Thicker Than Blood

Chapter 6: The outbreak...

Alec was walking to his car when the call came in. He tried to walk faster down the hall and hunched over to hopefully blend in with his surroundings, but he had no such luck. Right as he got to the door, they brought him back in.

"I was almost out the door..."

"I know, but this is an interesting case. Thought you might like to see it?" Amanda, the girl he had been secretly hoping to date for over a year now flashed her come hither smile at him. He was still an intern at the local hospital, and she was already a nurse with some nursing students under her. They had become fast friends during his internship there last year, and he watched all the guys desperately trying to get with her. He knew he'd have his day, just when he wasn't sure. She was difficult to read.

"Why, what's going on?"

"Well, there's a woman who's in here with symptoms all over the place. At first, we just thought she was having what seemed like epileptic seizures, but her husband insists that she doesn't have epilepsy. She can't seem to talk or walk either, so either she had an epileptic fit, or she had a stroke. We're waiting on the CAT scan and the MRI. Chief ordered both since the husband was adamant about the epilepsy. But I thought it might be of interest to you, since you just had a similar case with a child, although you solved it, right?"

"I'm not sure that I did. She's still here, I had told the pediatric nurse, Jennifer, to take her blood to see if we can rule some more things out," he paused to look down. "That's her paging me right now, I wonder... The blood test results wouldn't be back this fast." He sighed, steeling himself for what waited for him. "Keep me posted, I'll be back."

Alec hurried over to the elevators to get to the floor that his patient would be on. Being in general pediatric surgery was his specialty and once they got the blood results back, he was going to perform surgery on the little girl because of her apparent embolism. But now that there was a woman down in emergency with similar symptoms, he was beginning to wonder then what it could be afflicting these people.

Right as the elevator doors opened, he was greeted by a rush of black, dark blue, and rainbow-colored uniforms running down the hall in the direction of where his patient was. He suddenly felt ill at the thought of a little girl or boy getting worse. More and more hospital personnel were running past him, all in the same direction he was going. He got worried and felt that maybe he should pick up his pace. Hurrying down the hall, he got to his patient.

"Oh doctor, I don't know what's going on. Before I could take the blood from her, she began to have asthma symptoms as well as hypertension!" Jennifer was herself beginning to get panicky, her face reddening and her voice kept rising; luckily, the girl's parents were down in the cafeteria having dinner. Alec assumed that they'd be back relatively soon, for they never left her side for longer than maybe 20 minutes. He looked over the nurse's shoulder and saw the oxygen mask over the girl's face and could hear the quiet rumble of the nebulizer machine. Her chest was still rising and lowering, but he wasn't sure he could help her. She seemed to be stable and wanted to wait till her dose of albuterol sulfate was completed before he had the nurse try again with taking her blood.

"What's with all the running?" Alec finally was able to ask after looking over the little girl's chart.

"A whole bunch of stuff, but it's not all the patients that I can tell. It seems to be, or maybe not, that when this little one began to show signs of hypertension, a bunch of others started having problems. One kid started having convulsions down the hall, another one at the same time as Beth here, had an asthma attack just after complaining about a headache, well gesturing it somewhat. That took a bit of time; poor thing couldn't communicate well or understand what exactly I was saying. Her parents said that was unlike her," she trembled and paused," but like I said, it's not all of them; at least I don't think so. It must be a full moon tonight." Jennifer half chuckled to herself and Alec thought it was probably to calm her nerves, because he didn't find anything amusing about this.