Eight-year-old Benny Wenz knows a good thing when he sees it – and he’s not shy about saying as much.
So when his 18-month-old sister Stella ended up at Kittitas Valley Healthcare’s Urgent Care clinic in Cle Elum this past October with an ear infection, Benny made a point of telling staff just how good he thinks they are.
“You always cure us. You always cure me. I’ve never been here without being cured,” he said as they waited for Stella’s medicine.
His point made, the staff beamed. Benny, after all, is no stranger to Urgent Care.
For the Wenz family – Benny, Stella and their parents Matthew and Jennifer Wenz – the convenience and competency of KVH Urgent Care has been a lifesaver, figuratively if not necessarily literally, on more than one occasion. And the reassurance of having Urgent Care close by is priceless.
“It seems like my kids always get sick after hours,” Jennifer says.
“Usually it’s Saturday,” her husband offers.
There was the time Benny got diaper rash as an infant. “We were young parents. What did we know?” Matthew says, shrugging his shoulders and smiling.
There was the day Benny, then about Stella’s age now, came down with a high fever. “He was lethargic,” says Jennifer, who picked him up from day care and took him to Urgent Care where the medical staff checked him out, advised her to give him Tylenol and push fluids and told her she could take him home.
What happened later caught Jennifer, a psychiatric nurse who works in Yakima, by surprise. Before their shift ended and they headed home, clinic staff called to check up on Benny. “It really impressed me,” Jennifer says.
Once, Benny fell and hit his head on a hard surface while kicking his soccer ball outside. “I puked,” Benny says. “So they took me to Urgent Care to see if I had a concussion.” Jennifer says the medical staff, aware that Benny is a Star Wars enthusiast, determined that he didn’t have a concussion by “asking him things only a true Star Wars fan would know.”
When a fall while running an obstacle course in gym class landed him in the nurse’s office, his parents once again turned to Urgent Care. “I had a really bad headache. At Urgent Care, they said maybe I had a minor concussion,” he says. “Four days later I was better.”
Recently there was the day Benny woke up to find his arm swollen. At Urgent Care, staff diagnosed him with an infected spider bite and prescribed antibiotics.
“They’re very nice. They’re always helpful,” Benny says, with the air of someone who has seen a thing or two over his young life. “Like I said, I’ve never gone there without being cured.”