that blended too well with her bed covering and had poor turgor, despite the intravenous fluids. Oxygen was being delivered via a nasal cannula. Edith’s short salt-and-pepper hair was sticking up every which way about her head as if she’d been restless. Or maybe she’d just run her fingers through her hair a lot.
“Hello, Edith, how are you feeling since I last saw you at the office earlier today?”
Pushing her glasses back on her nose, the woman shrugged her frail shoulders. “About the same.”
Which was a better answer than feeling worse.
“Any more blood?”
Edith shifted, rearranging pillows. “Not that I’ve seen.”
“Are you spitting up anything?”
She shook her head in a slow motion, as if to continue to answer required too much effort. “I was coughing up some yellowish stuff, but haven’t since I got to the hospital.”
“Hmm, I’m going to take a look and listen to you again, and then one of my colleagues whom you’ve met before will also be checking you. Dr. Spencer.”
“I know him. Handsome fellow. Great smile. Happy eyes.”
Lance did have happy eyes. He had a great smile, too. But she didn’t want thoughts of that happy-eyed handsome man with his great smile interfering with her work, so she just gave Edith a tight smile. “That would be him.”
“He your fellow?”
McKenzie’s heart just about stopped.
Grateful she’d just put her stethoscope diaphragm to the woman’s chest, McKenzie hesitated in answering. Was Lance her fellow? Was that what she’d agreed to earlier?
Essentially she had agreed to date him, but calling him her fellow seemed a far stretch from their earlier conversation.
She made note of the slight arrhythmia present in the woman’s cardiac sounds, nothing new, just a chronic issue that sometimes flared up. Edith had a cardiologist she saw regularly. Perhaps McKenzie would consult him also. First, she’d get an EKG and cardiac enzymes, just to be on the safe side.
“Take a deep breath for me,” she encouraged. Edith’s lung sounds were not very strong, but really weren’t any different from her usual shallow and crackly breaths. “I’m going to have to see why your chest X-ray isn’t available. They did do it?”
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.”
Edith’s husband had been gone for a few years. He’d died about the time McKenzie had returned to Coopersville and started practicing at the clinic. Edith and her husband must have been patients of Lance’s prior to his death. Had the woman changed doctors at the clinic because McKenzie hadn’t known her husband and therefore she’d make no associations when seeing her?
No wonder he’d been so familiar with Edith.
“What
