Some
history. I was an only child. My own father never had much use for
me. Our relationship was strictly functional. I was a necessary
nuisance for the perpetuation of the family line. And I never had any
respect for my mother; she was detached with me and just happened to be a
pathological liar. We lived together very loosely.
Martin, to
paraphrase Ben Jonson, is Mine First borne Sonne. He's in great shape,
mind and body, for a seventeen-year old. Every night he does his forty
push-ups and forty sit-ups and he's developed quite a build, a good set
of muscles for a lanky kid. And he's casual and accepting about the
nuisance (a mild word that) of watching himself so carefully.
Valerie,
my wife, doesn't believe in ying and yang. Everything has to be seen
in absolutes of startling black and white. So when we left him, that
first night, at the hospital, and I had to stop the car because I
couldn't see the road, I knew I had disappointed her again. I was
supposed to be in control, the reliable, strong male.
She had
made the appointment for Martin to see Dr. Kale, but she didn't go with
him. It happened I got home early and decided to go along to the
doctor's office, after him. Not that we really thought there was
anything wrong. But he was thirsty all the time, and seemed tired,
lethargic. The thirst we attributed to the unusually hot weather, but
Valerie mentioned a peculiar odour on his breath, one she remembered
from when he was a baby. He'd have that same sweetish-milky smell when
he was ill, as a baby.
Dr. Kale smiled when he told us that I'd
have to take Marty right over to the hospital. He smiled because he's
always smiling, not because he had good news for us. I couldn't believe
him at first, so he took a dipstick, explained the colour code to us,
and we watched while he dipped it in Marty's urine sample. In his
beautifully modulated voice he said: "I've never seen such a positive
test before". Almost admiringly. "Take him right in. You have to; he
may go into a coma. I'll call the hospital and get in touch with a
colleague, a nephrologist. He's a good doctor. He'll look after
Martin."
An intern at the hospital examined him, took a medical
history, explained to us skimpily, about juvenile-onset diabetes.
Juvenile Diabetes Mellitus. Marty was hooked up to an intravenous unit.
He looked a little shaky, but not frightened. He listened intently to
everything the doctor said.
Watching him undress there, I
realized with a shock that he had lost weight; his ribcage looked
prominent. It never had been, before.
They took blood tests, the
lab technicians. Before we left the hospital, Valerie and I, the
intern, a young good-looking guy in the pink of health, chewing crushed
ice out of a paper cup, had a talk with us, at the nurses' station.
"His state of mind can be crucial to the development of complications",
he said. And he also said - it sounded almost insouciant: "His life
expectancy will be shortened, of course". Of course. My face felt like
cardboard. I had to resist the urge to smash the paper cup into his
bland, helpful face.
Then, in the car, I put the windshield
wipers on. It was raining. There didn't seem to be anything for us to
say. The huge maple in the hospital driveway was just getting its
summer leaves. The road was glistening wet. Val offered to drive. She
wasn't crying. It was I who had sat at the edge of the bed holding his
hand, talking to him. I kissed him goodnight.
He'd call me at
work, during those three weeks in the hospital. "Dad, you wouldn't mind
getting me some sheet music, would you? I've got a short list of
pieces I'd like to have." It was a gentle blackmail, but so what. He
had his viola and his recorders with him, there. After the third day,
he was off intravenous and they let him sign out to play his music in a
small lecture room, just outside the ward. They had to keep coming to
get him. For his blood tests, his sugar-urine readings, discussions
with the dietitian, the doctors, an examination by an ophthalmologist.
(His condition temporarily reversed his eyesight from near-sighted to
far.)
He still tired easily, but he insisted on playing his
music. When I'd step off the elevator, first thing I'd do was check the
little room. If he was there, the light would be on and the strain of a
Vivaldi, Haydn, Cimerosa piece might come wafting along the air
currents in the corridor.
I spent my lunch hours, not eating, but
prowling around in record shops, picking up Medieval and Renaissance
music for him. Or I'd go to the public library and get him reading
material. Benvenuto Cellini's memoirs, Elizabethan and Chaucerian
England, the era of Frederick the Great, the Great Houses of Europe. Not
my choices, but his.
