Some Kind of Normal (2 page)

But he shakes his head. "She fainted first, right?
How long before she had the seizure?"

"I don't know. A few minutes."

"I doubt it, but we'll run tests at the hospital." He
don't look at me but clicks his pen on his clipboard and folds the
top paper over to start a new one.

"How old is she?"

"Twelve."

"You say she's been drinking a lot?"

"Yes. Just water, mostly."

"Has she been urinating abnormally often?"

I give him my best peeved look. "She's drinking a
gallon a day. Of course she's peeing a lot."

Two men lift her out of my arms and move her to the
stretcher. I let them. One wipes the water dripping down her chin
and looks at me as if expecting an answer. I hold up the bottle of
water, and I kick the Sunny D behind me as I'm standing. "I tried
to give her a little to wake her up."

"She can't drink if she's passed out." He rolls his
eyes at the other medic the way Logan used to roll his eyes at me a
few years ago before I took a switch and told him I'd beat those
eyes right out of their sockets. I look this man up and down and
decide he's not too old to need a beating. He's practically a kid
himself, and I find myself wondering if he possibly is old enough
to drive an ambulance, let alone dole out medical advice.

"How long she been breathing like this?"

I notice the heavy breathing I'd come to ignore over
the last few days. "A while. Since the flu. It made her breathe
real hard for awhile. Then it got better for a few days. Now I
guess it's back."

A slightly older medic spreads a blanket over Ashley
and buckles her onto the stretcher as if she might roll over on him
and fall the two inches back into the dirt. He pries her eyelids
and shines a light in them. She fights to close her eyes against
the beam, and I can tell from his face this is a good sign. He
opens his metal doctor bag and rummages through some packages until
he pulls out a vacuum-sealed needle that he tears open and inserts
in the back of her hand. They eye-roller is now writing something
on a clipboard.

They seem too calm to my liking, as if girls like
Ashley just keel over every day. Maybe they do. Logan never fainted
on me, but maybe that's because he's a boy. Maybe girls Ashley's
age do this now, some freakish pubescent result of living too near
the power lines or eating vegetables with pesticides or having
heavy periods. I expect the medic to tell me, "It's the most normal
thing ever these days, Mrs. Babcock. In a minute she'll wake up fit
as a fiddle. You just need to be sure to wash those carrots better
next time."

Instead, he says, "We're going to take her to the
emergency room, ma'am. Do you want to ride along?"

It's an inane question. As if I would let him take
her and leave me here. I nod and follow them to the ambulance. They
slide the stretcher through the back doors and hook up an IV, and
I'm halfway there before I realize I might need my car. And I
definitely need my cell phone to call Travis, and maybe Logan's
school if it takes too long. And the women at church. I'm supposed
to be there in an hour to help stuff flyers for the pro-life rally
in a week or so.

"Actually, I'll drive myself. She'll be all
right?"

"I don't know, ma'am." I'm sure I blanch at his
bluntness. You'd a thought a mama who taught her son to say ma'am
would have taught him how to use a little tact.

The driver is on a handset, talking to the hospital I
assume. "We've got a twelve year old girl presenting with polyuria,
polydipsia, Kussmaul's respirations and possible seizures."

Clipboard man climbs in and closes the doors, not
even glancing back at me. The ambulance pulls away, the sirens
screaming, leaving me still holding Ashley's water in its wake of
dust.

Fire ants are already beginning to swarm over the
honey slathered on the bagel. "Oh sugar," I say to no one.

