Some Kind of Normal (6 page)

"Now," says Brenda, wrapping her ample arm around
Logan, "let's go put some meat on those bones." She flashes a smile
at me. "We'll check back with you in a bit."

I sink into the chair again. Ashley waits until
they're gone before she asks, "The doctor says everything's going
to change for us. You think God will make it so it don't?"

I think of Logan, and how the milk allergy just kinda
went away and then about Travis, who still can't eat bacon and
eggs. "We can pray, I suppose, but I don't know if it will do any
good." Travis gives me a look to kill, and then puts his arm around
Ashley.

"We should pray that God will get us through this
however he sees fit."

"Can we pray he'll heal me? Do you think God
will?"

I look at Travis, who looks back at me with something
kin to a warning. "I don't know," I say. "He can, for sure. But
just because He can don't mean He will."

"Why?"

"I don't know," I say again.

"Because," Travis says, "sometimes we become better
people-- stronger--by going through adversity."

A tear slides down Ashley's face. "I don't think I
want to be stronger," she says. "I think I just want to be normal
again."

I move to the other side of the bed and hold Ashley's
head against me. "I know, baby girl. I want that, too."

~~~~

By the time Dr. Benton comes back, Ashley is asleep
again. It's as if she's suddenly let go of trying so hard to be
well and has given in to being sick. I wonder how hard it's been on
her the last few days trying to stay functional if she's been this
sick all along.

"It's all right," he says, looking at Ashley and then
at his watch. "It's almost noon. I should get back to my own office
and see my other patients. I'll drive back after the office closes
and we can talk then."

"Your office? Don't you work in the hospital?"

He laughs. "No. I go in occasionally when one of my
patients needs me, but mostly I work in my private practice."

"You're gonna drive all the way back home, and then
back here tonight?" Travis asks.

"Sure. It's only about an hour." We don't answer
that, but I'm sure Travis is thinking the same thing that I am:
that an hour might as well be cross-country for us.

When he leaves, Travis and I feel alone in the room.
There's some machine hooked up to Ashley that keeps beeping every
few seconds, and her breathing is still more like a fish flung on
the floor, but as we are the only two awake people in the room, the
unquiet quiet feels unnatural.

Travis breaks the awkwardness by standing and making
a big deal out of stretching his arms over his head, which expose
his belly hanging over his belt. "Should we go see if we can get a
Dr. Pepper or something?"

"I'm not going and facing
those
women."

"I thought they were your friends."

"They aren't. Just 'cause we go to church with them
don't mean we're friends. I don't have the energy right now to deal
with them, and if there are four of them down there by now, it'd
take all the oil wells in Houston to get me enough energy."

He shrugs. "How 'bout a coke machine?"

We find the machine in the waiting room at the end of
the PICU wing. Travis pulls a wrinkled bill out of his pocket and
tries to feed it into the machine. The machine don't like it and
spits it out. He smoothes it down and tries again. Again it comes
out.

"For Pete's sake. You got any money?" I don't have to
check my wallet 'cause I don't carry cash. At least, not the bill
kind. I start pulling out everything in my purse to see if there
ain't some change at the bottom when a lady thrusts a crisp, new
bill at us.

"Here. I have a pocket full of them. I get them at
the bank down the street. I ask for new bills there, because
otherwise I might never get a drink here."

Travis thanks her, trades his wrinkled dollar for her
starched flat one, and slides it in. It eats it immediately and
deposits a can with a loud clunk. He pops the top and takes a long
swig and hands it to me. I wave it off and thank the lady. "You
visiting someone?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "My son's in here. He was in a
bike accident. He fell down a ravine and hit his head and broke a
few bones."

"That's awful," I say, but not meaning it
wholeheartedly because right now I wish Ashley only had a few
broken bones.

"What kind of bones did he break to land him in
PICU?" asks Travis.

I elbow him to give him the signal he's been rude,
but the lady tears up and suddenly I'm looking for the tissues.
"He's in a coma. He slammed his head pretty good. It ricocheted his
brain against his cranium and now. . ." She trails off, and I feel
awful for thinking what I did about Ashley.

"Motorcycles are dangerous things," I say, trying to
be sympathetic.

She stops sniffling a moment and looks up at me
confused. "Not a motorcycle bike. A bicycle. He's eight."

My vision of a teenager careening down a hill comes
to a halt. I think of Logan when he was eight, still innocent and
fun. He'd stopped hugging me by then, but he still let me wrap my
arms around him and tell him I loved him. To lose him in those
years. . ..

"I'm so sorry."

"Yes," she says, dabbing at her eyes. "Me too."