We were on staggered work hours, so I left
the house earlier in the morning, cut my lunch time short, and left work
early to go right down to the hospital. Valerie looked after the other
kids, at home.
Once, when she did come to the hospital with me,
we had a conference with Dr. MacBeth and several of his assistants.
"Why?" I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders and looked down at the
case history he was holding. Marty was being used to further orient his
assistants.
Macbeth inspired confidence, if only because we saw
everyone, his assistants, the nurses, our family doctor, deferring to
him. It was the first time we'd met him, despite that we'd repeatedly
asked for an interview. We'd be told in hushed tones that Dr. MacBeth
was down in the clinic, or the lab doing a biopsy, or he was in
conference.
The great man smiled and said "Mr. Grantly, when we
know that, we'll know a great deal. However, I can tell you that
Juvenile Diabetes is a genetically-disposed disease. Right now, we
think that something like an infection, a virus, might trigger an
auto-immunological response, accidentally destroying vital beta cells in
the pancreas, but as yet, it's only an educated hypothesis."
Outside
the room I tried to corner him about complications. About the
possibility of retinopathy, kidney disease, gangrene, hardening of the
arteries, heart disease; everything that I'd been reading about. He
brushed me aside brusquely. "Forget all that", he said. "Right now our
only concern is to get your son operating on an even keel. The future
will look after itself."
In the afternoons, we'd sit and talk, me
and Marty, or I'd follow him into the little room, where we'd lock the
door, if it hadn't been pre-empted, and he'd play. He becomes
completely absorbed in the music. His face is serene, it's anguished,
living the music he plays.
I had to call to explain his absence
at school, at orchestra practise. Some of his friends began dropping in
to visit with him. One girl brought him a stuffed toy. Others brought
bright little get-well cards. Another friend, a boy, lugged his
bassoon over and they played duets. A girl brought her violin and they
played duets. The bassoon player talked a friend of his into bringing
over an electronic harpsichord. They played well together, until the
hospital staff discovered the plugged-in harpsichord and someone took
the machine away. Downstairs, one of the hospital electricians put a
different plug on it, compatible with the hospital's electric current.
After that they left the harpsichord in Marty's room, with the bassoon,
and they came over regularly, to play with him. I was grateful to them,
but I also felt jealous. Stupid.
I felt other things too. when
I'd come home and see the neighbourhood alive with kids, playing street
hockey, whatever, I'd wonder why it wasn't one of them.
He was
never a particularly active boy, never participated in games, group
sports. But we used to go hiking, him and me, in the Gatineau Hills.
We'd climb quite steep rock faces. The same thing in the summer, on the
Appalachian Trail. the first time I took him climbing again, about two
months after his hospital stay, we took extra food for him, to make up
for the extra energy expended. We were quarter of the way up a dry
creek bed. "Please Dad, let's stop. I don't want to go any further", he
said. His face was ashen, he was visibly trembling. I was angry. I
didn't want us to stop. I didn't want him to let himself think he was
any different than he had been. And exercise was good for him. But we
had to go back.
A week later, he was nimbling those hills like a moufflon.
At
the hospital, he taught me what the nurses taught him. I had to know
how to take his urine tests, to interpret them. Tests for sugar, for
ketones. He learned to fill the syringe with the exact amount of
insulin, and to administer the dosage to himself. Two kinds of insulin,
one fast-acting, the other slower, to tide him over each day. Every
day.
"I'd love to have lived during the Renaissance", he said
often. If he had, he'd have been dead a few weeks after the first
symptoms of diabetes manifested themselves. The ancient Greeks
described it well: "The flesh melteth down into sweet urine". But he
knew that. I thought it was his way of transcending reality.
He
was given an orange to practise on at first. It's what he used to teach
me the method too. Then came the time when I had to inject him, not
the orange. I had watched him swab his stomach and inject himself with
the insulin. His stomach. I couldn't imagine what strength of mind he
must have. I knew I had to be as matter-of-fact about the procedure as
he was. My mind flinched from the act of piercing his skin, but I
performed. At home, I would do him occasionally, in inaccessible
places. He had to avoid injecting himself in the same place repeatedly,
had to rotate the sites, to avoid skin complications.
