176 - Urgent Care
*No baby, she’s going to be okay. Trust me, the Uittenbroek women live for a long time. Satan fears them and the gods are terrified of them. - Dutch*
Darkness finished the latest book and set it on the bedside table and picked up the bottle of water. After emptying the bottle, he went to the attached bathroom and emptied his bladder. Tossing the hand towel into the basket, he made a mental note to wash towels in the morning. Glancing at the clock on the nearby bedside table, he realized that ‘morning’ was only a few hours away.
Leaving the bedroom, he went into Camille’s office and found her coding a website. As usual, it just looked like a bunch of gibberish to him. She wore a hoodie and had a thick blanket wrapped around her legs. Her body trembled as a shiver ran through it.
She coughed and then grabbed a tissue out of the box and blew her nose. As she tossed the used tissue away, she coughed into the other hand. The sound was rough and painful, causing him to cringe at the thought of how that must feel.
“Cam, baby,” he touched her shoulder, and she shivered again.
“I feel so cold,” she said before she shivered and coughed once more.
Grabbing up her phone, he unlocked it and searched for the nearest urgent care that was open at two-thirty in the morning. Finding one, he scheduled a walk-in appointment with just enough time to let Dutch know that they were leaving and to get to the stand-alone clinic a few miles away.
Before leaving the room, he got a cold bottle of water out of her small refrigerator and ordered her to drink it. He knocked on the door to the guest room on the second floor and hoped not to wake up either of the kids. A very groggy Dutch opened the door, and Darkness pushed his way into the room.
“What’s wrong?” Dutch asked as he closed the door and yawned.
“Cam is sick, I’m going to take her to the urgent clinic.”
“Is it that bad?” he asked, running his hand through his dirty blonde hair.
“Probably not, but the kids panic if either of us gets a little sniffle.”
Dutch nodded, “I guess that happens when you lose your parents like they did.”
“Glad that you’re here for them.”
“What time do they get up?”
“Around six. Nicki has band practice at seven and Zydeco will come over to take her. He’ll stay with her in case Dominique or any of her henchmen show up. Mitch has theater workshop at seven-thirty, if you don’t mind taking him.”
“Yeah, go take care of my sister.”
“Take care of my kids.”
Dutch smirked, “Always. I fear what my mother would do if I did not take care of them.”
The two men shared a light laugh and Darkness headed back upstairs to find that Camille had laid her head on the desk with her hood pulled up over her head. As a sign of how bad she was feeling, she barely stirred when he picked her up and held her against his chest. He shushed her softly as he carried her downstairs, still wrapped up in her blanket.
Arriving at the overnight clinic a few minutes early, he again picked her up and carried her inside. Unsurprisingly, with her cough and rough breathing that had started on the ride over, the woman at the desk insisted on a face mask. Keeping her tucked against his chest, he sat on a couch and waited for her to be called back.
Finally, a nurse in dark blue scrubs stepped out of the door, smiling at Darkness, she asked, “Camille?”
Standing up, Darkness carried Camille to the doorway, “My wife.”
Nodding, she pointed to the scale, “I need to get her weight, without the blanket.”
He sat her down on her feet just behind the scale. Waiting until she was steady on her feet, he took the blanket off and encouraged her to step up onto the gray metal square. It did not take long for the nurse to get the weight and entered into the chart. She also made a note of how badly her patient’s body was trembling.
“Leave the blanket off,” the nurse ordered and then pointed to the left. “Around the corner, second door on the right.”
Following the directions with his shaking wife in his arms, he headed into the room with an opaque sliding glass door. The nurse followed them in and closed the door and slid the colorful curtain to provide a little more privacy.
“When did this start?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t know, she had a little bit of a sniffle at dinner, but nothing bad.”
Under the silent direction of the nurse, he placed Camille on the exam table. She rolled to her side, curling up into the fetal position and went back to sleep. Her body continued to tremble with shivers running through it.
“Right now, I’m concerned about that fever,” the woman said as she ran a temporal thermometer across Camille’s forehead. She looked at the digital read out and shook her head. “Has she had anything? Acetaminophen? Ibuprofen?”
“Some Tylenol a little after dinner,” he said. “She had a headache, but this week has been stressful, and she has slept less than usual.”
“Less than usual?” another woman in black scrubs and a white lab coat asked as she entered.
“We both suffer from insomnia,” he explained. “She typically only sleeps three or four hours a night.”
“She has a temperature of 102.3,” the nurse told the doctor.
“Let’s get a saline IV going, fifteen-minute infusion of Ofirmev,” she ordered the nurse as she listened to Camille’s chest. “Let’s do a swab for flu and Covid. She’s got a lot of congestion in her chest.”
“Does it look,” Darkness swallowed hard. Softly, with his voice thick with emotion and his heart in his throat, he started again, “Does it look like Covid?”
“Honestly, I’m thinking flu,” the doctor said. “I would just rather make sure. Has she been exposed to either?”
“I don’t know,” he said as he brushed some hair off her cheek that was sticky with sweat. “She attends LSU, and god only knows what the kids bring home from school.”
“Pre-k? Elementary?” the nurse asked as she prepped Camille’s arm for the IV.
He chuckled, “High school.”
“She doesn’t look old enough to have kids in high school,” the doctor said as she moved to look at the chart. With a look of confusion, she asked Darkness, “How old is your kid?”
“Our oldest is a freshman at MIT, our youngest is a freshman in high school and our daughter is a junior.”
“Yours from a previous marriage?” the nurse asked as she inserted the IV needle.
“No,” Darkness took a deep breath. “We adopted my brother’s kids after he and his wife died of Covid. The kids worry whenever we get sick. I saw how sick she was, and I knew I needed to get her in so I could tell the kids that she would be okay.”
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