Never Giving Up (Never #3)(63)
“I’m here on orders from Dr. Edwards to get another blood draw.”
My blood started pumping faster and I could feel the panic starting to come over me at the thought of another incompetent person poking Mattie.
“I very explicitly stated in the patient’s chart that there were to be no more phlebotomists sent here to draw her blood. Tell me what you need and I’ll make sure the lab gets it.”
“Listen,” the woman said to Melody. “I just go where the doctors tell me to go. You want to take care of this, be my guest. All the info is in her chart.” She swiftly left the room, not looking our way again. I was still a little stunned that Melody had so easily and effortlessly put her in her place, that I hardly noticed when she picked up the phone.
“Hi, who’s the nurse in charge up on your floor tonight?” She listened to the person on the phone and I saw her nod. “Great, can I speak with her?” A few moments later and someone else came onto the other side of the line. “Hi, Barb? Hey, it’s me Melody down on the pediatric floor. Do you think you could come down here and help me with a special patient? We’re trying to draw blood but she’s a tiny little thing and we need some extra help.” A few moments later Melody hung up the phone and turned back to me. “Barb is the charge nurse up in the NICU and she’s going to come down and help. She’ll be better at finding a vein and Mattie won’t feel a thing.”
I stared at Melody and even though my heart still pounded, coming down from the fear that I was going to have to watch my child be tortured again, I felt a warmth swarm it at the same time. This woman, who I didn’t know more than a day, had just taken a situation that could have been terrible and eased all my fears. I wanted to hug her. Words couldn’t express how much I appreciated what she had just done for me and for my baby.
“You’re incredible,” I managed to whisper. “Thank you.”
She waved a hand at me as she made some notes on the computer, as if she hadn’t just done something for me that I’d remember forever. I knew, years from now when I told Mattie about the time she was rushed to the hospital when she was a tiny baby, I would tell her about Melody and how she fought the white-coated monsters for her. She was my hero in that moment.
I knew I didn’t have the words to explain it, so I let her wave it away. I was still silently dumbfounded by the whole situation when Barb made it down to the room, cooing and fawning over my baby. Without one single cry from Mattie, they were able to get what they needed from her.
The following days were difficult. Every morning Mattie’s I.V. came out and had to be put back in. Everyone on the floor was very understanding and always called the NICU for help. They took blood from Mattie every day, testing the blood for infection levels, measuring whether the antibiotics were doing their job. The good news, as Dr. Edwards let me know during her rounds on our fifth day there, was that since her first blood draw in the ER, the infection hadn’t gotten any worse.
“You brought her in at just the right time, Mrs. Masters. This could have been a very different outcome if you hadn’t noticed her fever. You did a good job,” she said, smiling at me. “I’m going to order that she be taken off the heart monitor. She doesn’t need it anymore.”
“She doesn’t?”
“No. The first few nights we wanted to monitor her heart because she was a very sick little girl and I wasn’t sure how she would do on the antibiotics. But I’m confident she’s on the road to recovery. I think she’s out of the woods now.”
Hearing the doctor tell me that she was essentially afraid Mattie’s heart would stop in the middle of the night really scared me. I knew she was ill, but I’d never really stopped to think about the severity of everything going on. My mind had just been focused so fully on getting her better. I never let myself stop to think about the fact that I could have lost her.
“She was very sick, Mrs. Masters. I don’t want to mislead you,” Dr. Edwards said, placing a hand on my shoulder, obviously picking up on my sudden turn in mood. “But you’ve done a great job taking care of her. She’s making remarkable progress. In fact, I think we can release her sooner than I originally anticipated.”
“Really?” I was instantly uplifted. After days of feeling the heavy darkness looming over us, the uncertainty of what would happen, this was the first moment in which I felt like, just maybe, everything would be ok after all.
“Yes, but it’s going to take a bit of work on your part.”
“Anything. If Mattie needs it, I’ll do anything.”
“I thought so,” Dr. Edwards said, smiling. “If we were to release Mattie later this week, she would still need up to two weeks of antibiotic treatment administered intravenously. So, in order to make that happen outside of the hospital, we would need to put in a PICC line.”
“What is that?”
“It’s essentially a flexible catheter we insert up the vein in the arm and thread it through to the opening of the ventricle of her heart. It’s like a semi-permanent I.V. You can both administer drugs through the port and also draw blood from it, so she wouldn’t need to be poked every time we needed blood from her and she can get her antibiotics. There also is virtually no chance of the PICC line coming out, like her I.V.’s have been.”
“It goes into her heart?”