Throughout every heave, every gasp of breath in, every apology that I gave my poor neighbor in my head afterward, and even when I was chasing Ranger away from it, all I felt was relief. I hadn’t pushed Rose too far, and this meant interesting things for the future.
There was no way in hell I was going to let her know that, though. So, I shot a glare at her over my shoulder as she got in her car, and then slammed my door, leaning against it with a huge grin on my face. It was time for a plan.
Rose
Nurses work all the time. I don’t mean that we work every hour of every day, but it didn’t matter what day it was, we were on that schedule for our appointed shifts, regardless. Which was why I was working at stupid o’clock on a Sunday while everyone else was in their beds. Well, unless they were puking in their neighbors dahlias, that was.
Yesterday, when Jose had told me her idea and offered me the bag of dirty diapers - along with the spray she’d bought as a joke, but had then decided against using because she didn’t want her house to stink forever – I’d felt bad taking them, and had planned on putting them in the trash. That had all changed when he’d pulled that stunt with the food yesterday, though.
So in the middle of the night, dressed in black with gloves and a mask, I’d laid them out on top of his garbage, sprayed the entire can in there, and gagged the whole way home. I’d had to bag the clothes I was wearing and throw them in the trash because there was just no coming back for them, but it was worth it. And I’ve got to say, I’d slept like a baby all night after that, and had woken up with a bounce in my step, watching out of the window while I drank my coffee until I saw him taking his trash out.
His reaction was better than anything I’d imagined, and the glare he’d shot me… better than chocolate brownies – something I doubt he’d want to eat after seeing what he had. I was used to it, bodily functions happened. Some were stinky, some were slimy, some were downright dangerous, but you showered and got on with it. Just in case he was immune to it, too, the spray had been perfection, and I didn’t regret keeping my finger on the nozzle until it had run out one bit – even if I was sniffing myself periodically today to make sure I’d gotten it all off my body.
Just then, the huge zit on the ball sack of humanity called Philippa Rosenstein, who was one of my bosses and the head nurse in the ER, appeared.
“Beauregard,” she screeched as she snapped her fingers under my nose. “You’re paid to do your job, not sit around on your fat ass all day. There’s a patient in cubicle four.”
Today she was calling them cubicles, last week it was bays, next week it would be as ambiguous as an area, the week after it would be a curtain, and God help you if you questioned her on it. That’s how petty and inconsistent the woman was, totally caught up in her own self-importance. And, man, I really disliked her.
Picking up the chart, I walked toward ‘cubicle four’, and pulled the curtain back. Lying on the bed was a little boy around the age of six, who looked pale and sweaty as he shivered and held his stomach. Opening my mouth to introduce myself, I looked up at who I assumed was his mom, and stopped when I saw her shining eyes. They weren’t shining with tears, they were shining with excitement and happiness while a little kid lay sick beside her. I’d been doing this job for four years, and in all of that time I’d only come across an excited parent in this situation once, and it had scarred me for life. No exaggeration on that. I still had nightmares sometimes where I’d miss the warning signs, and I’d be standing over a small body on a gurney, covered by a white sheet.
This could be different, though, so I needed to get some more information before I could even go down that route. Checking the name on the chart in my hand, I took a deep breath in, and smiled down at the little boy. “Hey, Oliver. My name’s Rose, and I’m going to be your nurse today. How are you feeling, honey?”
Groaning, he turned his face into the pillow and held his stomach a bit tighter. “He’s sick,” his mom replied, and when I looked up, sure enough she still had a sickeningly happy smile on her face. Oh, fuck a duck. “He’s been sick for days now, so I brought him here to get checked. He says he has a lot of pain in his upper belly, back, chest, and his sides. Oh, and he has a high fever.”
Frowning, I looked behind me and caught the eye of Dr. Simpson, the longest serving doctor in the ER, and gestured at him to come look at the kid. During the examination it became clear what we were dealing with – yes, the kid was sick, but so was the mother. There were signs to watch for, and she pretty much ticked all the boxes as she over described things, and added in her own probable diagnosis. Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another – FIDA – aka Munchausen by proxy, and it was confirmed when I got his previous doctor’s name and rang through while Dr. Simpson carried out Barium tests on poor little Oliver’s stomach.
The mother, Siam, had been diagnosed with Munchausen five years previously. At the time, she’d presented with such specific symptoms, that she’d had four surgeries in the space of thirteen months, during which they hadn’t found one thing wrong with her.
Sure, the argument is always there that the doctors should have known she was perfectly healthy from her test results, but sometimes things can go undetected and lead to the loss of the patient through negligence. Millions of dollars are paid out every year because of medical negligence cases, some sadly resulting in the death of a patient. It’s not the fear of being sued, it’s someone dying that doctors fear the most, especially when a patient can give symptoms that few people not suffering from a serious illness would be able to describe.
