After the wedding and after Andy and Cadell had shaken a lot of hands and Andy had wiped hand sanitizer on herself, Cadell, and Emily, they took Emily back to her room.
Andy needed to attend the Grand Rounds session that Dr. Taneisha Jackson was going to give, and it started in about ten minutes. She bolted out of the door, hurrying toward the auditorium on the fourth floor.
Dr. Jackson caught Andy at the door to the auditorium. “Skip Grand Rounds today.”
“I shouldn’t,” Andy said. “I’m supposed to attend, and I’m supposed to lob you a couple of softballs.”
“Don’t. Go back to your new husband and Emily. It’s your wedding day.”
Andy looked more closely. Dr. Jackson’s eyes were bloodshot now, and the dark skin of her nose looked rosy. “Are you okay?”
“Just go. Don’t ask questions. Just go.”
The locked files. Dr. Jackson’s red-rimmed eyes at the wedding. The empty room.
Andy’s skin went ice-cold. “Boyd Westerfield didn’t make it, did he?”
Dr. Jackson sucked her lips into her mouth. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow.”
Grief welled up in Andy’s stomach and overflowed. “Damn.”
Dr. Jackson shook her head. “The Grand Rounds are going to be a case study in happenstance. I’ve reviewed his records a dozen times since he coded. I even saw him personally this morning. He looked like he was deteriorating, and I scheduled him for a new PELD evaluation. He coded before the phlebotomist could get there to take the samples. Nobody missed anything. Sometimes, the disease trajectory is sharply downward.”
Pain cramped Andy’s stomach.
This was the part of the job that she hated. Everyone did. Losing a patient was a personal gut punch and a professional slap in the face.
“Go,” Dr. Jackson told her. “Spend your wedding day with Emily Glynn and your husband. I didn’t want to tell you at all.”
Andy stumbled to the on-call room, where she found Raji hanging out with old friends. With one look, Raji bounded up and grabbed her. “Oh, no. One of your patients?”
“He was eight,” Andy said.
“I’m so sorry,” the other people said while Raji held her.
After a few minutes, she pulled herself together, and Raji made sure that Andy was presentable before she went back down to Emily’s room. They found the bottle of Visine in the small bathroom and applied ice packs from the freezer to her eyes and nose to reduce the redness and swelling.
In a few minutes, Andy looked relatively normal, even though her heart still felt sliced open.
It wasn’t fair. Boyd had been only eight. They should have had more time to save him.
With a decline that quick, only a miracle could have saved him.
But, as Andy knew, miracles didn’t happen.