Wednesday 18 March 2015

A DAY’S WAIT 2

Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different coloured capsules with instructions for giving them. One was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition. The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained.






 He seemed to know ass about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees. This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.


Back in the room I wrote the boy’s temperature down and made a note of the time to give the various capsules. ‘Do you want me to read to you?’

‘All right. If you want to,’ said the boy. His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in the bed and seemed very detached from what was going on.

I read aloud from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates; but I could see he was not following what I was reading.






‘How do you feel, Schatz?’ I asked him.

‘ Just the same, so far,’ he said.

I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it to be time to give another capsule. It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely.





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