It's the only swear word I can think of at the
moment.

~~~~

"I don't know," I say for the third time to Travis,
who is more than a little spun up on the other end of the line. "I
told you all I know. She passed out. The ambulance came and took
her. I'm on my way to the hospital." It's only twenty minutes cross
town to Saint Joseph's, but I seem to be getting every one of the
ten red lights.

"Is it serious, you think? Should I leave work and
meet you there?"

"I don't know." My voice comes out shrill, and I
realize I'm suddenly aware this isn't some normal girl thing.
Somewhere between rationally gathering clean clothes for Ashley and
some snacks in case we are stuck there half the day tied up in
paper work and telling Travis "I don't know" for the fourth time,
the panic settles in.

"Yes." My knuckles are white on the steering wheel as
I tap my foot on the gas waiting for the light to change. "Meet me
there."

I hang up and the light changes, but the car in front
of me doesn't move. I honk. She moves, but slowly. I stick my head
out the window. "It ain't going to get greener if you water it,
lady!" The car speeds up a little and is finally far enough into
the intersection that I can squeeze around her and take a side
street. I gun the gas and blow through the next two lights without
any traffic.

I'm in full-on panic attack now. I can hear my own
heart. Not just feel it thumping in my chest, but loudly, like a
stereo is playing it. Then I realize it
is
the stereo. Logan has turned
down every tuner except the bass, and the drum of some rock song is
playing through the speakers. I turn it off and realize my heart is
fine. I ain't going to die of a heart attack. You'd think that
would make me feel better, but it don't.

My phone rings, and I know the word is already
spreading across the small town.

It's Gloria from church. "We heard about Ashley. Is
she gonna be all right?"

I want to ask how she heard, and who we is, but I
just say I'm sure she'll be fine, but the medics want to take her
to the hospital to make sure. No use in giving her and the other
gossip gals at First Baptist more to talk about.

"A few of us will get together to pray for her. How
should we pray?"

I know the tactic because I done it enough myself.
Cloak your own need for information in a prayer request. But as I
know they will genuinely pray for her, and since I want God on my
side and I'm not that good at praying myself, I ask her to pray
that Ashley will get good treatment at the hospital, and that
she'll get a good doctor, because I'm not too trusting of doctors
myself.

"Oh, don't I know it! Eduardo went in for a cough and
caught the strep from a doctor who didn't wash his hands. The
doctor poked around in him, told him to sit in the bathroom with a
hot shower running, and then sent him home sicker than he was to
begin with. He had to go back for antibiotics later. He almost
didn't go cause he was scared of getting something even worse.
Hospitals are just teeming with germs, and doctors don't know more
about medicine than a monkey. Almost everybody I know comes out
worse than they went in." She paused, and then added, "But I'm sure
Ashley will be fine."

"Yes," I say shortly, and hang up.

By the time I park by the emergency entrance of St.
Joseph's I've lost the feeling in my fingertips, and a gripping
headache is spreading from my clenched jaw to the back of my neck.
I grab my phone and stuff it in my purse and leave the clothes and
the food.

I've only been in St. Joseph's three times before.
Once each for the births of Logan and Ashley, in which I walked
through the front doors, and once when Logan fell out of the oak
tree in the back yard and needed twelve stitches in the back of his
head. We came through emergency on that one, bath towel pressed to
his scalp, blood already seeping through it. They put Logan on an
examining table, and when the doctor took the towel off I passed
out, and when I woke up, Logan was in a chair and I was lying on
the table.

I pass off the church sick visitations on the other
women. I hate hospitals.

St. Joseph's isn't like the TV hospitals, where
attractive young interns wander the halls making eyes at each
other, interrupted by sudden chaos when fifty people are brought in
after a train wreck or bridge collapses and all hands on deck have
to rip open bloody shirts and slice the chest open to get a heart
beating again. Although when Logan came, there was a man who got
his arm chewed off by a combine, and that was rather bloody. But
even then, there weren't no great commotion.

Today, the ER is empty. Elevator music is playing on
the sound system, some synthesized version of a Reba song, and no
one's even at the information desk. I look outside to see if the
ambulance is in the bay, but it's empty too. I have this frantic
feeling I've gone to the wrong hospital, as if there were more than
