Dionne
"We caught it just in time,"
The doctor's name was Dr. Amara Cole, and she sat across from me in the small consultation area off the main ward, her hands folded on the table, and she told me what was wrong with my daughter.
A severe respiratory infection, she said. Bacterial, aggressive, the kind that moved fast in young children and moved faster when it had something to compound it. In Nora's case, that something was a mild but undetected heart murmur.
I nodded, trying hard to stay composed and to hide the trembling in my hand, and I did not let myself think too hard about those five words and what the alternative would have looked like.
They had started her on a course of intravenous antibiotics. Her oxygen levels were already improving.
The murmur would require monitoring going forward a cardiologist would come to review her before discharge, and there would be follow-up appointments, a plan, but it was manageable.
