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The woman nodded. “They brought the machine here and did the X-ray with me in bed.”
Interesting, as Edith could get up with assistance and had walked out of the clinic of her own free will with a nurse at her side. Plus, she’d had to go to the radiology department for the CT of her abdomen. They would have taken her by wheelchair, so why the bedside X-ray rather than doing it in Radiology?
There might be a perfectly logical reason why they’d done a portable chest X-ray instead of just doing it while she’d been there for her CT scan, McKenzie told herself.
“Is there something wrong?” Edith asked.
“You’re in the hospital, so obviously everything’s not right,” McKenzie began. “It concerns me that you saw blood when you spat up earlier. I need to figure out where that blood came from. Your esophagus? Your stomach? Your lungs? Then there’s your pain. How would you rate it currently?”
“My stomach? Maybe a two or three out of ten,” Edith answered, making McKenzie question if she should have sent the woman home and just seen her back in clinic in the morning.
Maybe she’d overreacted when Edith had mentioned seeing the blood. No, that was a new complaint for the woman and McKenzie’s gut instinct said more was going on here than met the eye. Edith didn’t look herself. She was paler, weaker.
“Does anywhere else hurt?”
“Not really.”
“Explain,” she prompted, knowing how Edith could be vague.
“Nothing that’s worth mentioning.”
Which could mean anything with the elderly woman.
“Edith, if there’s anything hurting or bothering you, I need to know so I can have everything checked out before I release you from the hospital. I want to make sure that we don’t miss anything.”
McKenzie listened to Edith’s abdomen, then palpated it, making sure nothing was grossly abnormal that hadn’t shown on Edith’s CT scan.
“I’m fine.” The woman patted McKenzie’s hand and any moment McKenzie expected to be called dearie. She finished her examination and was beginning to decide she’d truly jumped the gun on the admission when Lance stepped into the room.
“Hey, beautiful. What’s a classy lady like you doing in a joint like this?”
McKenzie shook her head at Lance’s entrance. The man was a nut. One who had just put a big smile on Edith’s pale face.
“What’s a hunky dude like you doing wearing pajamas to work?”
McKenzie blinked. Never had she heard Edith talk in such a manner.
Lance laughed. “They’re scrubs, not pajamas, and you and I have had this conversation in the past. Good to note your memory is intact.”
“That your fancy way of saying I haven’t lost my marbles?”
“Something like that.” He turned to McKenzie. “I’m a little confused about why they did a portable chest X-ray rather than do that while she was in Radiology for her CT.”
“I wondered that myself. I’ll talk to her nurse before we leave the hospital.”
“We?” Edith piped up.
Before Lance could say or reveal anything that McKenzie wasn’t sure she wanted to share with the elderly woman, McKenzie cleared her throat. “I suspect Dr. Spencer will be going home at some point this evening, and I certainly plan to go home too.”
After real food and frozen yogurt.
And mouth-to-mouth.
Her cheeks caught fire and she prayed Edith didn’t notice because the woman wouldn’t bother filtering her comments and obviously she had no qualms about teasing Lance.
“After looking over everything, I’m thinking you just needed a vacation,” Lance suggested.
To McKenzie’s surprise, Edith sighed. “You know it’s bad when your husband’s doctor says you need a vacation.”
