Sweet Tooth

by Tim Anderson

  The door opened, and in walked Dr. Vogel carrying a clipboard at which he stared incredulously. He looked up at me, obviously spooked.

  “Are you…OK?” he ventured.

  Given that I was sitting in a downtown Baltimore ER examination room wearing a hospital gown at midnight on a Friday, I couldn’t help but think that the answer to that question was self-evidently “No.” But since I tend to avoid conflict at all costs, I said, “Yeah, I mean, you know, I feel kind of weird, but…”

  He consulted the paper on his clipboard. “I’m actually having a hard time believing this. Your blood sugar level is the highest number I’ve ever seen.”

  I blinked and tried to swallow.

  “It’s nineteen eighty.”

  This number meant nothing to me.

  “Normal blood sugar is seventy to one twenty.”

  That clarified things a bit.

  “Your pancreas is clearly not producing insulin anymore. We need to get you a hefty dose right now and get this number down.”

  Pancreas? Isn’t that the thing that stores bile? No, wait, that’s the liver. (Spleen?)

  “I’m afraid we’ll need to admit you. Your levels are really high. It’s incredible. You could go into a coma at any moment—in fact, I’m surprised that you’re not actually already in one. Like I said, highest blood sugar level on record.”

  So do I get a prize?

  “And then there’s the danger of ketoacidosis.”

  Surely he just made that word up.

  Turned out he hadn’t. I was in real trouble. I was not just sick. I was diseased. And worse: I would not be traveling the rest of the way up to Saranac to frolic in the sun and sand and roll around in the surf with Brad, kissing him passionately as the waves crashed upon us and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” blasted from the camp speakers. All of that was definitely going to happen, and now it would not.

  Dr. Vogel left the room to fetch a nurse, and I was left alone to contemplate the words he’d just said to me. It appeared that there were syringes in my future. Syringes full of insulin and misery.

  I got up off the examination table and walked over to the mirror above the sink. I washed my hands, working that soap into as satisfying a lather as I could manage. After rinsing my hands, I splashed water on my face, then looked at myself in the mirror. I still couldn’t see very clearly, but the blurry features that appeared in front of me sure looked terrified.

  An hour later I was lying in a bed in a hospital room sucking a Diet Shasta through a straw as my blood sugar level slowly stabilized thanks to the turbo-dose of insulin I’d been given in my inaugural diabetes syringe jab. My parents had been called and had immediately gotten on the road to make the drive from Raleigh. The buses were ready to roll back onto the interstate. And it was decided that Todd would stay overnight with me until my parents got here; he would rent a car in the morning to drive up to the lake.

  It was so sweet of Todd to offer to do this. So sweet. Just amazingly generous and gracious and WHY COULDN’T BRAD STAY WITH ME INSTEAD?!

  Brad came in to say good-bye before getting on the bus.

  “You’re going to be fine, buddy,” he said, flashing that smile. “We’re all going to be praying for you that your stay here is short and sweet.”

  I nodded and took another long suck on my Diet Shasta, emptying the can.

  “You’re going to be OK. We’ll get together and play tennis or something when I get back, OK?”

  “Sure, that’ll be fun.” Not as fun as swapping slop on a sandy beach, but OK.

  And with that he was gone, leaving me alone with a new, dreadful disease that prohibited me even drowning my sorrows in a bowl of freaking Froot Loops.

  “Want to watch TV?” Todd asked, coming into the room with some snacks he bought at the vending machine down the hall.

  “Yeah, let’s turn it on,” I said. “Oh, and would you mind getting me another one of these?” I asked, pointing to my empty Diet Shasta can.

  I was still very thirsty.

  The teenage boy is sleeping peacefully in his bed at home.

  Listen to that dulcet hacksaw snoring erupting from his giant nose, sounding like cutlery being thrust into a blender in front of a microphone. But despite this veneer of elegant slumber, all is not well.

  First there’s a quiver. Then a twitch. And a jerk of the head.

  Maybe he’s dreaming about being slapped in the face? More quivers. And twitches. Another jerk of the head.

  Now it seems that a thousand beads of sweat have popped through the surface of his skin, blending to cover every inch of his body in a clammy glaze.