So, they’d gone in repeatedly, worried that something had been missed, and had eventually organized a psych eval when she’d continued to press for more. That’s when they’d realized what they were dealing with.
Afterward, she’d brought Oliver to a hospital in a different state, with symptoms that had ended up with him in surgery twice by the time he was three years old - during which nothing had been found unsurprisingly. She’d persisted again, and had tried to convince doctors that he’d been diagnosed with different illnesses, so they had carried out an investigation on her medical history. Putting the two together, CPS had been called in, and a therapist had diagnosed her with both Munchausen and FIDA.
She’d apparently been doing well, until four months ago when her husband had left her for another woman and she’d moved without telling anyone, including CPS. Which led us to now – all the tests and scans we’d done on the boy had come back clear on anything serious, but he had something that was causing severe acid reflux in his stomach which could cause long-term problems for him if we didn’t do something. That ‘something’ had shown up in one of his blood tests – high levels of the antidepressant medication Siam had been prescribed to help with her problems.
After a quick discussion with Dr. Simpson about the results and what I’d found out from her previous doctors, we were calling in the police and CPS. Our procedure was to secure the safety of the child first while we waited for CPS to arrive, so I picked up the phone and rang through to the police. It wasn’t always necessary to dial 911 in a small town, something I was hugely grateful for at that moment… or at least I had been grateful for it.
“Piersville Sheriff’s Office, how can I help?” a nasal voice that I recognized as belonging to Rory answered.
“Hey, Rory, it’s Rose here. Can you put me through to Sheriff Bell, please?”
There was a pause and then she came back sounding like the real Rory, the one she hid from the men. “No, stop wasting his time. He’s in his office with someone right now and is very busy,” she snapped, and then just hung up on me.
This wasn’t unusual for the woman, seeing as how she’d made it her life’s mission to give us shit for calling the department on numerous occasions. Normally I would laugh it off, but this case was different because it involved the welfare of a child, so right now I wasn’t laughing at all.
It also left me with two choices – calling Raoul or Logan, and with the f
ormer being the most experienced out of the two, the decision wasn’t a hard one.
So, picking up my cell, I hit the call button and waited, grateful when he answered after the first ring. “Rose?”
Glancing quickly over at the little boy again, I closed my eyes and filled him in while all the paperwork that had been emailed through to me from the previous doctor printed beside me.
* * *
Nine hours later…
I only just managed to drag my ass through my front door, kicking my shoes off and throwing my purse on top of them tiredly.
People misconstrue what nurses do every day. Some think we’re there to put a Band-Aid on and smile, others think we’re there to diagnose it all and then get a doctor to sign off on it, and some think we’re just there to make coffee. In all honesty, our daily duties and tasks depended on the department you worked in and if you were a nurse practitioner or not, which was the level between nurse and doctor. Working in the ER, my day consisted of everything, but at no point was I the authority in diagnosing a condition or anything close to it. Which is why today had my hands shaking and my stomach twisting, because I’d caught something which could have ended up in the death of an innocent child.
Psychology is one of the hardest things to diagnose because it presents in so many ways. People are quick to mention the most commonly known problems, like depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, even psychosis… but it went a hell of a lot further than that, and it was easy to misdiagnose.
It scared me to think that if I hadn’t had that one case years ago, I might have overlooked the signs, and he could have ended up going home with her again when he was better. Would I have seen that something wasn’t right? Would I have picked up on what I had today? It was hard to describe exactly what she was doing besides smiling that had sent alarm bells ringing, so would someone else have missed it if they’d been dealing with him instead? And even with those warning sirens going off in my head, I’d missed something initially that sickened me…
Just then there was a knock at the door, stopping me from sinking down into the couch to think it over even more. Turning around, I stared at it for a beat, groaning when the person on the other side knocked again.
“Rose, I know you’re home,” Raoul’s voice called, surprising me. “Open up.”
Deciding to get it out of the way, I got up and answered it, taking a step back when he gently pushed it open and came in then kicked it shut behind him. Before I could take another step, though, he was holding my arms and scanning me from head to toe. “Are you ok?”
He should know, both him and DB had been there for the hell that had followed after I’d called him about it. They’d arrived at the hospital at the same time as CPS, and I’d explained everything to them all in an office with Doctor Simpson, while another nurse watched over Siam and Oliver.
The end result was that Oliver had been admitted so that they could work on getting him better while his dad drove five hours to get to him. The fact that he had another parent who would look after him was a relief, but when Siam had found out what was going on, she’d lost her ever-loving shit and had tried to attack me as we wheeled him out of the room to take him to the ward.
While they’d been arresting her, she’d tried to run out of the door screaming rape at the top of her lungs, and had almost run in front of a car. It was obvious that she needed help, so DB had accompanied her to the psychiatric ward where she was going to have an evaluation, and they’d take it from there.
