Some Kind of Normal

by Heidi Willis

  "Is this a drug reaction?" Laura is suddenly backing against the wall, eyes wide over Ashley's gulping of her drink.

  "Yes. It's called insulin, and she needs it to live. But she needs to eat when she takes it or she dies. Do you get that? You'd let her sit here and die while you made your smug little point about zero tolerance?"

  I snatch the insulin pen off the desk and hold it close to her face. "It's prescription. Does this look like it's dangerous to you? Does this look like some illegal substance? It's got a drug company logo on it. Do you people not read the notes I send in? She's got diabetes. Why do you think she was gone all week?"

  Ashley is wide-eyed, but I can't stop. All this anger at what is happening to our lives rushes out, and I can't stop. Is this what her life is going to be now? Shots and tests and accusations and near-death experiences?

  And while I'm ranting more, the door opens and I feel a hand on my shoulder. When I see it's Travis I burst into tears, and he wraps his arms around me. Laura, smartly, leaves.

  When she returns, the contents of my purse are not spread around her desk anymore, and the can of coke is empty and in the trashcan, and Travis has pulled up a chair between me and Ashley. Laura looks at us coolly as she sits behind the safety of her desk. "Do I need to call security or can we resolve this now?"

  Travis leans over, resting his hands on the desk. "Do you have any idea. . ." His voice trails off with a tremble. I expected him to smooth us out, but instead he stands and opens the door, nodding for me and Ashley to leave.

  "This isn't over," Laura says, raising her voice enough to follow us into the hall. "Prescription or not, Ashley brought drugs to school. And a needle. That's serious, and the school board's going to be on my side."

  Travis walks back to her, his face inches from hers, and lowers his voice. "If you think for one second you, or your school board, is going to keep us from keeping our daughter alive, you are in for a long fight."

  On the way out I watched him put his arm protectively around Ashley, and a weight I didn't know I carried fell off my shoulders.

  ~~~~

  We call Dr. Benton, who's with a patient and whose nurse tells us we need to get us something called a 504 and refers us to a lawyer who will help us if we need it. I say we should wait 'til Dr. Benton calls back, especially since we got insurance to cover the doctor but no lawyer insurance, but Travis calls anyway. The lawyer seems overly eager to talk to us. I think he smells a lawsuit, but by now I just want Ashley back in school.

  She's gotten over the fear of being in trouble and now is complaining about the way they hauled her out in front of her friends and made a scene at the school. She's afraid she can never show her blush-cheeked, lip-glossed face again.

  This drama is new, so I test her blood, hoping it's the diabetes, but I'm disappointed when the meter shows 132. I realize it's just being twelve.

  "At least twelve goes away," Travis says, tying on a tie I haven't seen in a month of Sundays. "If the diabetes causes this kind of moodiness, we'd never get her married off."

  I point out a salsa stain on the tie, and he takes it off. He rummages through his drawers trying to find his only other tie, a white one with small blue and pink handprints Logan and Ashley made for him one Christmas back when their handprints fit on something as small as a tie.

  "You sure you don't want to go with me?"

  "I wouldn't know what he was saying anyway." I spit on my finger and rub it across the salsa stain trying to figure if I'd washed it already and it's set in for good.

  Travis stops fiddling with the knot and looks at me. "You think I do?"

  "You know better than I do."

  "I don't understand half of what anyone has said the last week. You were the one who understood what the doctors were trying to say. Carbohydrates, basals, hyperglycemia. I got no idea still what any of that means."

  "Logan explained it all to me," I say, finally dumping the tie on the heap of dirty laundry on the bed.

  "Maybe we should send Logan to the lawyer." We look at each other as if we're actually considering this, and then he pecks me on the cheek, which I can't remember the last time he done this, and says goodbye.

  Ashley is flopped melodramatically across her bed and moaning that since everyone is at school, she can't even text them. I toss her book bag at her and tell her to catch up on all her make-up work or help me fold clothes. She chooses the schoolwork.

  When Travis comes home the house is some semblance of back to normal, and I'm in the kitchen broiling chicken again 'cause I don't know what else to fix. He lays a folder on the table and grabs a Dr. Pepper from the fridge before sitting down.

  "Is it fixed?" I ask, joining him. "Can she take the needles to school, and more importantly, can we fire Laura?" This last comment is joking, but only partly, 'cause I'm still mad.

  "Yeah, yeah, and no. At least not yet." He shoves the folder across the table at me, but I don't open it because I know it'll be full of legal jargon.

  "Just tell me."

  "It's called a 504. It's a federal civil rights law, so it applies to everyone in the country, including us."

  "Ashley ain't black," I say, because civil rights brings flashes of bus protests and diner brawls to mind. I don't get where this is going.

  "Not civil rights like race. It's a disability law."

  "She ain't disabled either."

  "According to the law she is. She needs special rules for her because she's different, the lawyer said."

  "She's not different." I get up and pull out pans for chitlins and then realize I have no idea how many carbs are in them, so I put them away.

  "I don't mean she's different. I mean, she has different needs. Put that away and come sit down and listen, 'cause I can't take days off work every time there's a problem at Ashley's school. You gotta handle this, too."

  I sit, but I don't look at the papers.

  "It just means she's got rights. It's good stuff, Babs. Look at this." He pulls out a paper with a list with those dotty things in front of each item, but I push them back to him.

  "I don't want to read them. Just tell me."

  "Okay." He settles for this and glances at the papers. "A 504 is a law that says Ashley's got the right to feel safe at school, like she's not going to pass out and die and nobody will know what to do. The law says there's gotta be people at the school who know what diabetes is, and know how to give her shots if she needs it, or test her blood, and they gotta know what all the numbers mean, too, so they know if she needs to eat or call a doctor or something." He looks at the list again. "All her teachers got to know she has diabetes and what it looks like if she goes high or low, and what to do if it does. They gotta let her go to the doctor anytime she needs to and it's excused. And she gets to go to the bathroom or water fountain anytime, too. They can't keep her from doing that."

  I think about how Ashley came home crying the day right before she passed out, because the teacher wouldn't let her go to the bathroom, and she thought she was going to pee her pants in class. She was so embarrassed. And I told her to stop drinking so much.

  "She gets to eat whenever she needs to, and," he looks at me triumphantly, "she gets to carry her needles and insulin."

  "Really?" All I can think of is, We got Laura!

  Travis puts the papers back in the folder and drains the Dr. Pepper. "But we got to fill out all the papers first. To make it legal."

  "Well, let's do it." I get up to get a pen when Travis stops me.

  "We can't do it ourselves. We have to do it with the school, with the principal and the administrative people, and the teachers."

  "I'm not doing this with Laura. I won't sit in a room with her again and listen to her smug educated talk and her big words and her talking down to us."

  "But we're right." He's quiet when he says this, like he's calming me down, but what he's really doing is offering me a weapon to bludgeon Laura. "We were right, and she was wrong, and now we need to go get her to put that on paper." />
  I look at the papers in my hands and nod. "I'll call and make an appointment tomorrow."

  But we never make it.