  A few more twitches. Another couple of jerks.

  He’s dreaming that he’s alone on the floor of a brightly lit bedroom that’s not his, kneeling on a brilliant light-green shag carpet and looking out the window as his aunt and uncle get into their car and drive away. Casey Kasem is on the radio reading a long-distance dedication. The boy is amazed by the brilliance of the green of the carpet, and really wants that shade for his room. He pulls at a clump of carpet strands, and Casey Kasem tells him, “Needs mowing.” He jerks his head around looking for the lawn mower. He doesn’t see it anywhere in the room, but his head keeps jerking and shaking so it’s hard for him to see. The brilliant green of the room is soon pierced with snatches of black as his eyelids repeatedly pop open, then close again. He slowly slips out of the green room and into the darkness, twitching all the way.

  The bed is soaking wet now, and its occupant—not to put too fine a point on it—appears to be somewhat possessed by the devil.

  Twitchjerktwitchjerktwitchjerktwitchjerktwitchjerktwitchjerk-THUDwhackCRACK-CRACKCRACKCRACK.

  Yikes. He has left the bed and fallen nose-first onto his hardwood bedroom floor. Couldn’t have been pleasant. And what is that he’s doing now? Is that…swimming? Yes, he appears to be trying to swim freestyle on his hardwood floor. He was never a very fast swimmer, but he’s really going for it right now.

  There is more cracking and whacking of his head and limbs against the floor for a few minutes. He’s trying to get back into that green room. God knows why; that carpet was hideous.

  Ah, a light! Now we’re getting somewhere. The boy’s mother and father have rushed into the room and turned on the light. The mother says something to the father—I can’t hear what because of all the whacking and cracking. She’s left the room, and the father has crouched down, taken hold of the flailing boy, and is now trying to turn him over onto his back. It’s not an easy task—the father has to grip the boy harder than he would like and force him to turn over, all the while deflecting blows from the boy’s crazy spastic spider arms.

  At last the mother returns with a container in her hand—it’s a plastic bottle in the shape of a bear. A squeeze bottle. That’s a funny phrase to say: squeeze bottle. Squeeze bottle. Squeeze bottle. The more you say it, the funnier it sounds, no? Anyway, what’s in it?

  The mother screams at the father to hold the boy down, and as he does that she lifts the container to the boy’s mouth. Ah, I see, it’s honey. She’s squeezing honey into his mouth. And around it. And above it. Basically it’s going all over his cheeks and hair is what I’m saying.

  “TIM! TIM! TIM!” The sound of his mother’s screeching into his bouncing young face appears to be tugging him loose from the spotty netherworld he’s in. Am I right? He looks to be opening his eyes a little more often now. Yes, he’s now back with us, his eyeballs flitting to different spots on the bright white of his bedroom ceiling. His head is still banging against that floor, and his face and hair are just slathered with honey. If you rolled him in nuts you could sell him at the state fair.

  “TIM! Can you hear me?!” His mother has, it appears, turned the volume up to 11.

  “Drink the honey, sweetie! Drink it! Drink it! Honey, hold him!!!”

  The boy twists and shakes. His arms flap and flail. It’s like he’s trying to do the hand jive but instead of doing it in a gymnasium at a
1950s school dance he’s doing it on his back, in his bedroom, while his mother covers him in honey, intermittently hitting the bull’s-eye of his open fishmouth. The mother tells the dad to hold him and leaves the room. The boy, even from the twitchy dimension he’s currently in, can hear her yelling into the phone, and he even recognizes the human English word “diabetic,” though he can’t recall what it means. A minute later she’s back in the room, still wielding the honey bear.

  The boy gurgles and moans as his body, minute by minute, calms the hell down. Slowly the jerks become less jerky, the floor thwacks less thwacky. As his slippery body begins to reach the mechanical balance of a normal, nonpossessed human (give or take a few persistent twitches and jerks), his mother mercifully turns the volume down to about 8 or 9.

  “Tim! Tim? Tim? Can you hear me? Can you understand me?”

  The boy breathes deeply, and his eyes flit from his mom’s face to his dad’s face and back to his mom’s face. His parents hover over him like stunned scientists over a newly unfrozen alien specimen.

