Deadly? Sepsis?
The calmness I embraced melts away.
“I try to make her drink something every day.” I frown, looking up at Ace. “No, I—I didn’t take her temperature like I should have, but I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. What’s sepsis?”
It feels right explaining to Ace what happened. He’s the only one that gets it. Andy and his SoCal buddy didn’t know shit about taking care of Mama.
“Baby...”
Hearing that pet name pour out his mouth in front of people makes me needy and full of want. I want to touch him, taste him, and hear him until I’m nauseated from being overwhelmed by him.
We stare at each other until my vision gets blurry with tears.
Andy clears his throat. “I was reading her chart and saw that she’s living with metastatic colon cancer. It’s unlikely—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Ace cuts in, swiping a wild tear from my cheek. “Do you understand what he’s saying?”
“No,” I garble out, whining and hoping it’ll make him pull me into him, but he won’t fold.
His hand falls back to his side.
He looks over at Andy. “I like you, bro, but my lady don’t understand none of this shit you talking about and she’s scared.”
Andy nods, pounding his hands together and inhaling a breath full of stale hospital air. “Ms—”
“Lourdes,” Ace says. “She never hit a buzzer beater against Villanova, but her name is more important to you than mine will ever be. Start asking your patient’s family members their names. It’s a sign of good bedside manner.”
If this is the type of responsibility Ace was talking about owning as my man, I don’t think I ever want to go back to boys. Apparently, men know how to calm chaos and command rooms without even raising their voices.
Andy takes another deep breath, splaying his hands toward me. “Lourdes, I know you know your mom has cancer.”
I nod, rubbing another tear from my eyes.
The nerve of that word to show up again.
“She’s on chemo and radiation treatments.” He slaps his hands together, inhaling a third deep breath. “While those treatments are great for treating cancer, they wreak havoc on her white blood cells. These blood cells exist to fight off infections in the body.”
“Without those white blood cells, her immune system can’t fight off an infection like pneumonia and it turns on itself. So, she becomes vulnerable. When this happens, sepsis sets in—the fever, confusion, sleepiness and pain are all symptoms. The pneumonia didn’t cause the sepsis though. It’s caused by her body’s overwhelming response to the pneumonia.”
Somewhere between his words, I grabbed Ace’s hand because trust is a motherfucker. It makes me never want to come to another hospital without him.
He squeezes the tips of my fingers, stroking my nails. I look at him out of the corner of my eye, searching for any sign of confusion on his face, but it’s relaxed.
“Explain to her it’s not her fault,” he says, keeping the same foot of distance between us.
“It’s not your fault. Your mom issovulnerable right now from the colon cancer and all the treatments that something small that wouldn’t impact me or you could be deadly for her.”
“Thank you,” I choke out.
They’re the only words that can encompass five years of frustration from doctors talking at me and not to me.
“I want you to be prepared for the future, there are ways to get ahead of this. I can get the social—”
“I can do that,” Ace cuts in. “I can explain it. Please don’t bother them about that.”
Andy nods with his lips balled down. “For now, we’re going to get her admitted and moved to our intensive care unit.”
Ace drops my hand and pushes away from Mama’s bed, taking long strides to Andy across the room.
