All the Days of Her Life

by Lurlene McDaniel

  “After the performance tonight, I want to take you out,” Todd said, eyeing Terri. “Someplace private.”

  To Todd, “private” meant being alone with no danger of interruption. “We’ll see,” Lacey said, knowing she wasn’t in a mood to be with him. “Tomorrow night would be better.”

  “It’s not better for me.”

  She chalked up his bad temper to first-night stage jitters. “We’ll talk about it after the play,” she insisted.

  Just then Monet swept backstage. Her dress was short and black and her blond hair fell past her shoulders in a sleek veil. She looked tall and slim and beautiful. “I thought I’d give you a kiss for good luck,” she told Todd.

  He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Lacey felt the old familiar twinge of jealousy. Without a word she turned and walked out of the dressing room. Terri met her in the bustling hallway. “I don’t know why you let that guy pull your chain,” Terri grumbled.

  Lacey shrugged listlessly. “I don’t know either. Right now I’m too tired to care.”

  “Boy, you don’t look like you feel real good.”

  “Maybe I do have the flu.”

  “Too bad you can’t pass it along to Mr. Wonderful.”

  Mr. Wonderful. That was the sarcastic term Jeff had used for Todd. Suddenly, a deep yearning sprang up inside Lacey to see Jeff again. Not only to see him, but to be with him, talk to him. He understood what it was like to feel bad physically, and Lacey knew that was part of her problem. She had no one to talk to about her health, and she was scared about what was happening to her. Somewhere over the past couple of months she’d lost control of her life, and now she felt helpless to turn the tide that was threatening to engulf her.

  “Curtain going up!” the stage manager shouted.

  Instantly, the hallway cleared and everybody scrambled for their places. “Want to go out front and watch?” Terri asked.

  “No. I want to sneak into one of the dressing rooms and fall asleep,” Lacey confessed.

  Terri hesitated for only a minute. “I’ll go with you.”

  Secluded in one of the rooms, Lacey tugged off the smock she’d donned to protect her clothes from makeup smears. As she pulled the smock over her head, her shirt slid upward, exposing her bare midriff. “Jeez, Lacey. I can count every one of your ribs,” Terri exclaimed, her brown eyes wide with shock.

  Intrigued, Lacey tossed the smock across a chair and stepped up to the vanity counter and its bank of mirrors. She held up her shirt and saw exactly what Terri had meant. Her ribs stood out in relief on her torso. Her skin looked stretched and papery thin, and her stomach seemed almost concave.

  “You look like a war orphan,” Terri declared. “Maybe you should lay off that diet.”

  Lacey felt alarmed over her appearance too, but she pulled her shirt down and tucked it into the loose-fitting waistband of her jeans. “Maybe I should see if Monet’s agent could use another model.” She tried to make light of the situation.

  “Maybe you should eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry. All I need is a drink of water.”

  “I’ll get it for you. You don’t look as if you can make it to the water fountain and back.”

  Lacey sat down heavily in a chair. “All right, I’ll let you.” In truth, she was grateful. Exhaustion was consuming her, and she felt dizzy and light-headed. Nausea passed through her in waves, and for a moment she was terrified that she might start throwing up. Something was wrong with her. Terribly wrong. She didn’t have the strength to move. Her arms and legs had stopped obeying her commands and felt like lead weights. Her head flopped against the back of the chair.

  “Here’s your water.”

  Terri’s voice seemed to be coming through a tunnel. Lacey struggled to answer.

  “Lacey, are you all right?” Terri’s voice sounded anxious, but try as she might, Lacey couldn’t form words. Her breath grew rapid and shallow, and she became so dizzy that she thought she might float right off the chair.

  “What’s wrong? Lacey, please say something!” Terri’s voice sounded frightened, but no matter how hard she struggled, Lacey couldn’t respond.

  “I’m getting help,” Terri cried.