  “Buddy? You there?” his dad says.

  The boy blinks and turns his head to look around his room. He discovers that he’s lying on the floor. That he’s sticky. And that his nose is hurting like a bitch.

  A siren sounds outside the house. The dad leaves the room and goes downstairs. The mom strokes the boy’s head.

  “Tim? Can you hear me? Say something if you can hear me.”

  “Mmmmeh,” the boy says, his honey lips smacking, his synapses finally starting to synapt again. He struggles to lift himself up. He falls back down and thwacks his head again.

  The sound of multiple footsteps on the stairs reaches their ears, louder and louder.

  The boy tries again to summon the strength to sit up on the floor and get himself back into bed, and makes some headway this time. He’s covered in sweat and is feeling a chill. He flops onto the bed and quickly pulls the covers over his wet body before the footsteps turn into people. He’s in his underwear, you see, and he doesn’t want to be seen by strangers in his underwear. (This will change.)

  The three paramedics make their dramatic entrance. The boy is still confused and doesn’t understand why three hunky firemen (are they firemen?) have entered his room. He sits bug-eyed and breathless as one of the handsome brutes comes over and takes his hand. Not, sadly, to ask him out for pancakes, but to test his blood sugar. He grabs the boy’s index finger, swabs the tip with an alcohol wipe, and jabs it with a lancet. He squeezes out a drop of blood, turns the finger over, and transfers the blood to a test strip. The boy lies back with his arm outstretched, surrendering to the manhandling like he’s on the cover of a romance novel.

  After two minutes, the glucose monitor gives its reading: 34. Very low. But after all that honey, it is certainly on its way up.

  The mother chats with the paramedics for a few minutes, and the boy sneaks a quick look underneath his blanket: Thank God, no boner.

  Ten minutes later, after checking his sugar again, the calendar boys depart. The exhausted boy, his body ravaged by adrenaline, slips back into sleep.

  He will not dream about a bright green carpet. He will dream about crash landing on a snow-covered planet and being attacked by a clown with pinwheels stuck into his wig.

  He’s had a lot of sugar.

  CHAPTER 2

  Knowledge is power, this is a certainty. Thing is, I’ve never been particularly power hungry, and my knowledge of the world’s realities had always been a little skewed. For example, when I was a paranoid youngster, I’d thought that Olympic events decided geopolitics. So if the Russians beat us in, say, the pole vault, we Americans would all be sent to labor camps. I learned later on this was not the case, but that was probably only because the USA beat the Soviet Union in hockey. The point is, I had no idea how the world worked.

  In the weeks after my diagnosis, I felt completely and utterly powerless. I needed to regain some semblance of equilibrium, to fill in some of the gaps in my understanding of the world o’ diabetes so I could go back to living my life half awake rather than completely passed out. For example, why did I have such a lazy pancreas?

  “Type 1 and type 2 diabetes have different causes, yet two factors are important in both,” my informational pamphlet from the American Diabetes Association proclaimed. I was sitting at home on the couch watching Days of Our Lives and wondering (1) how I ended up with this disease, (2) if I did anything to cause it, and (3) if Calliope was ever going to get a decent storyline. The latter question would be answered in time (no, and the answer was because daytime television writers didn’t know what to do with funny women), but the first two questions were really bothering me. I’d never gotten a very good answer from anyone at the hospital about why this had happened. I needed to know that it wasn’t my fault; that I was just an innocent babe in the woods whose destiny it was to have an insulin deficiency.

  “First, you must inherit a predisposition to the disease. Second, something in your environment must trigger diabetes.”

  Something in my environment, something in my environment, hmmm. Trying to think. What in my environment changed in the past month or so? I got a haircut, but that’s never triggered diabetes before. I swallowed a watermelon seed at a picnic a few weeks ago, but that doesn’t lead to diabetes, that just leads to germination of a new baby watermelon in your stomach. Oh, I know, I’d pleasured myself constantly to magazines swiped from Satan’s own porn closet. COULD THAT BE IT?! I needed the good people at the American Diabetes Association to tell me that that was not it.

