Their Baby Surprise by Jennifer Taylor

Author:Jennifer Taylor [Taylor, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Single Mothers, Widowers, Medical, Women physicians
ISBN: 9781426848599
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2009-10-15T06:00:00+00:00

‘The good news is that I’m ninety-nine percent certain that Robbie doesn’t have meningitis.’

Matt sympathised when he heard the boy’s parents gasp in relief. As a parent himself, he understood how worried they must have been. He smiled at them, trying not to think about all the other worrying issues he had to contend with at the moment.

‘Whilst Robbie undoubtedly has a fever and a rash, there’s nothing else that points towards it being meningitis. There’s no neck stiffness, no sign of photophobia—that’s an aversion to light—no headache or sickness.’

He pressed a glass tumbler against the blotches on the boy’s legs, blanking out all thoughts of what had happened before he’d left the house. The desire he’d felt for Rachel had almost overwhelmed him. If he hadn’t made such a rapid exit he would have had the devil of a job to contain it. The thought was enough to make his heart race.

‘As you can see, the rash disappears when you press the glass against it. That doesn’t happen with the meningitis rash.’

‘So you think it’s some sort of a virus?’ Robbie’s father queried.

‘It could be.’ Matt turned to the boy, his gut instinct telling him to probe a bit more deeply. ‘Is there anything else that you haven’t mentioned, Robbie? Something that’s happened which you haven’t told your mum and dad about?’

Robbie bit his lip, looking so sheepish that Matt knew he was right. He sat down on the edge of the bed and said firmly, ‘Nobody is going to tell you off if you’ve done something silly, son. We just want to find out what’s making you feel so ill.’

‘It was the rat,’ Robbie muttered, glancing warily at his parents.

‘A pet rat?’ Matt said, shaking his head. Mrs Morris opened her mouth to speak. He didn’t want any interruptions now that Robbie had got this far.

‘No, just a rat down by the river. Me and my friends were playing there the other day and we found this rats’ nest, you see. We weren’t going to hurt them,’ Robbie said quickly. ‘We just wanted to have a look at them. We got a stick and poked around a bit, but then one of them bit me on the ankle. Just here. See.’

‘That looks nasty,’ Matt said as the boy rolled down his sock and showed him his ankle. The area surrounding the bite was badly inflamed, pointing towards it being infected. ‘It would definitely explain why the lymph nodes in your groin are swollen. The infection has spread throughout your body. No wonder you’ve been feeling so poorly.’

‘But rats carry the plague, don’t they, Doctor?’ Mrs Morris put in fearfully. ‘I saw a programme on the television a few months ago and they said that the plague started because the country was overrun with rats!’

‘Usually it’s the fleas off the rats that bite people and pass on the plague,’ Matt explained patiently. ‘Thankfully, we don’t have that problem in this country any more, although there are other diseases that rats can carry.

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