very restricted. Children are not allowed. You and Mr. Phillips can visit five minutes an hour.”
Priscilla started screaming then.
“She’s a baby! You can’t do that! She’s had so many changes!”
“It probably won’t be for long, only a couple of days,” Dr. Callas said.
“Can you at least make the time cumulative?” Priscilla’s voice was shaking uncontrollably. “Fifteen minutes every three hours?”
“No,” Dr. Callas said.
13
It was like dealing with a couple of two-year-olds, Evelyn thought. You say the same thing, slowly, over and over again, patiently, calmly, and you let them scream and cry and drum their little heels on the floor until eventually they hear you, and stop. Or just stop out of exhaustion or a sense of futility.
It was the way Evelyn had designed the meeting, but it was still difficult to live through. At lunch she and Estol had discussed strategy over a sandwich in the cafeteria. They had already reached the decision to transfer Mindy, and that was not to change. So the purpose of this meeting was really twofold: primarily, Evelyn felt, it should be a meeting for the parents to ventilate their feelings. She expected a mammoth explosion because that’s what you always got with those two. She and Estol would just have to sit there and take it.
Secondly, Evelyn had decided that she wanted to provide the Phillipses with the minimum possible amount of basic information about why they were moving Mindy to ICU. And that was going to be the hard part. Because by now she knew a great deal more than she had this morning when she had made the decision to transfer Mindy.
Estol had been brilliant, really. He’d made a quantum leap she had never considered. He had looked at Mindy’s intake and output of sodium and realized that the natural place to start was not the output but the intake. She was getting the sodium from somewhere, obviously, so why not start with the formula?
He had told her what he had done—taking a syringe full of Mindy’s formula to the lab and ordering a sodium test. When he had returned for the results, the lab tech informed him that the formula contained 4,480 milliequivalents per liter of sodium.
“I told her that was in the direction I expected, but seemed awfully high,” Carte had said at lunch. “And she called me back with a corrected figure of four hundred forty-eight. She’d forgotten to put in the decimal point. Still, of course, that was an unbelievable figure!”
“What’s the expected sodium content of Cho-free?” Evelyn asked.
“Fifteen milliequivalents. I looked it up.”
“So, what did you do next?”
“Well, I contacted the nursing supervisor and asked her to witness what I was going to do. Then back at the ward I took the whole bottle of Mindy’s formula out of the ward refrigerator and brought it back to the lab. I told the technologist to label it, make sure no one threw it out, and keep it in the lab refrigerator.”
“And then?”
“I returned to the ward. The nurse was already mixing new formula for Mindy, so I instructed her to change all the tubing, and keep the new stuff in the Medication Room—not to let it out of her sight. Then I thought I’d better get a control sample tested, so I took some of the newly mixed formula and ran that down to the lab. I haven’t received the results back on that yet, but when I got down there, they handed me the slip on Mindy’s most recent serum sodium. Since it was one hundred sixty, I figured I might as well use that as an excuse to move Mindy to ICU, as we’d discussed. And that’s what I did.”
“But what made you think to test the formula?” Evelyn was stunned at the simplicity of it.
“I don’t know. I guess maybe it was on my mind somehow—the fact that Mrs. Phillips was involved with that formula. You know, on Monday I heard Debby Roof on the phone to Mrs. Phillips, asking about mixing the formula. I thought Debby was talking to Sara. When I found out the
Priscilla started screaming then.
“She’s a baby! You can’t do that! She’s had so many changes!”
“It probably won’t be for long, only a couple of days,” Dr. Callas said.
“Can you at least make the time cumulative?” Priscilla’s voice was shaking uncontrollably. “Fifteen minutes every three hours?”
“No,” Dr. Callas said.
13
It was like dealing with a couple of two-year-olds, Evelyn thought. You say the same thing, slowly, over and over again, patiently, calmly, and you let them scream and cry and drum their little heels on the floor until eventually they hear you, and stop. Or just stop out of exhaustion or a sense of futility.
It was the way Evelyn had designed the meeting, but it was still difficult to live through. At lunch she and Estol had discussed strategy over a sandwich in the cafeteria. They had already reached the decision to transfer Mindy, and that was not to change. So the purpose of this meeting was really twofold: primarily, Evelyn felt, it should be a meeting for the parents to ventilate their feelings. She expected a mammoth explosion because that’s what you always got with those two. She and Estol would just have to sit there and take it.
Secondly, Evelyn had decided that she wanted to provide the Phillipses with the minimum possible amount of basic information about why they were moving Mindy to ICU. And that was going to be the hard part. Because by now she knew a great deal more than she had this morning when she had made the decision to transfer Mindy.
Estol had been brilliant, really. He’d made a quantum leap she had never considered. He had looked at Mindy’s intake and output of sodium and realized that the natural place to start was not the output but the intake. She was getting the sodium from somewhere, obviously, so why not start with the formula?
He had told her what he had done—taking a syringe full of Mindy’s formula to the lab and ordering a sodium test. When he had returned for the results, the lab tech informed him that the formula contained 4,480 milliequivalents per liter of sodium.
“I told her that was in the direction I expected, but seemed awfully high,” Carte had said at lunch. “And she called me back with a corrected figure of four hundred forty-eight. She’d forgotten to put in the decimal point. Still, of course, that was an unbelievable figure!”
“What’s the expected sodium content of Cho-free?” Evelyn asked.
“Fifteen milliequivalents. I looked it up.”
“So, what did you do next?”
“Well, I contacted the nursing supervisor and asked her to witness what I was going to do. Then back at the ward I took the whole bottle of Mindy’s formula out of the ward refrigerator and brought it back to the lab. I told the technologist to label it, make sure no one threw it out, and keep it in the lab refrigerator.”
“And then?”
“I returned to the ward. The nurse was already mixing new formula for Mindy, so I instructed her to change all the tubing, and keep the new stuff in the Medication Room—not to let it out of her sight. Then I thought I’d better get a control sample tested, so I took some of the newly mixed formula and ran that down to the lab. I haven’t received the results back on that yet, but when I got down there, they handed me the slip on Mindy’s most recent serum sodium. Since it was one hundred sixty, I figured I might as well use that as an excuse to move Mindy to ICU, as we’d discussed. And that’s what I did.”
“But what made you think to test the formula?” Evelyn was stunned at the simplicity of it.
“I don’t know. I guess maybe it was on my mind somehow—the fact that Mrs. Phillips was involved with that formula. You know, on Monday I heard Debby Roof on the phone to Mrs. Phillips, asking about mixing the formula. I thought Debby was talking to Sara. When I found out the
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