  Lacey wanted to stop her because she didn’t want to cause a scene. She just needed a little sleep. Sounds came to Lacey in riffs, like waves breaking on a shore. Darkness came too, segments where she lost contact with the sounds and the glaring lights of the vanity mirrors. She gasped for breath, then lapsed into the quiet shadows while the sounds of running feet, adult voices, and excited babbling scraped against her eardrums.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I think she’s unconscious.”

  “She’s sick. Really sick.”

  “Lacey. Lacey. Say something.”

  “Call an ambulance.”

  “Better call her mother too.”

  Her mother would be angry, Lacey wanted to tell them. But suddenly, she wanted her mother with her. And her dad too. But they were divorced. And warring.

  Hands lifted her, placed her onto a couch, and covered her with a blanket. In the distance, a telephone rang. Maybe Katie was calling, Lacey thought. But no, Katie wouldn’t call the theater. She heard running feet and metallic noises. She again felt herself lifted, this time by men’s hands onto something that was cushioned, a bed with cool sheets. Someone pried open her eyelid and shone a bright light straight into her eye. She tried to turn away.

  “Start an IV,” a man’s voice said. “Saline. She’s dehydrated.”

  “Is she dying?”

  “Clear out of the way,” the man’s voice commanded.

  Someone else was crying. Terri?

  The bed started to move, and then Lacey was outside in the night air and the metal clacking stopped as she was rolled through an open door inside a vehicle. Red lights reflected off people’s faces, giving them an eerie, nightmarelike quality. Lacey allowed herself to drift away once more.

  “Lacey! Lacey honey … it’s Uncle Nelson. Can you hear me?”

  When she could focus, she realized that she was no longer in the theater or the vehicle. Uncle Nelson’s face was right above her, and she wanted to ask him why he’d come to see her. All around her she was aware of people moving and of a sharp antiseptic odor.

  “You’re in the emergency room, Lacey,” her uncle told her.

  She drifted off hearing him command, “I want her up in ICU. Stat.”

  She was aware that her bed was rolling again, and when it stopped moving, more hands lifted her onto yet another bed. She heard murmuring, felt needles pricking the backs of her hands and round sticky pads being stuck to her chest. She heard the sounds of machines blipping and humming and Uncle Nelson’s voice coming from far away.

  “It’s your diabetes, Lacey. You’re in keto and I don’t know why, but I’ll find out. Hold on.”

  But she couldn’t hold on. It was too much effort.

  “Your parents are here and they’ll be in just as soon as I can get you settled.”

  Her parents? Together? Lacey felt a numbing sensation that pulled like quicksand, or an undertow, sucking her into a sea of darkness. She fought against it, panicky, like a drowning swimmer. But the numbness crept upward, seizing her legs, then her arms, and finally her mind. The last thing she remembered was the bleep of a machine and the cold, quiet terror of falling headlong into a dark and bottomless pit.

  Eleven

  LACEY FELT DRUGGED, mired down, weighted by tentacles of sleep she couldn’t quite shake loose from. She recognized the comings and goings of people—nurses, her uncle, her parents. She even recalled hearing her mother crying, which surprised her. Her mother never cried. Not even when Lacey’s father had moved out.

  She heard her father call her “Daddy’s girl.” He hadn’t called her that since she was ten. She heard Uncle Nelson giving instructions to nurses, and she was aware of tubes being changed that had been inserted into parts of her body. The one down her throat hurt whenever i
t was removed, and she was relieved when they didn’t put it back.

  Yet Lacey had no sense of time as she drifted. The artificial lights were always dim, never indicating if it was day or night outside her glass cubicle. When there were no people around, the machines kept her company and their mechanical rhythms kept diligent vigil, sometimes comforting her, other times frightening her. She would drift into wakefulness, hear their beeping and wonder, Where are the people? Why aren’t there any people?

  Finally, however, Lacey was able to free herself from the snakelike arms of the unnatural sleep that held her and floated into complete wakefulness. A bright light was shining in her eyes, and her uncle’s voice said, “Welcome back.”

  “Where—?” Her voice was wobbly and strange-sounding to her ears. And her throat hurt.

