By Fay Lamb

Lately, I have been reminded of the good old days. Those were the times when my husband and I didn’t have a lot of money. We had an abundance of bills and two growing boys in daycare. At the same time, we were so busy shuttling the kids to ballgames and practices that we barely had time to think of our poverty or little else. There is little wonder that during that busy time we failed to realize our youngest son, Ethan, was ill. My mother-in-law, bless her heart, kept telling me something was wrong with him, but I didn’t see it. He didn’t have a fever right away, and I thought he just needed more sleep.

Ethan

Then one day, Mom got in front of my face and pointed to the basketball court. There stood this waif of a child, ghostly pale and barely able to move. I called him to me, and he was burning up. From that time on, his fever would spike every day and eventually lead his pediatrician to hospitalize him for three weeks in our local hospital.

During those long weeks, I spent a lot of time in the hospital room with Ethan. In fact, I didn’t leave his side. We watched The Little Mermaid at least fifty times, and while my eight-year-old slept, I cried. One morning, the pediatrician, our beloved Dr. Jamir, entered the room to find me crying. He waved his hands at me and told me not to worry too much. They would find out what was wrong with him. Then he said that he was off for two days, but his partner, Dr. Erbs, would check in on us.

Dr. Erbs was a gruff old cuss, and I wasn’t particularly fond of him. Oh, he was a great doctor, as many families in our town will attest, but I never appreciated him more than that weekend—a few days before Dr. Jamir would sit me down and tell me that they’d done all they could locally, and they were sending him to Arnold Palmer’s hospital for children.

On this Saturday, Dr. Erbs entered the room in his blustery fashion, two nurses on his heels. “Turn that bed around,” he ordered. The nurses looked at him and then at me. “What are you waiting for? Turn the bed around.”

The nurses still looked confused, but Dr. Erbs winked at me, and I giggled.

“She knows what I’m doing, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“You want to tell these Yankee nurses what we do in the South for a fever that won’t break?”

“You turn the bed around.”

And the nurses did so, laughing and teasing with Ethan, with me, and with the blustery old cuss. My son had a nice view outside the window for a couple of hours.

And, no, his fever didn’t break, but Ethan was fine. The doctors at Arnold Palmer Hospital zeroed in on his problem. Turned out his fever had been a good thing—a miracle. After testing they discovered a sinus infection throughout his sinus cavities, and if the fever had not spiked, giving us an indication that something was wrong, he could have died.

I’m very, very thankful for those doctors at Arnold Palmer, but Dr. Erbs’ act of kindness to a worried mom who just needed a reason to smile, still means all the world to this mother’s heart.

Fay Lamb is the only daughter of a rebel genius father and a hard-working, tow-the-line mom. She is not only a fifth-generation Floridian, she has lived her life in Titusville, where her grandmother was born in 1899.
Since an early age, storytelling has been Fay’s greatest desire. She seeks to create memorable characters that touch her readers’ heart. She says of her writing, “If I can’t laugh or cry at the words written on the pages of my manuscript, the story is not ready for the reader.” Fay writes in various genres, including romance, romantic suspense, and contemporary fiction.

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Storms in Serenity (Serenity Key Book 1)

****This author donates 100% of her royalties to Christian charities.

How can one man save the town he loves when he’s the reason for the destruction?

Serenity Key, Florida, has seen its share of hurricanes, but this time, one foul weather system is about to collide with another storm, and this one has nothing to do with atmospheric pressure. 

David New has guarded his secrets for years, but when two brothers, John and Andy Ryan, arrive in town and he gets news that the daughter he’s never told anyone about has disappeared, possibly the victim of a heinous crime, and the lives of many of the town residents begin to unravel in the gale force consequences of David’s past, he has nowhere else to turn.
God is the only one Who can calm the storms, but can David and the good folks of Serenity Key survive until He does?
A tempest has been brewing for thirty years, with only one island town in its path.