Marriage and Mayhem by Jeanne Glidewell

Author:Jeanne Glidewell [Glidewell, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644570005
Publisher: ePublishing Works!
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

The hospital released Raven a few hours later. She had arrived in the ER with a slightly elevated temperature and a perfect sodium level. Since regaining consciousness just moments after passing out at the wedding, she’d exhibited no other symptoms other than a bit of light-headedness and some minor confusion. Within an hour of arriving at the hospital, Raven’s temperature had returned to normal. The temperature inside the hospital had been so cool―to prevent the growth of bacteria, no doubt―Raven was probably more in danger of suffering from hypothermia than heat stroke.

Against the doctor’s recommendations, she insisted she be released. Though the medical staff wasn’t fully confident that heat stroke or heat exhaustion caused her fainting spell, they couldn’t find a good reason to hold her overnight. The medical team attending to her had voiced an interest in retaining her for testing purposes, but when Raven expressed concern about the limits of her health insurance coverage, the medical team relented and discharged her.

Bubba Slippknott remained comatose and his prognosis looked grim. The tox screen results came back later that day. He had tested negative to all of the toxins covered by the analysis. The head physician stated that though not all toxins were included in the standard screening, it did include the most probable poisons people have been known to ingest, accidental or otherwise. The tox screen reports did not, the doctor emphasized, rule out some of the more uncommon poisonous substances.

For the moment, all we could do was sit back and pray as we waited for his condition to either improve or, God forbid, take a turn for the worse. Most of the predictions that came from the hospital staff were not optimistic. In fact, it appeared as if their focus changed and they were now more worried about how to protect themselves from a potential malpractice lawsuit if the patient passed while under their care.

Neither Stone nor Andy had left the hospital since Bubba had been wheeled into the trauma center on a gurney. Andy had tried to reach Bubba’s sister, Samantha, numerous times to no avail. He did, however, reach Sam’s best friend, who claimed not to have seen her in several days. According to the friend, Sam hadn’t showed up at work for the past two days. This friend, who’d been keeping an eye on Sam during her husband’s deployment, had contacted the building super at Sam’s apartment complex. He checked her apartment and found nothing amiss. Nor did he find his tenant.

Andy had advised Sam’s friend to contact the police and she promised she would do so. He’d told her about Bubba’s dire condition and explained Sam needed to get in touch with the ICU department as soon as possible. The friend recalled Sam mention once that Bubba had been deathly allergic to peanuts as a child, but thought he’d pretty much grown out of it by adulthood―or had learned to avoid them. And, as Andy had told the head physician, Bubba was mildly asthmatic, although he hadn’t had an asthma attack in years.

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