Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Things I Don't Remember


Memory is an interesting thing, no matter how hard you try to remember specific episodes from your life, some will inevitably be forgotten with time; this is especially true of childhood memories. While concrete details will often be forgotten, feelings seem to linger.
*****
I remember being scared.
            I remember standing on the second-floor landing and trying to yell for help, but not finding the words.
“MO–," and then I threw up on the stairs. 
            Before that, I remember a week of feeling sick, not going to school, and wetting the bed. I was six and had long since outgrown that embarrassing phase of my life, but my bladder was trying to tell me something. I remember, on the first night of that week, waking up, realizing what I’d done, and rushing to the bathroom to try and sop up of the quickly cooling urine with toilet paper. I slept on the top bunk above my brother. It didn’t go unnoticed.
            I remember riding in the car to the doctor’s office after I puked on the stairs. His name was Dr. Jay; he was a very kind, bear of a man, with a low, throaty voice.
I don’t remember the visit.
I don’t remember getting my blood tested and I don’t remember being weighed, although I do remember sporting a new, slim figure, having lost close to 15 pounds in the previous week alone.
I remember Dr. Jay pulling my parents aside while I sat on the examination table after the tests, and saying something to the effect of, “We can’t say for sure, but we’re going to send you to the Barbara Davis Center, where they’ll run some more tests.” The room was well lit, and the morning so sunny that I couldn’t see anything but silhouettes.
I don’t remember anything after my visit with Dr. Jay other than meeting Dr. Peter Chase, whom I would visit every three months for the next 12 years, who said, definitively, “It’s diabetes.”
I don’t remember whether or not I knew what that meant, and I don’t remember Dr. Chase promising my mom that I would play in my soccer game that next Saturday, but I remember the changes that came with the diagnosis.  
*****
I have never liked needles. I’ve been afraid of injections, IVs, and even pokes as small as finger pricks for as long as I can remember. Something about the image of skin resisting the initial puncture only to inevitably succumb to the syringe has always made me writhe, even now, as I write this after 15 years with my disease.
I’m better about it now – thank god – but during my first few months, and maybe even my first few years as a diabetic, I was a nightmare for my parents. After meals when I would need a shot of insulin to bring my blood sugar down, I would run away as fast as I could around the house. I pretended it was a game and that I wasn’t scared, but really I ran as though it was for my life; that’s how much I dreaded shots.
We had a circular, wooden table where we would normally eat dinner. Around this table I was at my best when it came to injection avoidance and escaping the pain. Eventually, the game turned to hide and seek; I tried to figure out how I could avoid the injection for the longest period of time.
The lunchtime shots were unavoidable, especially during the school week when I would be lucky enough to pick a friend – usually, that was my best friend and next-door neighbor, Connor – who would escort me to the nurse’s office at the other end of the school. I would have to check my blood, tell the nurse how much food I was planning on eating, and get a shot anticipating that amount of carbohydrates in the food. If I was given too much, I had a stash of juice boxes in one of the drawers of my classroom, but I was always embarrassed to drink from it because I didn’t want my classmates to see and think I was somehow being given special treatment.
Other than that, I don’t remember life at school being all that different. On my first day back after being sick for so long Ms. Weins, my first grade teacher, asked me to say something to the class. I remember her asking me to show the class what I had brought in that day. Unfortunately, diabetes still hadn’t registered in my system, and instead of showing off my new, stainless steel bracelet that said “Jack Todd, Type I Diabetic, Insulin Dependent,” I showed off the National Geographic animal explanation clippings I had happened to bring to school that day. I remember getting as far as explaining the clipping about polar bears before Ms. Weins stopped me and told me what she really wanted me to talk about.
I don’t remember telling my classmates “I’m a diabetic;” I don’t remember them asking me what that meant, or even actually explaining it to them. I do know, though, that it had been described to me as “my pancreas, the organ that creates insulin in my body, got shot and died,” and that’s likely how I related it to them as well. The image accompanying that description was a pancreas – which, thinking about it now, looked suspiciously like a kidney – wearing a cowboy hat, boots with spurs, and a pistol on its hip. I don’t remember whether or not there were tumbleweeds blowing in the background, but for some reason I think there were. It was all very dramatic.
*****
I remember meeting Tavia. It was my second visit to the Barbara Davis Center.
“Heyyy JT!” she said with a high five and no previous introduction. That was all the introduction I needed. “How we doin’ today?”
Every three months, after the initial onslaught of visits to the Center, I remember Tavia greeting me in the same way.
I don’t remember how I responded, at least not the first time. “Uhm, hey,” followed by clutching my mother’s hand and nuzzling my shy face into her hip is a good guess.
Tavia was warm – something that I needed, however removed from the situation I may have been. When she saw that I was afraid of needles, she, and she alone, could talk me down, reassuring me that “this won’t hurt one bit.” Or when my bloodsugar would plummet, she would greet me in her office with graham crackers, peanut butter, and a can of apple juice with the tinny aftertaste.
I remember one time when I visited the center with my grandmother; my bloodsugar was the lowest it has ever been, 22 mg/dl – a meaningless number, even, in some ways, to me, but a diabetic’s bloodsugar should hover around 100. My grandmother had no idea what to do or how to react; Tavia was the only resolution. I don’t remember her saying “Heyyy JT!” as I walked in asking for sugar, but I have no doubt it happened.
*****
            I remember – mostly because my family will never let me forget – waiting for my sister, Sony, to finish a piano lesson as my bloodsugar plummeted. I wailed, “Mom, I feel flimsy.”
            My mother swears that’s when the reality of my diabetes hit her. “None of my children have ever used the word ‘flimsy,’ other than on that day,” she says. We went to the 7-Eleven down the street and got a Slurpee. I hardly remember drinking it on the front doorstep of her piano teacher’s house as Sony finished her lesson.
*****
            Apart from my diagnosis, I remember relatively few concrete details from my childhood. I remember many of my adventures with Connor, some of them only vaguely, but couldn’t possibly put them in context.
I vividly remember random days like those spent playing Hi-Ho! Cherry-O in Connor’s basement. In one such memory, I can still see the horrible bowl-cut Connor was sporting at the time and the black and white striped turtleneck he was wearing that was stained with red juice.  Apart from times like these, though, much of my childhood is hazy to me now.
I don’t remember why Connor or I thought it was a good idea to go climbing around on his roof or “tire-tapping” each other as we biked to and from school; I don’t remember how we discovered an enormous sink hole in his back yard or why his sister, Bailey, thought it was a good idea to run around my house with an open Sharpie; I don’t remember our parents passing us over the chain-link fence connecting our backyards. I do remember being happy, though. I don’t remember diabetes changing that, and I’m satisfied knowing it all could have ended a lot worse than it did. 

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