That had been fucked up, but it wasn’t the worst part of it all. That had come when they’d looked more closely at Oliver without the distraction of his mother, and all the months of abuse that he’d gone through had become clear. In his armpits and groin were cuts and burns, some healed - some new, and all had been cleverly hidden. During his initial examination, we’d raised his arms to feel the glands in the area as per procedure, but he’d never once given any indication that it was hurting him, and it had to have been agony.
A child being given medication that fucked with his body was hard to face, but a child who didn’t react when he was in pain from cuts and burns? That sort of thing had been conditioned into him, usually through raw fear, and that knowledge fucked with your head. That was his mother, she’d carried him inside her for forty weeks, she’d changed his diapers, she’d accepted Mother’s Day cards from him… and then she’d poisoned him and abused him, terrifying him somehow into never reacting to the pain. I was a human being, and I was also a woman who wanted to be a mom one day, it just didn’t compute in my mind how anyone could do that. And I felt sick that I’d missed those injuries initially.
Looking up at him, I wrapped my arms around my waist, trying to appear as normal as I could. People think if you’ve studied something that it won’t affect you – they’re fucking wrong. Like I said, I’m human, so I needed time to get my head around it and find solace in the fact the little boy was safe now. “I guess.”
Groaning, he closed the distance between us and pulled me into his arms, holding me tightly against his chest. “Wanna talk about it?”
I thought about it for a second but then decided it wouldn’t do me any good, so I shook my head, not even bothering to lift it away from where it was on his chest first. “There’s nothing to discuss, you saw it all.”
“Yeah, honey, I did,” he said quietly, moving his hand so that it rubbed up and down the length of my spine. “That shit was… I don’t even know what it was, but to be honest with you I’m struggling with it.”
Lifting my head up, I tipped it back so that I could look up at him, and saw the emotions swirling around in his eyes. “But you’re like the stone guy from that superhero movie. How are you struggling with it?”
Snorting, he looked back down at me, not once pausing the movement of his hand on my back. “The stone guy from the superhero movie? Which one’s that?”
Thinking about it quickly, I tried to remember the name of the movie but I was shit at things like that, so I ended up just shrugging and going with the truth. “If I could remember any names, I’d have said them instead of calling him a stone guy from a superhero movie. He’s big and smashes things, I think?”
It was his eyes that changed first, crinkling at the sides as the darkness in them lifted slightly, and then he started laughing softly. “You got me there, baby,” he muttered, and lifted his hand to tuck a piece of hair that had fallen out of my ponytail behind my ear. “I already thought what you did was hard, being part of a unit that was there to save people’s lives and make them better, but this?” he shook his head, blowing out a breath. “I’ll never look at a medical professional the same way again.”
Pulling away from him, I moved over to the couch and sat down in my usual spot. Normally I would snuggle up in a ball and relax, but today I sat looking at the floor with my elbows on my knees. “Cases like this cut me up. It doesn’t matter if it’s a woman, an adult, a teenager, or a child… abuse is hard for me to stomach.”
I heard him moving, but it still shocked me when he crouched down in front of me and lifted my chin with the tip of his finger. “You did good today, baby. You saw it and acted quickly when you alerted the doctor, and then you got the boy to safety.”
“I missed it,” I croaked, fighting back tears. “I even felt under his arm to see if his glands were swollen and I missed the injuries. But do you know what’s worse?” I waited until he shook his head, and then laid it out, “He didn’t cry or make a noise, and they had to be so painful, Raoul. He had burns there, deep scratches that were just healing, and he didn’t even flinch,” I choked, losing the battle and letting the tears fall.
Pulling me off the couch so that I was sitting on his lap on the floor, he tucked my head under his chin, holding me tightly against him. “Jesus.”
I don’t know how long I cried for, but he held me for every last one of the sobs and tears, murmuring things I couldn’t even make out as I released the emotions inside of me. When I finally sto
pped, he stayed where he was and tightened his arms slightly, letting me know not to move as I listened to the soothing beat of his heart against my ear. Well, that was until it started to speed up a bit and I felt him tense up slightly.
“What the fuck is that?”
Lifting my head up, I looked around the room, trying to figure out what he was talking about until I saw my cat Rex. Rex was a tabby cat who was supposed to be a nice ‘normal’ sized cat. I don’t know if it was a flaw in his genes, or if I’d been lied to, but the cat was freaking huge and ate everything he came across, which would account for his girth. His size would also explain why Raoul sounded so shocked and horrified when he’d asked his previous question.
“That’s Rex,” I explained, biting my lip. “He’s a cat.”
Pulling back so that he was holding my face in his hands, he asked, “Did you name it after a T-Rex? Rose, honey, if that’s a cat, you might wanna put it on a diet for a while. That thing looks like he’s one meal away from a heart attack.”
For the first time since I’d met him, I didn’t feel the need to argue with him, especially seeing as how he was telling the truth. “He’s on a diet,” I told him, watching as he did a doubt take at my kitty.
Classy AF: Cheap Thrills Series Book 3 Page 3