Zeke had just discharged a patient when Kate emerged.

"How's it going in there?" he asked her, noticing her flustered look and the cell phone in her hand.

"Pretty good," Kate sighed shortly. "Just calling our resident brain specialist right now."

"Brain specialist?" Zeke echoed with a puzzled expression, "You have a head case in there?"

Kate paused in her dialing to answer Zeke, "Headaches, a 'bone growth' behind the ear that feels like a pump or a valve of some sort, and a two-inch scar just below her sternum that she doesn't know where it came from, and a hospital that told the foster agency that all the physical defects were the result of birth-induced trauma." Kate's wry frown showed Zeke exactly what she thought of the story.

Zeke nodded, "Make the call, Kate."

Kate lifted the phone to her ear. A couple rings, and she heard Michael Holt's quick voice on the other end, "Hello?"

"Hi, Michael," Kate began, getting right to business, "I have a patient here complaining of headaches—"

"Oh, come on, Kate!" Michael interrupted, sounding very frazzled. "I'm not due there for another hour, I'm sure whatever it is can wait till then!"

"Well, I've just been talking with her, and I'm not so sure, Michael!" Kate returned, "She has something behind her ear that feels like a pump, but she thinks it's a bone growth. She has a two-inch suture on her chest that she's had since her foster mother received custody of her," Kate placed especial emphasis on the words, "and they have no idea what's causing the headaches, and frankly, I can't think of any condition that would match the symptoms she has! I really think she needs an MRI, which, as you know—"

"Yeah, the Clinic doesn't have; look, Kate, I'm in the middle of something right now. I'll be over there at ten o'clock, just like I promised. Tell you what, if you think it's something serious, why don't you try X-raying her neck, see if you can pick up this pump thing, and maybe you can get enough answers to tide you over till I get there."

"Fine," Kate sighed, "all right." She hung up the call and turned around. Zeke stood right behind her. Kate rolled her eyes, "The best we can do to get eyes on the inside is an x-ray."

Zeke nodded, "I'll go fire up the machine."

"And I'll go get the patient ready," Kate added.

Kate and Karthey arrived in the x-ray lab minutes later. Zeke extended a hand.

"Hi, I'm Dr. Zeke Barnes," he said.

"I'm Karthey," the girl with golden-brown hair smiled at him and shook his hand.

"Dr. Kate tells me you're having headaches?" Zeke began pulling on a pair of surgical gloves.

"Yeah, I was," Karthey answered. Hope shone in her light-brown eyes, "Are you the head specialist?"

Zeke shook his head, "I'm afraid not; I'm just another doctor like Kate. Would you mind taking a seat?" he patted the back of an exam chair set up near the x-ray machine.

"We're just going to take some pictures of your neck, Karthey," Kate explained, "we won't know anything definite until the neurologist gets here and you can get an MRI, but at least this will give us a general idea of what's going on around that head of yours."

"Sounds good," Karthey confirmed.

"Okay, you're all set," Zeke stated, "Kate and I are just going to be right over there, operating the machine. You just hold really still till we say you can move, okay?"

"Got it," Karthey answered.

As the image of Karthey's neck appeared on the screen, Kate looked at it closely, hoping for some sort of answers that would tell them what Karthey had, be it a twisted disc, or a pinched nerve, or some sort of tumor-looking something. What she saw was unlike anything she'd ever expected. The image of a small white box showed up plainly on the x-ray image. Down near the clavicle, Kate saw another white object, starkly contrasted with the spine it paralleled.

She pointed to the objects. "Zeke," she gasped, "is this what I think it is?"

Zeke leaned in for a closer look. "I'll be durned," he muttered, "This girl has a cerebral shunt."

Kate left the monitor and returned to the room where Karthey waited. She noticed that the girl was obviously uncomfortable, and wondered if the pain had returned.

"Okay, Karthey," she told the patient girl, "you can move now."

Karthey sighed with relief and immediately began scratching her neck and behind her ear.

