The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,57

surgery till someone else tells us it’s the only option.” It was five-thirty A.M., and he wanted to call Cathy, but he agreed with Zoe that they should wait another hour.

The resident returned ten minutes later with a doctor roughly Austin’s age, and he scowled as he looked at the chart, after greeting Austin and Zoe with a cursory glance. “Wait a minute here, folks. Let’s go about this sensibly,” he said, looking at the resident. “I want an ultrasound so I can see if her appendix is hot or not. It could be anything, intestinal flu, colitis, something she ate.” He looked at Austin then. “I had a six-year-old boy come in last year, and we saw a tiny turtle swimming around when we X-rayed him, he had swallowed it. Kids do weird things. I had a four-year-old who had ingested a Lego. Let’s get an ultrasound now.” There was a sonography lab on the same floor as the ER, and the four of them rolled down the hall to it with a nurse, with Jaime on the gurney, crying. She was frightened and in pain.

They set up the ultrasound for her, and the surgeon studied the sonogram with the technician, as Zoe and Austin stood to one side. She was convinced they should operate immediately, before Jaime’s appendix burst, and she risked septicemia which could kill her, she told Austin. But the surgeon turned to them and shook his head.

“No turtle,” the surgeon said to Jaime, and he turned to her parents. “Nothing shows on the sonogram. Her appendix isn’t inflamed. Has she eaten anything strange in the last twelve hours?”

“Spaghetti and meatballs,” Austin answered for her.

“A bad oyster? Seafood that might not have been fresh? She has no known food allergies,” he mused, and thanked the sonography technician. “I’m not taking a kid into surgery for an appendectomy with nothing on a sonogram. We may have to observe her for a while. I want to keep her in the ER.” They rolled her back to the exam room, and Zoe looked panicked and whispered to Austin after the surgeon left the room.

“What if he doesn’t know how to read the sonogram, and her appendix bursts?”

“I don’t know,” Austin said, running a hand through his hair. “I’m calling Cathy.” He walked away to call her on his cellphone and Zoe stayed with Jaime, who was still in excruciating pain.

Austin called Cathy on her cell, apologized for waking her at an ungodly hour, and told her what was going on. “They thought it was appendicitis at first, and so did we. She’s screaming in pain. The hothead resident wanted to operate immediately, and Zoe agreed with him, Jaime is tender on the right side. Zoe still thinks it’s appendicitis. They called in a surgeon and he ordered an ultrasound. He says her appendix looks fine and isn’t inflamed, so he’s not going to operate. No one knows what this is, Jaime looks like she’s in agony.”

“It could just be a bad case of stomach flu. There’s a lot of it going around. I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she promised and showed up in fifteen. She conferred with the surgeon, and the resident to spare his ego, and then the surgeon turned to Zoe again.

“Has she been sick recently, or on any medication?”

“She had strep throat, and was on an antibiotic,” Zoe answered, and as she said it, Cathy looked like a light had gone on.

“Wait a minute! Did you finish the course of antibiotics?” she asked Zoe. “All seven days?”

Zoe looked mildly sheepish. “I gave it to her for four days. I didn’t want to overdo it.”

“You can’t do that with an antibiotic,” Cathy chided her. “What may have happened is that you got the strep subdued but didn’t knock it out, and when that happens, the strep can travel, and go to your stomach lining. It’s not dangerous but it’s excruciatingly painful, and the timing is about right. I think that may be what happened.”

“Bingo.” The surgeon smiled at her. “Good detective work, Doctor. I’ll bet that’s it. It’s just as painful as appendicitis,” he explained to Zoe and Austin.

“What do we do for that?” Austin asked them, looking hopeful and somewhat relieved.

“Put her back on the antibiotic,” Cathy answered him. “She’ll be better in twenty-four hours, out of pain in a few days, and fine in a week. And all seven days this time,” she said, looking at Zoe, who wasn’t convinced of