  “ICU,” her uncle answered. “You’ve been here two full days and three nights.

  The news shocked. Over two days of her life were missing and all she knew about them were pale glimpses of reality. “What’s wrong? My throat—”

  “The soreness is due to the gastro tube we put in because you were vomiting. You’ve been in a diabetic coma. We’ve got you stabilized, but I still don’t know why it happened. There are no secondary infections, nothing medical that might have caused it. I’m baffled, Lacey. So I thought that as soon as you woke up, I’d ask you why. Any ideas how this could have happened?”

  She didn’t want or need a lecture from him, so she avoided a direct answer. She said, “I’m tired.”

  “Your parents will want to see you,” he said, not forcing the issue of her collapse. “They’ve been here day and night and they’re worried sick.”

  “You mean they’ve stayed in the same room together without fighting?”

  A smile curved Uncle Nelson’s lips. “Extraordinary, huh? Nevertheless, they’ve put aside their differences for now. I’ll send them in. Later, I’ll have you transferred to a private room.”

  “I am going to be okay, aren’t I?”

  He eyed her with a cool medical calm that made her glance away. She was scared, but didn’t want to show it.

  “We’ve got to get to the root of this problem. Diabetes is serious and can cause severe complications over time. But you’ve been a diabetic for years, Lacey. You know the basic facts.”

  She knew, but had glossed over them. Complications were for “other people,” not sixteen-year-old girls such as herself. “You can send my parents in,” she told her uncle.

  Her mother and father looked ready to explode with relief when they entered the cubicle. “Oh, baby! We’ve been so worried about you.” Her mother’s eyes shone with unshed tears.

  “Lacey, it’s wonderful to see you alert. How do you feel?” Her dad needed a shave, further evidence of his concern. He was always clean-shaven.

  “How did this happen, Lacey?” her mother wanted to know. “I thought you were doing so well. It’s because you skipped your appointments, isn’t it? I should have kept a closer check on you. I blame myself.”

  Lacey was in no mood to listen to her mother’s self-recriminations. “Nagging me wouldn’t have made a difference, Mom.”

  “But why? How could this have happened?”

  “No need to bombard her, Sandra,” Lacey’s father said.

  “Alan, I’m not bombarding her. I’m simply asking what went wrong. How could she have allowed herself to lose total control of her illness.”

  “Maybe she didn’t lose control. Maybe something else is going on.”

  Listening to them made Lacey’s stomach constrict. “Has anybody from school called?” she asked, interrupting their argument.

  Her parents turned toward her. “A girl named Terri,” her mother said.

  “No one else?”

  “Your friend Katie called twice from Michigan. She’s pretty upset and wants you to call her as soon as you’re able.”

  “Uncle Nelson says I’ll be moved out of ICU later today. I’ll call Katie and Terri then. And anybody else who’s asking about me. I’ll be going home soon anyway.”

  Her parents exchanged glances. “Hasn’t your uncle talked to you?”

  “About what?”

  “About your hospitalization.”

  Lacey experienced a sensation of cold foreboding. “What about it?”

  “You’re going to be here awhile,” her father said. “Maybe a couple of weeks. They want you to undergo evaluation by a diabetes specialty team. To determine why this happened to you. And to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “What do you mean, I can’t get out of here for a couple of weeks?” The words tumbled out Lacey’s mouth the instant her uncle walked into her private room that evening. “I have to go to school. I can’t hang around the hospital.”

  Her uncle put on his best doctor expression and sat down on the side of her bed. “I can’t let you out until I know exactly what triggered your DKA.”

  “I didn’t plan to go into keto, you know.”

  “Lacey, anyone who’s monitoring their blood sugar regularly, giving their insulin shots, and maintaining an exercise program shouldn’t go into keto. At the very least, you should have smelled the buildup of acetone on your own breath.”

  She recalled Todd asking her if she’d painted her fingernails. He had smelled the acetone and she’d dismissed his observation. How stupid! She told her uncle nothing because she knew he was goading her into confessing that she’d blown it.