  ~~~~

  Chapter Twelve

  I don't notice Ashley's itching right away. By the time I see her scratching at her stomach with the fervor of a dog with fleas, she's scratched a good few layers of skin off, and fingernail size streaks of blood are seeping through her clothes. She winces giving herself a shot for dinner, and I see the red blotches across her white shirt.

  I pull up the shirt enough to see her abdomen is dotted with angry welts. I recognize them right away as hives. I'm no stranger to hives on my kids. Logan got them when he drank milk as a toddler, and every time he rolled down a hill of Saint Augustine grass. Ashley got them when the local pool dumped too much chlorine in the water and when I use bleach that smells like flowers. But we haven't been to the pool in months, and I stopped using bleach the day Travis accidentally used it instead of detergent on a load of his work jeans.

  I run through the list of suspects in my head. Laundry detergent: the same. Bath soap: the same. Her shirt: cotton, and old. She hasn't used any lotions or perfumes that I know of. I ask. She denies.

  "When did it start?"

  "I don't know." She pulls away and cleans up her testing supplies and needles, unconcerned.

  "Think."

  She does. "Right before we left the hospital."

  Well, that makes sense. Maybe it's the hospital sheets, or gowns, or the disinfectant that they use. I give her calamine lotion and she dabs it across the welts before going to bed.

  Her blood sugar at midnight is 103. A good number. I test again at three in the morning and it is 174. I blink at the number on the glowing green screen. Ashley is asleep immediately although she never fully awoke. I am seeing double with exhaustion. In a fog of awareness, I decide I've done something wrong and go back to bed without checking her again.

  In the morning the meter reads 260.

  "But I didn't eat anything bad, " she protests, scratching the palms of her hands something fierce.

  I grab them and see they are covered in a rash.

  "When did this happen?"

  "I don't know. Since last night. This morning I guess."

  "Do I call the pediatrician, the allergist or the endocrinologist?" I ask Travis, who is in the garage looking for a new package of drill bits for his toolbox.

  "Dr. Benton."

  It's my thought too, not because I think it's got to do with diabetes-- who's heard of a rash with diabetes?--but because I like Dr. Benton best.

  "What do you think it means?"

  "I don't know, Babs, but you have to take care of this. I can't take any more time away from work. Just call and make an appointment this morning. I'm sure it's nothing."

  I know it's not nothing because by the time we arrive at Dr. Benton's office the hives are on her arms and neck.

  We've never been to Dr. Benton's office, and it's much smaller than the pediatrician's. There's less than half a dozen chairs, and the only people in the waiting room are two old people. The receptionist takes one look at Ashley and tells us to come on back.

  The room is small, two chairs and one of those examination tables crammed together, and the walls are white and the window has white aluminum blinds that are open to the oak tree behind the building.

  It takes only a minute or two before Dr. Benton comes in. He shakes our hands and makes small talk before asking Ashley to get up on the table. He looks at her neck and arms first, then her hands and stomach, which by now are raw and scabbed.

  "When did this start?"

  "Right before we left the hospital."

  "Can you remember the day?"

