When It All Falls Apart (Book One) Read Online Free PDF

send someone in soon,” he said.
    We stood next to her bed in silence, listening to the beep and hum of the machines hooked up to her body.
    “Should we try to wake her up?” I asked.
    “The nurses said we should let her sleep. She’s probably fighting off some infection and her body needs sleep.”
    I hadn’t thought about an infection. Maybe she had another bad bladder infection. It wouldn’t explain why she threw up, but maybe it was why she was so tired and having such a hard time waking up. It was a few more minutes before a man pushed through the curtain behind me.
    “I’m Dr. Yang,” he said. He was a short man with carefully cropped hair and a white collared shirt half haphazardly tucked into his pants. He stuck out his hand to David first and then me. We eagerly shook hands, anxious to be done with the formality. He took a seat on a stool and propped himself up against the wall.
    “What’s going on?” David was clearly annoyed with his casual approach.
    “Well, I don’t really know. We’re not sure. We took some blood and there are some abnormalities in–”
    David interrupted. “What kind of abnormalities?”
    I placed my hand on his arm. “Give him a second to explain.”
    “Her white blood cell count is a bit elevated, but it’s not completely out of the normal range. Her blood sugar is a 42 which is very low. She’s hypoglycemic and really dehydrated. The IV fluids should take care of raising her blood sugar and we should start seeing it come back up,” he explained slowly. “I’m not sure why her blood sugar is so low, though. How many times did you say she threw up?”
    “Three.” David responded quickly. “And just since this morning. How could she get so dehydrated in only a few hours?”
    “It’s a bit on the unusual side. You typically wouldn’t see a child get severely dehydrated so quickly. Usually you would see a child become this dehydrated after they had been throwing up repeatedly for days...”
    “So, what does that mean?” I asked.
    “It could mean a few things.”
    I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I was beginning to get annoyed and I knew David had already reached his limit. “Like what?”
    “Well, we haven’t gotten any urine and it’s important that we do because we need to take a look at it and see if there’s any kind of infection. It’s possible there might be some kind of infection. It will also tell us whether there are ketones in her urine.”
    “What are ketones?” The only time I’d heard of ketones was when everyone had gone on the Atkins diet in the early 90s. I thought they were a good thing because all of the Atkins books described them as being positive, but maybe they weren’t.
    “Ketones are associated with the proteins in your body and fat. If you have a significant amount of ketones in your urine then it usually means a person is dehydrated or it can also signal other issues that might be present. In this case, we would expect to see ketones in the urine because we already know she’s dehydrated. We just want to see how high her levels are to make sure nothing else is going on. However, I’m a confused by her other results.”
    “What are the other results?” David and I talked on top of each other.
    “Her bicarbonate level is a 7.” His forehead lined with concern. Both of us waited for more but he didn’t have anything more to give us as if he expected us to somehow know what a bicarbonate level was. I’d never even heard the word and I was certain David hadn’t either.
    “What’s a bicarbonate level?” I asked.
    “Whenever we see a child whose dehydrated we run an electrolyte blood panel to see how dehydrated the child is. One of the electrolytes that the blood panel measures is bicarbonate along with sodium, potassium, and chloride. Her electrolytes show severe dehydration but her bicarbonate level is very low, much lower than we would expect to see from dehydration alone.”
    “So what does that mean?”