ever telling a story like this, it would not end well.
“I called neuro and told them. They booked an appointment within 48-hours for their clinic.”
“What did they find?”
“She had a dedifferentiated chordoma, a malignant tumor spreading through her spine.
“I’ve never heard of it, though I’m sure it exists.”
Clarissa rubbed her eyes. “Yeah, neurosurgery said it was like being struck by lightning at the same time as being stung to death by bees while a group of monkeys successfully type Shakespeare on a million typewriters.”
“So very rare and very bad.”
“Pretty much. Even after it’s resected, it comes back. Doesn’t respond to chemo or radiation or gamma knife therapy.”