  Ashley thinks before answering. "Maybe the night before we left, but maybe even the day before that. I don't remember exactly." I want to ask her why she never told me.

  "That's okay. Do you remember if it was before or after you started taking the shots?"

  "After. I'm pretty sure."

  He sits and looks at a folder, which I am guessing is her file from the hospital. "Where on your body did they start?"

  "My stomach." He nods as if this means something.

  "And then where?"

  "Then my hands, then my arms, then my neck. But those all just started today."

  "We didn't know what doctor to call," I add. "She's had hives before, but since her blood sugar was so high, we figured you would be our first stop." This is not entirely true, but true enough.

  He looked up with his eyebrows arched high. "What's going on with the blood sugar?"

  "It's high," I repeat, not knowing what else I should say.

  "But I didn't eat anything," Ashley adds. "It just went up. I took my shots and everything."

  "Do you have the records of your food, insulin amounts, and meter readings?"

  I have forgotten to bring anything, and I'm about to apologize for this when Ashley pulls it out of her purse, the pocketsize book she got at the hospital to record everything she eats and how it affects her. Dr. Benton looks through it, eyebrows scrunching at the last page.

  "Is it an allergy?"

  "Maybe." He stands and pats Ashley on the knee. "I'm going to copy this off and then you can have it back. I'm going to send you to the hospital for a few tests."

  "Children's Hospital?"

  "No, just the one here. I want to run a few allergy tests. I'll be right back."

  He disappears and I watch Ashley fidget with her purse. "I'm sure it's nothing," I say to calm her, even though I'm lying as I say it. That feeling I had in Austin last week--the feeling that things were going to get worse before getting better--is getting stronger.

  Dr. Benton returns with the logbook and a dose of Benadryl. "Take this and see if it helps the itching some. I called the hospital and they're expecting you. They're just going to take some blood and run a few tests on it for me to rule out some things."

  "What do you think it is?"

  "We won't know until the tests come back." I can tell he's hedging, and this is very unlike the doctor who was so straight forward with us last week. He holds Ashley's hands as she hops down from the table. "It's probably something simple, like a reaction to the insulin we put you on. We may just have to switch brands, and that's no big deal. You won't even notice a difference. Except the new one won't make you look like you've got the pox." He smiles and punches Ash lightly on the arm as he leads us out and tells us he'll call us with the results as soon as he gets them.

  ~~~~

  "Four hours," I say, yanking open the drawer with the pots and pans, and then slamming it again. "They shot her up with a bunch of stuff, and then we have to sit around and wait to see if she goes into ana . . . ana-something."

  "Anaphylactic shock," Logan says, not looking up from his homework. I'm starting to regret telling him he has to do schoolwork in the kitchen instead of locked away in his room with his music blaring.

  "What's that?" Travis asks.

  "It's when she has an allergic reaction that kills her," I open the refrigerator, then switch to the freezer, which I also slam. "Can you believe that? We can replace someone's heart with someone else's but the best way we can tell if someone has an allergy is to inject them with it and see what happens. Is there nothing in this house we can eat but chicken? If I have to eat one more broiled chicken, I might choke to death."

  "What about spaghetti," Travis suggests.

  "You trying to kill her?" I pull out the box from the pantry and slide it roughly across the counter at him. "Look at the carbs in that."

  "So did they find anything?" He slides the spaghetti back to me.

  "No. Now we have to wait two days and see what happens. Meanwhile she's scratching herself raw. I guess we'll have chicken."

  "We can't eat broiled chicken every night, Babs."

  "What about tacos?" Logan unfolds his lanky body from the stool and goes to the pantry, pulling out the box of shells and handing it to me without looking at it. "2
1 carbs for three shells. Minimum for the meat and cheese, maybe four for tomatoes."

  "What about the beans?" I'm not trying to be troublesome, but I'm pretty sure beans are out.

  Logan shrugs and takes his place behind his books again. "Make a salad."

  I look at Travis who also shrugs. "Anything but chicken sounds good to me."

  "I'm done." Logan shuts his textbook and notebook and shoves them in his backpack. "I'm going to Jim's to practice. His band has a gig Saturday, and they asked me to stand in."

  I open my mouth to say no way. I don't like the band. I don't like his drumming. It's a school night. But I think of the tacos, and the cake, and the monopoly game, and I just nod.

  "Back by six-thirty," I say.

  "No prob," he says, and he's gone.

  "Is this serious?" Travis asks when we're alone.

  "I don't think so." I take a seat at the high stool next to Travis. "Dr. Benton seems to think if it's an allergy to the insulin, we just switch. In fact, he already gave us a vial of a different brand."

  "The long acting one or the meal one?"

  "The meal one."

  Laying the paperwork from the hospital on the counter, I go through the tests with Travis. I don't know how to pronounce most of the words, and even though the allergist explained what tests he was going to run, I couldn't remember well enough to explain them.

  "What's a serological test?" Travis asks.

  "I think it just means blood test. They did a scratch test, where they kinda pricked the skin on her back with different things that might cause allergies, and then they took blood to test, too. I think."

  "This says they are testing for carrier proteins and additives. I thought they were testing for insulin. Could it be something else?"