Page 53 of No Greater Love
The thought should have terrified me.
But it didn’t.
I set the phone aside and walked quietly down the hallway. Paige was still out cold, her hair fanned across the pillow, one arm curled around her stuffed axolotl. I leaned in, kissed her forehead, and whispered the same thing I had a thousand times.
"We're okay, baby girl."
But this time… I was really starting to believe it.
seventeen
tasha
Room 8 was supposedto be routine. A fifteen-month-old girl with UTI symptoms—fussiness, low-grade fever, foul-smelling urine. The kind of case I could handle in my sleep.
The little girl—Mia, according to her chart—sat on the exam table in a pink onesie covered with tiny elephants, her wispy blonde hair pulled into two small pigtails with purple elastic bands. She was clingy but not screaming, which was already a win. Her mother, Jessica, looked exhausted in the way only parents of sick toddlers could manage.
"She's been cranky for two days," Jessica explained, bouncing Mia gently on her hip. "Won't eat much, keeps grabbing at her diaper. I thought it might be a UTI because my sister's daughter had one around this age."
I nodded, making notes. "Good instinct. Let's get a sample and see what we're dealing with."
Getting a clean urine sample from a fifteen-month-old required patience and creativity. I applied the adhesive-backed collection bag carefully while Jessica distracted Mia with her phone, playing some mindless kids' song on repeat. The whole process took twenty minutes, but we finally had what we needed.
"Lab should have results in about an hour," I told Jessica as I labeled the specimen. "In the meantime, let's get her some Tylenol for the fever and see if she'll take some juice."
Jessica nodded gratefully. "Thank you so much. I was worried I was overreacting."
"You did exactly right bringing her in," I assured her. "Better safe than sorry with little ones."
I sent the specimen to the lab and moved on to my other patients. Room 12 had a construction worker with a gnarly laceration that needed suturing. Room 4 was a college student with what appeared to be strep throat. Standard Friday afternoon in the ER.
I was charting the strep throat case when my phone rang. Lab extension.
"Fast Track, this is Tasha."
"Hi Tasha, this is Mike in the lab. I have critical results that need to be reported directly to a nurse or physician, not just uploaded to the system."
I frowned, pulling up my patient list. "Which patient are you calling about?"
"It’s, ahh, Room 8. Mia Johnson."
Room 8. Mia. The UTI case. I felt a flutter of confusion. "Room 8? That's a routine urinalysis for a possible UTI. What's critical about that?"
"The culture came back positive for Neisseria gonorrhoeae."
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I stared at my computer screen, at Mia's sweet face in the photo Jessica had shown me earlier—the one where she was laughing in a sandbox, dirt smudged on her cheek.
"Are you... are you sure?" I managed.
"Confirmed positive. The patient is fifteen months old, correct?"
"Yes." My voice sounded strange to my own ears. "Yes, that's correct."
"Okay, I'll upload the results now, but I needed to make sure you were aware, given the... circumstances."
I hung up and sat staring at the phone for a long moment. Gonorrhea. In a fifteen-month-old baby.
There was only one way that could happen.