~~~~

"Inside our bodies we have lots of different organs
that do different things," Dr. Benton is saying. He settles back
down on Ashley's right side and is talking directly to her. "Take
the heart. What does it do?"

"Pump blood," Ashley says.

"Right. And the lungs, what do they do?"

"Take in oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide."

"And the brain?"

"It regulates the other organs and processes
information."

Dr. Benton seems impressed. "You must be an "A"
student." Ashley smiles back. It's a weak smile, but it's more than
I've seen in a long time, and I hope maybe he's diagnosed her
wrong.

"Do you know what the pancreas does?"

She shook her head.

"It produces a hormone called insulin. Insulin takes
the glucose in your bloodstream and helps your body use it as
energy. With diabetes, your body has stopped making insulin.
Without insulin, your body can't use the food you eat as fuel. Even
though you might eat, you feel tired all the time." I see Ashley
nod, and I think of the last two weeks and how she slept all the
time and how I thought it was all because of the flu.

"Then the glucose--the sugar--doesn't have anywhere
to go, because your cells can't turn it into energy or store it for
use later, so it builds up in your blood stream. Essentially, it's
poisoning you. Everything you eat and drink, except for water, is
poison to your body right now. Your body wants to flush the sugar
out, so it craves water. The more water you drink, the more sugar
gets flushed out of your body."

"But she's not eating sugar," I interrupt. "She's
hardly had anything sweet in two weeks."

"The word sugar is a misnomer," he says, turning from
Ashley to me and Travis. "Almost everything you eat has at least a
little bit of it that gets turned into glucose by the body.
Anything carbohydrate, like the bagel this morning, is primarily
seen by the body as sugar. It doesn't matter if it actually has
sugar in it or not."

He turns back to Ashley. "But even if you don't eat,
your body is producing glucose on its own. You need insulin whether
or not you eat, and you aren't making any insulin right now."

"Do I have to have surgery? My pappy had a heart
attack last year, and they stuck a balloon in his veins."

"No," he says slowly, glancing at us. "There's no
surgery for this. There is no cure."

I think these may be the worst four words I've ever
heard in my life. "But the nurse said she could live a normal life.
Like all the other girls her age."

"She can." He takes a small black pouch off the top
of the pile of papers he has on his lap. He unzips it and pulls out
the contents one by one: a small blue machine that looks a little
like a calculator without all the buttons, a fat blue pen, and a
container that looks like what my camera film used to come in.

"You now get to be your own pancreas. Since yours
isn't checking the sugar levels in the blood and making insulin to
cover it, you will do it yourself." He opens the top of the vial
and pulls out a strip of black, shiny paper. "This is called a test
strip. It will show you how much sugar is in your blood." He puts
it into a slit in the top of the meter and the screen lights up. A
few numbers flash across it, and then it settles into a picture of
a blinking drop of blood. "That means the meter is ready," he
explains. He draws an almost microscopic needle out of a pocket in
the pouch and unscrews the cap of the pen. He places the needle
into the pen and then lets Ashley look at it before screwing the
top back on.

"See? Tiny. You won't hardly even feel it." He takes
her hand and presses the end of the pen against it. "This is the
lancet. You should put a new needle in it each time you test. Then,
you place it on the side of one of your fingers and--" He presses
the button on the side, and I hear a slight wiz of air. Ashley
grimaces and then relaxes.

"Is that it?" She grins at us. "It didn't hurt at
all!"