"Oh good," she sighed, "because I've had this awful itch ever since I sat down!" She rubbed her neck very hard, and Kate noticed it didn't take long for the skin to turn bright red. Immediately, Kate grabbed Karthey's wrist.

"Wait, stop," she ordered. She examined Karthey's neck closer. As she did so, Karthey began itching the inside of her arm, where the IV had been. Kate could see large welts developing, and leaning closer to Karthey's face revealed a faint wheeze. By now Karthey was frowning as if she desperately wanted to itch her neck again.

"Dr. Kate," she admitted finally, "I'm having a hard time breathing."

Kate knew she was having an allergic reaction. She had to act fast. "Karthey, you're having an allergic reaction. Are you sure you're not allergic to iodine?" Kate began gathering the necessary medications and antihistamines to stabilize the reaction.

"Pretty positive," Karthey answered, "about the only thing I'm allergic to is balloons."

Kate stopped with one glove on, the other halfway. "Wait, balloons?" she echoed. She looked down at her hands. With gloved hands she and Zeke had touched Karthey all around the areas in which Karthey now exhibited large, swollen hives. "Are you sure it's just balloons," she asked Karthey, "or is it latex?"

Karthey shrugged, "All I know is, I'm allergic to balloons. I can't ever touch them, or they make me itch, just like this."

Kate rolled her eyes and stripped the gloves off, digging in the cabinet for a box of nitrile gloves. "I'm sorry, Karthey; I think you might be allergic to my gloves; that's what's causing the reaction." She hooked a vial of antihistamine drip to Karthey's IV valve, "Here, this should counteract the reaction and make it stop itching."

Karthey's neck was red and no doubt sore by now. "Thank you, Dr. Kate," she said.

Kate knew that she needed to tell the girl about their discovery right away, and it probably wouldn't hurt to share it with Mrs. Devanne, either. Zeke came in and handed her the developed x-ray films.

Karthey noticed, "Are those the films?" she asked. "Can I see them? Did you find out what the problem was?"

Kate bobbed her head, "Something like that," she answered tentatively. "Okay," she told Karthey, "Let's go back to the exam room to look at them."

"All right," Karthey complied.

Kate and Karthey returned to the exam room, where Mrs. Devanne was still waiting for them.

"What did you find?" she asked when Kate entered the room.

"Well, Mrs. Devanne," Kate answered, flipping the switch on the lightbox and clipping the films against its surface, "we found two things: one, Karthey is allergic to latex rubber—"

"Oh! I'm sorry, I should have mentioned that!"

"—and two," Kate continued, pointing to the x-ray films, "Karthey happens to have a cerebral shunt, probably installed within the two weeks after her birth before she arrived in the foster system."

Martha's jaw dropped as she looked at the solid white objects that stood out next to Karthey's ghostly bones on the films. "But why wouldn't anybody know about this?" she gasped, "all the records described her as a healthy child with nothing wrong!"

"We'll get to the bottom of that, Mrs. Devanne," Kate promised, "meanwhile, this x-ray shows that the shunt is in fact broken, see how it stops just below the box—which, by the way, is a manual valve for the shunt—and continues down at the base of the neck? There should be tubing there, but it isn't."

Mrs. Devanne blinked wide eyes. "Well, that would explain the headaches," she concluded, but upon noticing Kate's dubious frown, she added hesitantly, "wouldn't it?"

Kate shrugged, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Devanne, but we can't know more about what's going on in Karthey's head until we can get an MRI."

"Do you have one of those here?"

Kate shook her head, "I'm sorry, we don't." Just then, she heard the front door of the clinic open, and Michael's familiar sigh as he made his way back through the crowds to the area behind the counter. Kate smiled, "But the man who does has just arrived! Come with me, Karthey!"

Kate Sykora bounced out the door and greeted Michael, who had just shed his overcoat and hung a stethoscope around his neck. "Good morning, Dr. Holt!" she cried cheerily, pulling Karthey forward by her shoulders.

The young woman hung her head shyly; Michael noticed lines of pain around her eyes. Why would Kate drag patients out to him?