one within fifty miles. I see a bell on the desk and I ring it.

"I'm looking for my daughter, Ashley Babcock," I say
to the white-haired lady who appears from nowhere. "An ambulance
should have brought her in."

She nods and opens a door next to the desk and
beckons me back. I follow her through a maze of curtains to the
single room with a door. Inside, Ashley is on the bed, her eyes
open, watching the two distinctly not-TV-type doctors buzzing
around her. One is poking at her veins, cussing under his
breath.

"I need a smaller needle, Park. The veins are
collapsed."

I see Ashley wince each time he pierces her, and
already blood is gathering beneath her translucent skin. This is
why I hate doctors.

"Can't you be more gentle?" When my jaw unclenches I
realize I've been gritting my teeth. The doctors ignore me, and I
see her thick, dark blood finally filling a test tube. Ashley's
eyes wander to me, but they are glazed and unfocused. She don't
smile at me, and though she smiles less at me since she turned
twelve, I find this a bad sign.

"Can someone tell me what's going on with my
daughter? What's wrong?"

I am still expecting someone to say maybe she's
anemic and needs to eat more bacon for breakfast, but instead he
says, "Your daughter has diabetes."

Just like that. He don't even turn to look at me. He
finishes drawing the blood and marks the tube with a black pen.
"Christ, it's thick as finger-paint." He shakes the tube but the
blood barely sloshes. "Up the fluids and give her a shot of
humalog," he says to the man named Park. "Start with four units and
add a drip line as well. I don't want her seizing again."

"What's going on?" I think I sound angry and this is
better than worried, which is what I am. I don't like that they are
putting drugs into Ashley's veins.

"Your daughter's nearly DKA, ma'am. It's lucky the
EMTs had it figured or we'd still be running tests. Her glucose
doesn't even measure on our meters here in the ER, so there's not
much doubt, but we're running the labs anyway."

"What's DKA?" I have no idea of half what he
said.

"Diabetic Ketoacidosis. Coma," he says, and then I
wish I hadn't asked.

He begins to walk out, his hands full of my
daughter's finger-paint blood, then turns and says, "We called the
helicopter in. We're going to medevac her out to Children's
Hospital in Austin. She needs immediate attention, and they're more
equipped to deal with this than us. You need to keep her awake.
It's still possible for her to go into coma, and that would be
bad."

I stand looking at the door that's swung shut behind
him. Bad doesn't even begin to cover it.

"How can she have diabetes?" I say to the man at the
IV. "It's not like she's fat or anything. She doesn't even eat
sweets that much." I think of the Sunny D loaded with corn syrup
and a sliver of guilt creeps in. The man at the IV shrugs and
leaves. I make a mental note to write the director of the hospital
and demand he provide a seminar on bedside manners.

I spot a swivel stool in the corner and pull it over
to Ashley's side. I take her hand. It's hot and dry. I think of
when I was a kid and my dog dragged around like he had worms and my
brother told me to test his nose. "If it's cold and wet, he's okay.
If it's hot and dry, he's sick." Despite the ridiculousness of it,
I reach out and touch Ashley's nose. She opens her eyes.

"Hi sweetie." I move my hand to her forehead as if
I'm testing for fever instead of hiding the fact that I'm treating
her like my childhood pet. "The doctors say you need to stay awake.
Can you do that?"

She looks like she might want to answer, but then
changes her mind. She swallows hard, then whispers, "Water."

Now I feel like rolling
my
eyes. "Dang it, Ash, is that all you can
think about?"

Suddenly she vomits. It's mostly just water, I
suspect because that's about all that's in her. Still, the sight of
it makes me queasy, and I jump up, letting go of her hand and
sending the swivel chair crashing into the metal cabinets against
the wall.

"I need a doctor," I yell.

One appears almost instantly, a different one, and I
wonder how many doctors a small town like Collier Springs can hold.
It's not as if people are lined up in the waiting room.

This one, though, I like instantly. He immediately
lifts the back of Ashley's bed, grabbing a pink plastic tub at the
same time and handing it to her with a smile. "That'll wake you up,
won't it?" He strips the blankets off her as a nurse rushes in.

"I'll do that, Doctor Benton," she tells him, smiling
in that way that actors in the TV shows smile at each other when
they're in love. He doesn't notice. She takes the sheets away and
returns with clean ones and a washcloth for Ashley's mouth. I
notice Ashley trying to suck the water from it as the nurse passes
it over her face, and I throw her a scowl she doesn't catch.