[stylist] Writing exercise 2 (Patricia Foster's)

[Priscilla McKinley]

Hey, guys,

I decided to try adding some information to a piece of writing where I
don't know what happened, the "what I don't know" exercise.  While
this is far from finished, I do think that writing some of my thoughts
about what I don't know helped me start to see things a bit more
clearly, as Patricia said it should.  I included a little bit of
information before to set the context.

Thanks,

Priscilla


     I was diagnosed with Type 1 juvenile diabetes at age eleven,
after my mother noticed my excessive thirst, frequent urination, leg
cramps, and extreme weight loss  fourteen pounds in two weeks.  When I
arrived home from school one day, she told me I had to go see Doctor
Owen, the only doctor in my hometown in Northern Iowa, but I was too
scared.  I also had noticed the symptoms, and I thought I had cancer,
a new word in my vocabulary from watching "Love Story" on television,
and I didn't want to find out I had only three months to live.  My
mother chased me through the house, but I managed to climb the stairs
and lock myself in the bathroom before she could catch me.  She banged
and banged on the bathroom door, waiting for me to come out, but I
refused.  Finally she said she wouldn't make me go see Doctor Owen if
I would give her a urine sample.  Reluctantly I agreed, and she set a
rinsed out pickle jar on the floor outside the bathroom door.
     That night, my mother took me to Gabe's, a small restaurant in my
hometown known for their fresh fish.  It was October and my father was
in the fields, my brother Phil at junior high football practice, and
my sister Jane at high school play practice, so my mother and I sat
alone at a little table in the back of the restaurant along a wall
with a mural.  The entire wall had been painted blue, a bright blue,
supposedly the color of water.  In the center, a life size man in a
fishing boat, a pole in one hand, a net in the other, tried to catch
the enormous orange fish swimming past the hook.  The fish was
smiling.  He was happy, and, at age eleven, I was happy for him.
     When I turned away from the fish, my mother looked at me through
her black cat eye glasses and blurted out, "You have diabetes."  At
age eleven, I didn't know anything about diabetes.  It didn't sound as
serious as cancer, but I still asked my mother if I was going to die.
"Of course you aren't going to die, honey," she answered, a strained
smile on her face.  She said I would have to stop eating sugar and
start taking insulin injections.  She said diabetes wouldn't change my
life.
     For a long time, my mother was right.  Sometimes my diabetes even
came in handy.  By bringing a syringe to school, lifting my shirt, and
stabbing myself in the stomach, I could scare the hell out of the
squeamish boys in my sixth grade class, even Bob, the class bully.  I
especially felt empowered when I gave my demonstration speech on how
to give a shot and Bob had to get up and leave the room, making the
others in the class laugh.  Sometimes I pretended to have insulin
reactions, a condition that occurs when a diabetic has too much
insulin and not enough sugar in the body, symptoms including sweating,
tremors, slurred speech, hunger, irritability, and light-headedness.
If not treated, insulin reactions can result in coma or death.  In
Junior High, all I had to do was start shaking a little and Mr.
Truitt, the fat, red-headed gym teacher who sat on the bench and
picked his nose, sent me to lunch early, excusing me from the five lap
run around the gym at the end of class.  With the pop and candy
vending machines in the high school commons area, I even managed to
work up a few good shakes during geometry and algebra.
     But during my pregnancy, I no longer had to pretend.  If blood
sugars of pregnant diabetics remain high, the babies of diabetics can
be extremely large, often weighing between ten and fifteen pounds, so
the doctors wanted me to keep my blood sugars extremely low, and I had
insulin reactions almost every day. My mother would find me sweating
in the over-stuffed leather chair in her library, or shaking in the
cherry four-poster bed in her bedroom, or passing out on the antique
fainting couch in her kitchen.  At least a few times a week, my mother
forced juice down my throat.  Sometimes I tried to bite her.  Almost
every time, I tried to push the glass away, usually spilling the juice
down my front.  But I didn't remember any of this.  When I came to,