"Morning," he muttered, "Who's this?" he extended a hand and tried to smile at her.

"Karthey," the girl replied softly.

"This is the headache case I called you about earlier," Kate explained to Michael, and turned to the girl, "Karthey, this is Dr. Holt; he's a neurologist. He can help you."

Karthey looked up at Michael, "Can you really help me?"

Michael raised his eyebrows at Kate. "I might; it depends on what the problem is."

Kate handed Karthey's file to Michael. "Turns out Karthey, here, has a cerebral shunt!" she declared.

Michael tipped his head, "Does she now?"

"Yeah, a broken one," Karthey put in.

When Michael glanced at her in alarm, Kate explained, "We were able to see on the x-ray that the tube is separated from the valve behind her ear," Kate turned Karthey's head and pointed to the protrusion, "and continues about here," she laid another finger about two inches lower, just above Karthey's collarbone.

Michael frowned; this was certainly an unusual case! "That's not what I normally hear about cerebral shunts," he remarked to Kate.

"Is it bad, Dr. Holt?" Karthey asked, the fear showing plainly in her eyes.

Michael hesitated before answering, "I really can't answer that until we get you in for an MRI. That can happen—"

"At Holt Neuro, right?" Kate cut in, smiling in the way that Michael found so aggravating.

Michael sighed, "Sure; have her mother to drive her over, and I'll call Rita and get her set up for a scan while I get my work done here."

Kate's smile dipped; she hated it when Michael tried to dodge her obvious hints about the right thing to do. "Dr. Holt, can I speak to you for a moment?" She grabbed his arm and pulled him into her office.

After he'd closed the door, Kate didn't waste a moment.

"What the heck?" she demanded of the neurosurgeon, "You would ship her off to your own office, while you stayed here—to do what, may I ask? Why wouldn't you go with her?"

"Now, hang on a sec, Kate!" Michael tried to defend himself, "I just got here, okay? No doubt Autumn's got a slew of patients in 'dire need of my expertise'—"

"Yeah, meanwhile, you have one right there who needs you right now!" Kate pointed out the door to where Karthey still waited.

"Kate, look at her," Michael instructed in a calmer voice. "If she was really having an emergency situation, she wouldn't even be standing upright, much less quietly like she is now."

Kate raised an eyebrow, "She's got at least twenty minutes' drip worth of Toridol in her system still."

"I really don't think that would make a difference in a worst-case scenario."

"All right," Kate fired back, undaunted, "So maybe she's not 'worst-case,' but what if she's 'bad case,' anyway? You'd want to be present if they found something in the scan that required surgery, wouldn't you? You wouldn't want to be in the middle of something here when that call came, would you?" She huffed, "and besides, since when were you ever so committed to your two hours here that you'd send a patient off without at least following her back to Holt Neuro?"

Michael sighed, not quite ready to admit that Kate was right, but at the same time realizing he had no other option.

"I just—there's just a lot going on at Holt Neuro right now," he said.

Kate snorted, "Oh, so now Clinica Sanando is your 'get out of dodge' place? I don't think so, Michael," she shook her head.

Michael sighed, "Fine; tell her mother to drive her over to Holt Neuro, and I'll follow them."

Kate's eyes danced, "Why don't you offer to drive her? I still have questions for Mrs. Devanne. She could take the bus and join you guys later."

Michael blanched, "What?"

"Come on, Michael," Kate sighed, "I really think this would be the best option. You could get her in there faster than Mrs. Devanne could. She needs help—your help."

Michael hesitated.

Kate smiled softly, "It's what Anna would do," she hinted not-so-subtly.

Michael tossed his head and stood. "All right, fine!" He said. He returned to the hallway with Kate and gestured to Karthey, who was still standing with her mother.

"Come with me," he said, "I'll take you down to Holt Neuro myself."

Karthey glanced back toward Martha, who smiled encouragingly.

Kate spoke up, "Martha and I just have a few more things to discuss, and then she'll be right over as soon as we're done."

Karthey nodded.

"Shall we go?" Michael asked. He led the girl out of the lobby to his car.