Beautiful things - jaylor story (peace book 4)

hold your hand through plastic now

** monday march 2nd, 2036** 

-taylors Pov-  

"hi this is Taylor Alwyn calling, Mackenzie Alwyn's mom. She has a fever of 40 degrees Celsius and I was told to call if she gets a fever at all" I tell the person on the line. 

"You need to come in right away. This can be pretty serious. We are concerned for something called febrile neutropenia. Put on a mask for her, and you too and get to the ward as quickly as you can" she says, and we agree and hang up. 

20 minutes later we arrive at the ward and one of the nurses and doctors that's dressed in something that looks like a space suit take kenzie into this special room with a plastic wall so we can't get into her. 

They take her temperature which has increased more and work quickly on her to get her stabilized. She is starting to not respond much so they are working quickly. "We are pretty sure this is febrile neutropenia; it fits the general symptoms" the doctor says after they have undressed her. 

The doctor examines her entire body to look if there is another cause. They put high flow oxygen on her because she has really low oxygen saturation and access her port. There are three nurses and two doctors in there now and joe and I are standing on the other side of the plastic wall. 

I feel really helpless watching them work on her and I'm not even able to hold her hand. For about half an hour we are just standing here looking at them work quickly. They take tests, examine her everywhere, take imaging and start antibiotics. Eventually she is stable enough for most of them to come out of the room, but two nurses stay. 

The doctor gets out of the space suit and come to talk to us. "she shows the signs of febrile neutropenia which is a medical emergency. When you are treated with chemo your white blood count can drop which is dangerous and put you in serious risk of infections. She needs to be in the bobble for at least a few days to make sure she doesn't come in contact with any bacteria that can lead to sepsis. we need to wait for the blood panel to know how low she is, but we are doing what we can" she says and I'm holding joes' hand so hard I'm sure he has lost his blood circulation. 

"Is she going to be, okay?" I ask and hold back the tears "this is a pretty common side effect sadly. But we treat this often and hope we caught it in time, so she doesn't develop sepsis. But if she does, we know how to treat that too" she explains how this is most often seen in leukemia, but because her cancer has moved to her bone marrow, she is especially susceptible for this kind of side effect. 

"How long does she need to be in there" joe asks "we don't know for sure. That depends on how she responds to the antibiotics and how her white blood count is. Depending on how low it is we might have to give her a white blood cells transfusion to help her get the levels higher. We are starting with five days of antibiotics and see how she responds to that. But when her levels of white cells are higher, she will be able to move back to her room, but the visitors need to be restricted so she doesn't catch anything as she is still at high risk for sepsis" 

Just hearing the doctor talk about sepsis scares me a lot. That's a serious and life-threatening complication. The girl already has a serious cancer, and this complication just makes it worse for her. I wish that it would be linear but that's naïve, cancer is unpredictable in many ways. 

"Mommy!" kenzie screams and my heart breaks for her. I go up to the plastic wall and look at her "i'm here baby girl. Mommy and daddy are right here" I say and do everything I can to fight back the tears. 

She sobs "what is happening. Come closer please" she whimpers "we can't Mackenzie. You had a reaction and if we come inside, you can get sicker" I tell her and one of the nurses in a space suit is trying to comfort her.