  “One trigger might be related to cold weather,” the pamphlet continued unhelpfully. “Type 1 diabetes develops more often in winter than summer and is more common in places with cold climates.” Well, that was certainly the exact opposite scenario from the one I’d just experienced. Got anything else, ADA?

  “Early diet may also play a role. Type 1 diabetes is less common in people who were breastfed…”

  OK, stop right there. I was breastfed plenty. I loved the teat. Was all over that shit. Mom was actually still weaning me off my pacifier when I was four, that’s how much of a nipple fanatic I was. I’m gonna give you one more shot, diabetes pamphlet.

  “In many people, the development of type 1 diabetes seems to take many years. In experiments that followed relatives of people with type 1 diabetes, researchers found that most of those who later got diabetes had certain autoantibodies in their blood for years before.”

  Oh, so it’s the autoantibodies, thank God. Science sure cleared that one right up.

  In the weeks after my Baltimore meltdown and my initiation into the lifestyle of a two-injections-and-five-finger-pricks-a-day diabetic wunderkind, I found solace in the two small blessings that such a terrible new existence allowed: sympathy and diet soda. Preferably at the same time. Diet Coke just tasted better when it was sipped while chatting with a visitor who was looking at me with pity. (Did I encourage their pity with an evocative expression of plucky bravery? Maybe.) And it was downright delicious when sipped while staring into the dreamy eyes of a visitor such as Zach, a player on the Sanderson soccer team who had been on the Saranac trip and had stopped by to see how I was.

  “That must have been really scary,” Zach said, sitting on my couch wearing sexy soccer shorts.

  “Yeah, it was kind of scary, but, you know, I was lucky. I could have died.” The day would eventually come when I would have to stop using that reference to death as a way of getting hearts to bleed. That day was not today.

  “Wow,” Zach responded, looking into my brave face.

  “Yeah, it was crazy. But, so, tell me about Saranac! Do you want a Diet Shasta?”

  Yes, diet soda had entered my daily life in a big way. Though my taste buds recoiled in horror at first, after being force-fed Diet Shastas in the hospital in Baltimore for a few days, and another week of them when I was moved down to my local hospital in Raleigh, my revulsion subsided. I got used to the fake taste, and I started liking—even c
raving—it. And it didn’t take me long to place the limited choices available to me on a continuum running from “crisp and delicious” to “wholly, irrevocably unacceptable”: Diet Coke? Sure, bring it on. Fresca? OK, that’s pretty refreshing—it’s right in the name! Diet Pepsi? If there’s absolutely nothing else. Diet Rite? (Eye roll, stink-eye.) Tab? Fuck that bullshit.

  Mom never bought us sodas when we were growing up—we were raised on sweet tea, naturally, because it was healthier—but after my diagnosis she started buying the hell out of some diet sodas. It was like she felt they were the one thing she could allow me to indulge in without sending my blood sugar levels into conniptions. And though these fizzy saccharine bombs were probably giving me cancer, I guess we just figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

  Plus, I needed something to take the edge off. Not only had my nontropical-but-still-sun-drenched vacation in upstate New York been thwarted and my doomed romantic hopes of seeing Brad’s fuzzy navel also crushed, I was looking at spending my summer giving myself tutorials on the best places on my body to plunge a syringe into twice a day. Really, if I didn’t deserve a diet cola and some sympathy, then who did?

  So it came as a little bit of a surprise when my girlfriend Dawn, who by all rights should have been first aboard the Empathy Express, broke up with me while I was in the hospital. She didn’t call, because that would have been too awkward. She sent a sympathy card, with a lengthy note of explanation written on loose-leaf paper, which basically boiled down to: I’m, like, so messed up, and I met Roger the College Freshman, and I’m really sorry for your situation, but I’ve got to do what’s right for me.

  This was just a terrible development. Not the breakup; sure, it was unfortunate, but our relationship was obviously going nowhere—well, you know, no place that Roger couldn’t take her much more enthusiastically. What really galled me was that, in breaking up with me via Hallmark card, she didn’t allow me the dramatic hospital room breakup scene that would have made the whole relationship worthwhile. You know, something like: