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She was going to be a mother...sooner than she’d thought.
“So will you do the scans for me?”
“Of course.” Sunday. On Brooklyn. “I’ll do anything to help that little girl, you know that.”
At least, he should know it. But then, he should also know that if she said he was the father of her child, then he was. “Are you thinking Martha didn’t administer the medication you prescribed on Monday?”
“She scanned it out of inventory, but there’s no scan of Brooklyn’s wristband documenting that she actually got it.”
“She probably got distracted and didn’t do the scan. Maybe another emergency going on,” Elaina said, though she was concerned by the lack of attention to a critical technical procedure. “She’s great with the kids, gentle, patient. She gets along with all of the other disciplines, child life, radiology, she’s always willing to work overtime, and she knows medicine. Knows when to call a doctor, knows what we’re looking for when she does.”
“So maybe she gave the medication to someone else to administer and it didn’t get done for whatever reason.”
“I have to admit, I ran the scans you ordered yesterday, but I didn’t read all of the charting.” Her duties didn’t require her to know, or follow, a patient’s total care. Only that she know everything about her part in it. She read scans. She didn’t treat. “I’m assuming you ordered blood and urine samples?”
He nodded.
“And they came back with no sign of the medication in her system?”
Another nod.
Based on the type of medication he’d prescribed... “It should have been there for five days.”
“And we were only at the end of the third day,” he told her.
“Of course, systems process differently, but with no change of neurotransmitters on the brain scan, and no trace of medication in her system...” She paused for a few seconds.
“What do you want to do?” she asked him, worried for Brooklyn, for Martha, for the hospital, but also relieved to be able to be side by side with Greg on the matter, to have something to share with him.
“We’re going to have to report the discrepancy, but I’d like the result of Sunday’s scans before we do. We’ll then hav
e comparisons with Brooklyn’s body three days post-medication. And I’d like your help, as a fellow member of the charting committee, going over any charts Martha’s had access to in the last month, as well as taking a look at any charting that others who worked in the ED on Monday may have done. It’s within the scope of our committee work. But I’d like to limit it to just you and me for now. So we can keep this small, and reputations won’t need to be damaged, until we know what we’re dealing with.”
As the head of the committee, he could make that call.
He was giving Martha the benefit of the doubt, without letting the matter go. Exactly what she would have done. “Of course, I’ll help,” she told him. “In this case, Brooklyn’s going to be okay, but it could have been so much worse.”
He opened his mouth as though to say something to her, but then turned away. And that quickly she was hurting again. Wanting to know what he’d held back. That didn’t sit well with her. She knew they’d based their entire relationship on withholding the most emotionally personal parts of themselves, so why should his not telling her something bother her now?
How could she hurt over something she’d never had?
And how could she still be glad that there was a need for her to work with him over the weekend? How could she be clinging to the opportunity?
It wasn’t logical.
She should be resenting the fact that she was pregnant with Greg’s child when the baby should have been Peter’s. Or at least feel sad that she wasn’t carrying Peter’s baby. Maybe that would come. As soon as she had time to process.
She was pregnant!
It still wasn’t sinking in. Not fully. Maybe in bits and pieces. Like big, fluffy snowflakes falling softly around her and melting as soon as they touched the warm earth.
She agreed to see Greg later that afternoon, to split up charting detail, and as she was heading back down to Imaging, a thought occurred to her.
It was possible that she was romanticizing Greg, attaching to him emotionally, because she was pregnant with his child. She wanted to deny the assertion. To know in her heart that she was done being that woman. That it wasn’t happening again.
But she couldn’t.
Chapter Four
