When Dr. Rex Helton finally comes in—at 12:02 p.m.—he says “Hello, Edward,” and then he gets right to it. Directness is the only thing I appreciate about Dr. Rex Helton.
“I’ll be blunt. It’s not good,” he says. “It’s not good at all. It’s not just the weight, which you know is going in the wrong direction. We’ve seen the results of the fasting plasma glucose test you took a couple of days ago, and you’ve tipped into type two diabetes.”
“What was the reading?” I ask.
“Well, your six-month average is two hundred and twelve. It’s far outside normal.”
Holy shit!
Dr. Rex Helton goes on. “I’m also worried about your blood pressure. We need to get aggressive with this. You have to eat better, you have to exercise, and you’re going to have to go on medication.”
“How much medication?”
“Fifteen milligrams of lisinopril for the hypertension. Forty milligrams of furosemide, a diuretic to leach some of the water out of your body. Thirty milligrams of actos, which will help increase your sensitivity to insulin. A thousand milligrams twice a day of metformin, which should help control the glucose in your blood. And, finally, a daily potassium chloride tablet to help with your kidney function. That furosemide is going to put a lot of stress on them, so we don’t want problems there.”
“You mean, I’m going to be peeing a lot?”
“Yep.”
“Holy shit!”
I can’t believe I actually said this out loud, in front of Dr. Rex Helton.
“Edward, I know it sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But we have to get out in front of this thing. Lose the weight. Control your diet. You don’t have to take this stuff forever. I’ve seen people come off it. But you have to do the work. Is there any reason you can’t?”
I could make a lot of excuses about all of the things that have happened to me this year, but I don’t.
“No, Dr. Rex Helton. There’s no reason I can’t. What should I weigh?”
Dr. Rex Helton doesn’t know this, but it’s better for me when I have tangible goals.
“Less than you do now, OK? It’s not just about weight. It’s the whole picture. You’re tall”—in fact, I am 6 feet 3 5⁄16 inches tall—“but you’re still overweight. Lose some of the weight, adjust the diet, and we’ll see improvement.”
“But how much?” Dr. Rex Helton is not answering my question.
“Let’s say you should weigh two hundred pounds.”
Holy shit! I do the math in my head. I need to lose 31 percent of my weight. More than that, really. I don’t have time to calculate the fractions of a pound before Dr. Rex Helton is talking again.
“Now,” he says, “here’s what I want you to do. Get a notebook and keep track of how much you exercise. Thirty minutes a day, Edward. It can be as simple as a brisk walk. As for meals, imagine a plate divided into thirds. I want two-thirds of that to be vegetables—salad, carrots, green beans, peas, whatever you like. The other third can be lean meat. You can have pasta, but it needs to be an occasional thing, not the everyday meal it’s been. Those days are over. And look into sugar-free options for dessert. There are a ton of them. You need to be serious about this. Do you hear me?”
I smile. Dr. Rex Helton smiles back at me. I hear him. I’m getting new entries in my daily logbook. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that type 2 diabetes has been a good development, but I’ve found a silver lining, at least.
When I go home, I don’t follow my earlier route in reverse. That would transform all of my right turns into left turns. Instead, I get into my candy-apple-red Cadillac DTS, which used to belong to my father, and turn right onto Broadwater, right on Twenty-Fourth Street West, right on Grand Avenue, and right into the parking lot of the Albertsons on Grand Avenue and Thirteenth Street West.
Dr. Helton has called my new prescriptions in to the pharmacy, and sure enough, when I tell the pharmacist (her name tag says LUELLA, which I think is a pretty name) who I am, she has them ready to go. I pay the $122.57 with my credit card.
From the Albertsons parking lot, I am again a right-turning kind of guy. Right on Grand Avenue, right on Fifth Street West, and right on Clark Avenue, and then a right turn into my driveway.
I’m pretty smart sometimes.
In my absence, the mailman has come. I used to obsess about the time of the mail’s arrival, because it bothered me that there could be such wide variances given that the mailman walks the same route every day. It didn’t make sense to me. But Dr. Buckley worked hard with me to help me figure out the difference between things that matter and things that don’t. She helped me to see that as long as I receive the mail each day, it doesn’t matter what time it arrives. Dr. Buckley is a very logical woman. Besides that, I have been reading a lot in the Billings Herald-Gleaner about the financial trouble the United States Postal Service is in—how delivery might be curtailed on certain days and how letters may take longer to go from one place to another. While I don’t like conjecture, it’s easy for me to imagine that the postal employees are under a lot of stress, and I don’t think it would be fair for me to add to it by obsessing about delivery times.
I have only two pieces of mail. I can tell from the script handwriting on the envelope of one that it is from my mother, who is spending the fall and winter months in North Richland Hills, Texas, a suburb of Fort Worth, where she is from. She and her sister, Corinne, spend about half the year together in Texas now that their husbands are dead, and they do all sorts of things, like traveling and going to concerts and shows and spending time with some of their childhood friends, many of whom have also lost their husbands. All this death makes me wonder sometimes if marriage kills men. I asked my mother one time if she would think about getting married again now that my father is gone, and she wrinkled her nose and said, “Why would I want a smelly man around my house?” I didn’t have an answer for that, and she didn’t insist on one.
The other piece of mail is from Jay L. Lamb, my lawyer. I don’t feel so hot in my stomach when I see that envelope.
I open the envelope from my mother and remove the contents as I step through the doorway into my living room.
Dear Edward,
Here is your ticket to fly to Texas for Christmas. You’ll be leaving at 6 a.m. on December 20th, which I know is early, and you’ll be going back on December 27th. All of the information is on the ticket that I’ve enclosed. Did you know it cost an extra $25 for a printed paper ticket? That’s highway robbery, or skyway robbery. Be sure to take your credit card and your driver’s license when you get on the plane. They’ll charge you for your bag, and you’ll have to prove who you are.
I can’t wait to see you, son. We will have a real good time. Did you know the Cowboys are playing on Christmas Eve? Guess what? You’re going!
Merry (early) Christmas!
My mother asked me two questions, both of them rhetorical. That means she doesn’t really want answers, but I feel compelled to offer them. First, I didn’t know that about paper tickets, and I agree with my mother. Second, of course I know the Cowboys play on Christmas Eve. They will be playing the Philadelphia Eagles, whom I hate. Not hate as in I wish them ill health. I just don’t like them. The Dallas Cowboys, on the other hand, are my favorite football team, and I have wanted to see them in their new stadium since it opened for the start of the 2009 season. That was a good year for the Cowboys. They finished 11–5 and won the NFC East division, although they lost 34–3 to the Minnesota Vikings in the second round of the playoffs. In any case, it was way better than the next season, when they went 6–10 and didn’t even make the playoffs. Right now, in 2011, they are 7–5, but I’m not feeling too good about them. Still, I can’t help but root for the Cowboys, because I always have and because my father did. I do understand, however, that not everyone likes the Dallas Cowboys. Scott Shamwell hates the Dallas Cowboys. He calls them “America’s Douche-Canoes.” I don’t like it when he says that, but I have to remember that Scott Shamwell is a Minnesota Vikings fan and has never seen his team win a Super Bowl. The Cowboys, on the other hand, have won five. I will just be thankful for my team’s good fortune.