It was a
mixed ward, the one Marty was in. There was a little girl with a
grossly swollen head; leukemia. Another boy who often lay in the
corridor on his bed, for company. His problem was attenuated tendons.
His pain was quite obviously unbearable; I'd sometimes see him crying to
himself. Another little girl sat in a wheelchair in the corridor. For
company too, but it was debatable whether she knew what was going on
around her. Her head lolled to one side, her eyes were glazed. An
atrophying brain, one of the nurses told me. Apparently, she came from a
family of four other children; underprivileged background. Two of her
siblings had already died the same way.
There were other kids
too, not so badly off. Asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, broken limbs,
other things. Some of them ran around the corridors, throwing balls,
pedalling plastic cars; happy and boisterous, fooling around, making
noise; they weren't feeling noticeably ill. Others sat glued, every
minute of the day, to the tiny television sets suspended above their
beds. There were a few other parents wandering around the halls too,
people you got to recognize, to nod at amiably.
One afternoon,
the little leukemic girl asked Marty to play something for her. He
promised her he'd give her a concert soon. He did, he set his music
stand up in the corridor. Some of the active kids began to wheel the
incapacitated ones on their hospital beds out into the corridor, until
the hallway was full of beds, of kids lying, sitting on the floor
listening. I stood in the doorway of Marty's room listening, watching
what he was doing, pied piping Telemann's water music, Bach's
Brandenburg Concerto.
Valerie didn't want to discuss it. I could
think of no one on my side of the family who had diabetes. But the
pamphlets said that although five percent of the population had
diagnosed diabetes, another estimated two percent were walking around,
not aware that they had it. I recalled how her father used to get
infections that wouldn't heal, that once it was thought he'd have to
have several toes amputated, they seemed gangrenous. And how he'd
finally died of a heart attack.
"No" she snapped at me. "He
wasn't diabetic as far as I know. don't go looking for things. You'd
like to blame me, no doubt, but there's no more evidence of diabetes on
my side of the family than there is on yours." I didn't mean to infer
that at all, but I didn't bother objecting. Maybe after all, it was what
I'd meant, I don't know. I guess it hasn't been easy for her either,
having to prepare his diet.
Valerie's mother means well, but she
drives me to distraction. She simply cannot get it through her head
that bananas are no cure. Bananas. "Why don't you give him bananas to
eat? I know bananas are very good for diabetics." And whenever she
sees Marty, she tells him reassuringly, that before long he'll be able
to go off insulin, just take pills. He suffers her stupidities sweetly,
perhaps knowing as I do, that there is also no cure for congenital
ignorance.
First thing I do, when I get up in the mornings, is
look in on him. He sleeps without pajamas, even in the winter. He
looks vulnerable, lying there, his arms spread out around his head. He
wears his hair long and it's naturally curly. He never shaves, so he's
grown a beard, a mustache. I wake him about six-fifteen to void for the
first time; to get ready for his urine test. "Hi Dad", he invariably
murmurs and smiles, then turns over. I hate to prod him, but he's got
to get up.
Yesterday, in the mail, we got the latest booklet from
the Canadian Diabetes Association. An article on retinopathy; new
surgical procedures utilizing laser beams; hope for the future.
I
always considered him to be different, a rare human being. It was
confirmed in a way I wouldn't have thought of, in the literature. While
five percent of the population is diabetic, I read, eighty-five percent
are adults, not the brittle type of diabetic that a child is. One in
twenty thousand children are afflicted, the same percentage as multiple
sclerosis. And I read that juvenile diabetics have a thirty-percent
shorter life expectancy than normal. Marty, of course, read the
literature too.
"Thirty percent. That's a lot, eh Dad?"
"Yes."
"I didn't think it was that much. Did you?"
"No ... but ..."
Of
course statistics always look bad, eh Dad? I know that I've got it
under control, that's the main thing. A lot of people don't bother."
He looks at me for confirmation. I agree. Control is the key.
He
was only sick once this past winter. His sugar readings went wacky, a
warning. We thought he was going into a hyperglycemic condition, a
diabetic coma; he had some of the right symptoms. I panicked and
couldn't get in touch with Dr. MacBeth. He's always busy, you've got to
leave a message and hope that he'll get back to you. At that point, he
was out of town. I was more familiar with him, by then.