  “You’ve lost a lot of weight,” Uncle Nelson observed. “Were you dieting?”

  “I was counting calories,” she admitted. “But keto made me lose weight.”

  “And your blood sugar testing didn’t warn you of elevated glucose levels?”

  “So I wasn’t testing too regularly. I let it slip by on me.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “That’s an understatement.”

  “Well, I hate being in the hospital and I don’t see why I have to stay here. I can go to school and come in for regular visits.”

  “Like you did these past six months?”

  Her cheeks reddened and she felt anger welling up inside her. She wanted to jerk out the IV and march out the door. “I hate being here,” she restated. “I hate all this equipment. I feel like a freak.”

  He fingered the line attached to a small machine parked next to her bed. “This is an insulin infusion pump, and until we get you completely balanced, I want you on it. Think of it as a vacation from your twice-daily injections.”

  Her gaze followed the line that was threaded into her arm, where a needle was inserted under her skin and taped in place. “Some vacation.”

  “There are worse machines to be attached to,” he said enigmatically.

  “What’s this stuff about a team I have to see?” She changed the subject because she didn’t want a lecture on the dire consequences of diabetes.

  “An approach we use now for newly diagnosed patients. A patient sees not only the physician, but also a nurse educator, a dietician, an exercise therapist and”—he took a breath—“a counselor.”

  She stiffened at the last word. “You mean like a shrink?”

  “A psychologist who specializes in family counseling.”

  “Haven’t you heard, Uncle Nelson? The Duvals are no longer a family.”

  “Nevertheless, all of you are going to be talking to Dr. Rosenberg.”

  “Are you sure this doctor wants to be in the same room with Mom and Dad? It could be hazardous to his health.”

  “You’re the one who’s important,” Uncle Nelson declared. “They’re the ones who have to learn to work together for your benefit.”

  “That’ll be the day.”

  Uncle Nelson patted her hand. “I have other patients to see, Lacey, but I’ll be in tomorrow morning after I take a look at the readings from your blood work. I’ll be bringing the team with me for you to meet. They’re a good crew. You’ll like them.”

  I doubt it, Lacey thought, watching him exit her room. She hunkered down in the bed
with an overwhelming urge to cry.

  She might have started crying too, but a hesitant knocking sounded on her door. “It’s open,” she called.

  The door opened and Terri poked her head inside the room. “Are you up for company? Or are you in quarantine or something?”

  Twelve

  LACEY FELT HER spirits lift as if attached to a helium balloon. She beamed Terri a smile. “Come in. Come sit down. Tell me what’s happening? How’d the play go? How is everybody?”

  Terri crossed to the bed cautiously, peering hard at Lacey from beneath the brim of a funky hat. “Hey, slow down. One question at a time. First of all, are you going to be okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Terri eyed the IV line and insulin infusion pump skeptically. “You sure?”

  “These contraptions will be gone in a few days.”

  “What happened to you?” Terri edged down into a chair positioned alongside the bed. “I won’t lie. We were all totally freaked when you collapsed at the theater.”

  Lacey’s face stung with embarrassment. There was no keeping the truth hidden about her being a diabetic any longer. “I caused a real scene, huh?”

  “The play stopped and everything. An ambulance came and took you away. We were all pretty scared.”

  Lacey groaned and buried her face in her hands. It was worse than she thought. She’d never live down the humiliation. “This is so gross,” she mumbled into her hands. She looked up. “Everybody thinks I’m a total freak, don’t they?”

  “They think you’re ill.” Terri’s tone was empathetic. “Tell me, what’s going on? All your mother would tell me was that your diabetes was out of control. I didn’t know you had diabetes. Why didn’t you ever say anything to me about it?”

  “Nobody knows,” Lacey said miserably. “I hate having it.”

  “But I thought we were friends.” Terri looked hurt.

  “I don’t see any reason to dump on a friend.”

  “All the times you kept going to the bathroom and when you wouldn’t eat junk food—it was because of your diabetes, wasn’t it?”