feeling my shirt wet with juice and sweat, feeling my half-numb
tongue, like a giant cotton ball in my mouth, my mother would be
standing over me, an empty glass in her hand, a concerned look on her
face.  "That was a bad one," she would say.  "Yep, that was a bad
one."
     The worst reaction occurred when I was about four and a half
months pregnant.  My mother went to bed and I fell asleep on the couch
while watching television.  I woke up in the ambulance on the way to
the hospital, surrounded by a few volunteer rescuers from my hometown,
asking all sorts of questions.  At first, I couldn't speak, so I had
to blink once for yes, twice for no.  Do you know your name?  One
blink.  Do you know what year it is?  One blink.  Do you know what
happened to you?  This time, I blinked three times, not sure if I
knew.  I had never felt like this before.  I couldn't speak or move.
My arms and legs felt like lead, hard and heavy.  "You've had a bad
insulin reaction," one of them said.  "Your mother gave you the shot
of glucose just in time."
     At age eleven, the morning after I got out of the hospital, I
spent more than thirty minutes sitting in a kitchen chair, holding a
syringe a half an inch from my thigh.  When my mother offered to give
me the shot, worried I would be late for school, I said no.  Instead I
closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, and poked the needle through the
skin. In the years I had been diabetic, my mother never had given me a
shot of anything, not even insulin.  But in this emergency, passed out
on my mother’s couch, I was unable to refuse her help.  I imagined her
shaking me and calling my name, trying to wake me, finally realizing
she would have to give me an injection for the first time.  I imagined
her drawing up the glucose and sticking the syringe in my upper arm,
not knowing if I would live or die.  I imagined her rushing to the
phone to call for the rescue unit, realizing her secret would be out.
I wondered if she hesitated when she picked up the receiver.  Did she
worry more about people’s reactions than she did about her daughter
and her unborn grandchild?  Did this situation remind my mother of the
death of her oldest child, the daughter who had been perfect in her
mind, the daughter who never would have disgraced the McKinley family
name?  That tragic accident caused my mother to distance herself from
her other five children in fear of being hurt again.  But would she be
as upset if this youngest daughter faced the same fate, the daughter
who  had run away from home, the daughter who had been arrested on
more than one occasion, the daughter who disgraced the family name,
the daughter who could never compare?
     I hadn't been anywhere in two months, except to Obstetrics
appointments in Iowa City, and my mother hadn't shared the news of my
pregnancy with any of her friends.  So as I rode to the hospital, I
wondered what my mother said when these rescue workers rushed into the
house, through the dining room, and into the living room.  Knowing my
mother, she didn’t comment but instead pretended everything was
normal.  Would she have told them about the pregnancy in case I went
into premature labor?  Or would she have risked my life and the life
of my unborn child in order to keep our little secret?  Still, they
would have noticed, and I wondered what these people thought of me,
the daughter of one of the most respected women in the community, four
and a half months pregnant.  I imagined the surprised looks on their
faces--jaws dropping and eyebrows raising--as they entered my mother's
living room to find me unconscious on my mother's new white couch, a
colorful Monet print hanging on the wall over my head, my stomach
bulging beneath the new burgundy maternity blouse.
Disgrace...disgrace...disgrace.  Priscilla Leigh McKinley, unmarried
and pregnant, hiding away in her mother's house.
     By the time we reached the hospital twelve miles from my
hometown, I could speak.  The doctor took my blood sugar, and, since
it read 150, which is in the normal range for a diabetic, he said I
could go home.  When I started to get up, standing on my sore,
spaghetti-like legs, I noticed my gray corduroy maternity pants were
terribly wet.  Apparently during the insulin reaction, I had been
foaming at the mouth and had lost all bodily control.  My baby and I
had almost died.  But I didn't think of this.  I could only think of
how upset my mother would be if she couldn't get the yellowish stain
out of her new white couch.