Marty
has regular three-month check-ups at the hospital, at Dr. MacBeth's
clinic. "Everything all right?" the doctor invariably asks; pure
routine. "Sure", Marty always replies. He had quickly discovered that
he knew more about his personal metabolism than the doctor did, so he'd
stopped asking questions MacBeth couldn't find the answers for. But
now, when I wanted him, I couldn't get him. The violence of the
ague-like symptoms unnerved me.
"Dad, I can't breathe", he said,
the first night. "My throat is burning, it's constricted. And I feel
like vomiting." Now he was frightened too. Three more days of that,
then he began to come around. Small, regular insulin injections
throughout the day; a liquid diet. "That wasn't so bad after all" he
said, later. Cocky then, but he had been shaken.
The insulin
reactions are easier to deal with. "I had another reaction at school"
he'd tell me blithely. "Nothing to it, Dad. It's like being high, I
guess. I just take some direct sugar and relax a couple of minutes."
He smiles to reassure me; he knows I want to be informed about
everything. And I'm glad he wears a medic-alert bracelet so if he were
ever in trouble that he couldn't handle himself, no one might mistake his
condition.
Yesterday evening, we were both in the living room,
listening to one of his records. He had just finished doing his
exercises, was lying on the floor, his arms flung out, breathing deeply.
Naked, except for his undershorts, his chest rose and fell with his
laboured breathing, the ribcage prominent with the indrawing of air.
Light glanced off his auburn beard, his curly hair. I thought how like
Christ he looked. He seemed to be absorbed in some private revelation
only his eyes discerned, on the ceiling.
"Sometimes I feel so
sad" he said quietly. "I don't know why I feel like that" he smiled at
me. "I have nothing to be sad about. I've got everything I could
possibly want, haven't I?" The music moved the air gently around our
heads and I nodded. It wasn't the diabetes; I knew he wasn't thinking
about that. "It must be my age", he continued. "A stage I'm going
through. Maybe most kids do. What I mean is, listen to those words,
Dad."
I began to listen carefully to the words the tenor was
articulating, soft and sweetly melancholy. Marty reached the jacket
cover of the record over to me, so I could read the words while they
were being sung. The cover quoted Shakespeare: "Musick With Her Silver
Sounde". And the tenor was singing: "Away delights/go seek some other
dwelling/for I will die;/farewell false hope;/thy tongue is ever
telling/lie after lie..."
"Sometimes" he said dreamily, lying
back on the floor, looking again at that unseen panorama, hands clasped
now at the back of his head, "sometimes I feel just like that."
I
stared at him, uncomprehending. He glanced over at me and laughed
softly. "It's a love song, Dad. Unrequited love. I think about it, a
lot. Funny. It's funny to think about myself in love with someone."
I
felt relief at his silly sentimentality. "You'll go through a stage of
puppy love", I said, permitting my voice to scoff slightly, "to prepare
you for the final indignity, the real ignominy of becoming some
female's helpless puppet."
"No, Dad" he said gravely, still
smiling. "I've seen the way kids hang around each other, because it's
the accepted social norm. That's not what I want. Mine will be
different; my love."
So it's only now that the light begins to
dawn. Now I realize that his diabetes is no handicap to him. He sees
his life, his future clearly. Bitterness and doubt are simply not an
integral part of his makeup. He's a more complete human being than I
ever was. I see myself in an inherent caul of disaffection. I can't
help but wonder of his inheritance; where does he come from, this pure
soul?
Hell, the analogy of shining goodness is not entirely
appropriate. Ying and yang again. "I intend to immortalize myself" he
said just recently. I just lifted my eyebrows; it's the lazy man's or
the coward's way.
"I intend to be an outstanding musicologist.
there is absolutely no reason why I can't compose music as good as any
done by the masters. And be a recorder virtuoso as well." Off-handedly,
he told me the story behind Tartini's "Devil's Trill", a musical
perfection that was supposed to transcend human endeavour.
"Guiseppe Tartini claimed to have made a covenant with the devil in one of his dreams" he said fondly.
And I looked at his mischievous, yet enigmatic face. My son.
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