Chapter 17 — The Exam Room

About thirty minutes after they left, a nurse called Hazel’s name, and finally, finally, we were taken back into an exam room.

The doctor and the nurses were kind and quick and competent, and I will always be grateful to them, because they treated my daughter with exactly the seriousness her mother had been begging the night to give her.

They determined that she needed fluids and medication to bring the fever down, and they set her up carefully and ran the tests they needed to run and monitored her closely through what remained of the night, and slowly, slowly, the terrible heat began to loosen its grip on her small body.