He squeezes her finger slightly and a dot of blood
surfaces. He holds the test strip up against it and it sucks the
blood right into it. The screen changes suddenly to a countdown. 5
– 4 – 3 – 2 – 1.

565. I feel the color drain from my face. "That's
bad, isn't it?" Dr. Benton takes the test strip out and throws it
into a red biohazard container. "Normally, yes. That's very bad.
But it hasn't been that long since the medics started the insulin.
She's come down almost three hundred points, and that's
exceptionally good. Eventually, we'll get it stabilized around 100.
Then, the trick is to keep it there."

"How do I do that?" Ashley is examining her
finger.

"With insulin shots." She stops examining and looks
up at the same time that Travis and I lean forward.

"Shots?"

"Yes. Testing is only part of the job of the
pancreas. The other job is giving your body the insulin it needs to
cover the glucose in the blood, or, in the case of a diabetic, the
glucose they are about to eat."

"What about pills?" I ask.

"You can't take insulin in a pill," he says. "Insulin
can't be absorbed by the stomach."

"I see them on the commercials all the time," I
say.

"They aren't for type 1. That medication is for type
2. It helps the body use the insulin it is already making. But
Ashley isn't making any."

"Do I have to get a shot every day?" Ashley is like a
rabbit looking down a shotgun barrel.

"Several times a day. And let's be clear here,
Ashley. This isn't your parents' job. They should watch you
carefully, and help you out, but it's your body, and your life, and
you need to be the one in control of it. That means testing your
own blood, and giving yourself shots."

She couldn't have reacted with more horror if he'd
just cut open his own chest and handed her his bloody heart. "I
can't give myself a shot!"

Travis backs her up. "She really can't. Don't none of
us like needles none, but it took two of us to hold her down for
vaccinations when she was a young'un."

I hit him on the arm, but the doctor ignores him.

"You can and you will. And before you leave this
hospital, it will already seem like no big deal." Neither Travis
nor Ashley looks like they believed him.

He puts aside the meter and begins laying out papers
on the bed, motioning for Travis and me to scoot closer. "Before we
hand you a syringe, though, all of you have to understand how
insulin works. It's a tightrope you have to walk carefully. Too
little, you'll be back here." He looks gravely at us. "Too much,
and she'll be dead."

~~~~

The nutritionist comes later with her stack of
Xeroxed pyramid charts and fake plastic food. She explains that we
need to measure everything out now, and know exactly how many
carbohydrates are in each serving. Lean meat doesn't require
insulin, but we should only eat four ounces, the size of a pack of
cards, or the palm of my hand. We need to cut back on beef and
other fatty meats. We have to worry about fat, because heart
attacks occur at much higher rates among diabetics. Only a half a
cup of mashed potatoes or a half-cup of rice, fifteen carbs. One
cup of strawberries, fifteen carbs. One ounce of chips, fifteen
carbs. Suddenly the entire pantry is reduced to cups and ounces and
measurements of fifteen carbs.

"Do I really have to count how many Doritos I eat?"
Ashley asks.

"It's important that you measure everything you eat
before you eat it. That way you'll know how much insulin you need
to cover it. If you're still hungry later, you can eat more, and
take more insulin for it. The days of sitting on the couch eating
chips out of the bag are over, I'm afraid."

She doesn't look afraid at all. Ashley, on the other
hand, is getting paler, and her eyes keep closing.

"Are you tired?" I'm hoping she is so the doctors
will leave us alone to digest all this information, which I don't
think has any carbs.

She manages a "hmm," and a sigh, but don't open her
eyes.

"I'll come back tomorrow, " the nutritionist is
saying as she picks up her toy food. "I'll leave these pamphlets
for you to look over. Here is a book that lists the nutrition facts
about food sold at popular restaurants. You should keep that one in
the car with you. And these other pamphlets--" She puts them on the
pile of pamphlets Dr. Benton left us and stands to shake our hands.
"I know this all seems overwhelming right now, but it will become
second nature to you really quickly. You won't always have to
measure everything you put on your plates. You'll be able to
eyeball it soon, but for now it's important that it's done right.
For Ashley."