Golden's Rule. C. E. Edmonson

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СКАЧАТЬ scared would have made the situation so much worse. So I just focused on her voice, soothingly repeating, “It’s okay, baby. We’ll be there soon.

      Everything will be okay.” I think she was trying to convince herself as much as me.

      They took us seriously in the emergency room. I mean the triage nurse, and the examining nurse, and Dr. Sandoval when she came into my little cubicle. In fact, they let us in almost right away, before the grayish-looking guy with the hacking cough and the woman with a dishtowel tied around her arm as a makeshift tourniquet, both of whom had been there ahead of us. I wouldn’t have minded waiting. Really. That was one race I actually didn’t want to win.

      Dr. Sandoval was a heavyset woman, in her thirties, wearing pink scrubs. She conducted almost the same examination Nurse Cole had on the prior afternoon—except this time around, I think I forgot to breathe once during the entire thing.

      “I don’t find any gross abnormalities,” she told my mother afterward, much to my relief. “Still, I’d like to order a CT scan of Madison’s brain.”

      A scan? Of my brain? What?! Had something gone wrong with my hearing now, too?

      “I’d order an MRI, but your insurance company won’t approve the test,” Dr. Sandoval continued matter-of-factly.

      “The insurance company?” Mom asked. “Tell me why.” “They feel we should do the CT scan first. And fighting them will only cause a delay.”

      Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I was pretty sure the doctor just said “brain scan” and now these people were chatting about insurance? “Hellooooooo? Maddie calling. Do you wanna tell me what’s wrong with my brain, or is it a secret?”

      Dr. Sandoval and my mom both looked at me as if they’d forgotten I was there. Like I was something they’d misplaced. Then Mom reached down to stroke my hair. “Sorry, baby,” she said.

      We were inside a narrow space separated from similar spaces on either side by curtains. I was lying on one of those rolling hospital beds, called gurneys, mainly because there was nowhere else to sit or lie down. My mom was forced to stand up, and with Dr. Sandoval in the space, it was like we were jammed into a closet.

      Dr. Sandoval turned to me. Like everybody in the emergency room—the nurses, the doctors, the aides, and even the patients—she looked as if she needed to be somewhere else in a big hurry. But she forced herself to focus on me for the time being—and the expression on her face made me wish she hadn’t. It looked like she was trying to screw up the courage to tell me something, and I realized that it would have been easier to let her just keep talking over me instead of to me directly. That way, we could have both pretended she was talking about someone else.

      “The purpose of the CT scan is to determine what, if anything, is wrong with you,” she said. “But it’s possible that you’ve had a mild stroke.”

      Mild? Gimme a break! That’s how I order my General Tsao’s chicken. But a fourteen-year-old kid with a stroke? There’s nothing mild about that, any way you look at it. This is, like, guess what? Somebody tossed a refrigerator out of a window and it landed on your head. But don’t worry. It was empty.

      “The procedure,” she continued, “is simple. We’ll inject contrast material through a vein and take a few pictures. Nothing to it. It’s entirely painless.”

      Yeah, for you, I thought.

      And then she was gone, off to give thirty seconds of her precious time to some other chump. Mom sat next to me on the gurney. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her forehead was lined with tension.

      “I don’t think it’ll be anything,” I told her. “I feel great.”

      Physically, that was true.

      “I know, honey. You’re a strong girl,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Just keep being strong.” Then she stood up and paced around the small space. “I need to get in touch with your father.”

      “You didn’t call him last night?”

      “I tried, but his cell phone was out of reach. Anyway, it’s probably better if we get this pinned down first.”

      I wanted to ask why, but a nurse pulled the curtain aside and stepped up next to the gurney. She was carrying a plastic container full of needles and vials. My eyes grew wide at the sight of them and I shot my mom a quick look of panic. I mean, she wouldn’t let me rent any of the Friday the 13th movies because I’d have nightmares—and now I was living one!

      “We’ll just take a little blood,” the nurse said, smiling sweetly. “Just a pinch is all.”

      Promises, promises, that’s all I got. She had to make three attempts before she hit a vein. I mean, was she a trainee? Or did she just like to torture people? Not that she was apologetic or anything. No, her failures didn’t seem to bother her very much—she somehow kept up that beauty pageant smile, like someone was going to hand her a crown and a bunch of roses after this. With any luck, they’d have thorns on them.

      Hey, I was allowed to be bitter about this. After all, it was my arm getting stuck like a voodoo doll—I halfway expected to look down and see the nurse’s initials tattooed on it.

      When she finally finished taking the blood and labeling the vials, she handed me a plastic container with a lid and directed me to the bathroom. “We’ll need a urine sample, too. Drop it off at the nurses’ station when you’re finished,” she said cheerily.

      Then she was gone, no doubt off to find her next victim. And I was, like, so totally bummed out I couldn’t even talk. I felt like I was disappearing, the incredible shrinking Maddie—like I wasn’t a person anymore, just a series of test results or a lab rat to be tormented and studied.

      “Do you want me to go to the bathroom with you?” my mom asked.

      Oh, yeah, like that’d make it better.

      I did my duty, then settled back on the gurney to wait, wishing I’d thought to bring a book or something. Anything to take my mind off of what was going on around me, to me…inside of me. It seemed surreal to be sitting there while everyone else went about their usual business, poking and prodding patients, and talking about strokes like they were the most normal things in the world.

      I guess if you work in a hospital, that kind of stuff becomes second nature to you. But to me, it was as if my life had been turned upside down in just a matter of a few hours. Nothing was less normal than sitting here on the gurney, waiting to find out what was wrong with me. Being probed by aliens wouldn’t have been much weirder!

      But everything was normal just yesterday morning, just a short twenty-four hours ago. Life was perfect. No complaints. Now here I was, being checked for signs of a stroke. Could this really be happening to me? I kept wanting to wake up or turn back time. With something this serious, shouldn’t they give you at least one do-over?

      My answer arrived in the form of an aide pushing a wheelchair. I did get a do-over—unfortunately, with the wheelchair! Why did I need one when I could walk? Hospital rules.

      My mom and I looked at each other, but I think we both knew that we couldn’t fight procedure. Better to get it over with. I sat down with a sigh. Only the trip was even more depressing than lying on the gurney. СКАЧАТЬ