Chapter 4 — NINETY-FOUR POINT EIGHT
I did not call an ambulance. I put her in the truck.
Everyone who has ever heard this asks why. The answer is that St. Jude Memorial is four minutes from my house and I have been driving to that building five days a week for nine years, and an ambulance takes eleven minutes to reach our cul-de-sac. I have timed it. I have timed it because of a heart thing my father had.
I ran three stop signs and I put her on the counter of the paediatric ER desk still wrapped in my jacket.
The charge nurse that night is a woman named Bev Kessler, no relation to the Kesslers with the garage, and she has known me for nine years as the man who comes up from the basement when the humidity alarms go off in the NICU.
Bev did not ask me anything. She took Sophia off the counter and went through the doors backwards.
I stood there.
They took her core temperature rectally, which is the only reading that counts, and it came back at thirty-four point nine Celsius. Ninety-four point eight Fahrenheit.
Normal is ninety-eight point six.
The doctor who came out forty minutes later was a paediatric hospitalist named Priya Raman, and she had a clipboard against her chest and she did not sit down.
Dr. Raman: Mr. Vance, I want to walk you through what we are treating, because there are two things and they are pulling in opposite directions.
Mark: Okay.
Dr. Raman: She is hypothermic. Thirty-four point nine on arrival. Wet clothing in low ambient temperature — water conducts heat away from the body roughly twenty-five times faster than air does. A child that size loses heat much faster than you or I would in the same conditions. Surface area to body mass.
Mark: Okay.
Dr. Raman: She also has a significant lower respiratory infection that predates tonight. Six or seven days, from the sound of her chest. Once we rewarm her, and we are rewarming her slowly and deliberately, I expect her temperature to go straight past normal and up into a fever, because her body has been too cold to mount one.
Mark: How long was she out there.
Dr. Raman: That is not a medical question. But it was not twenty minutes.