k. james

The waiting room in endocrinology was like an assembly line of children with diabetes. Each time one child went in, another appeared. Then another and another and another. Very sad.

I zoomed in on a cute little girl with shoulder-length hair and a top with purple and red hearts as she buried her face into her father's shirt as he talked to the receptionist. Maybe just diagnosed? Don't know for sure. She had a sort of worry that should never be on a child's face.

I leaned over to Susanne to point out the girl, but she said "I know." 

"These kids all have diabetes," I told Charlie, as we waited for his name to be called.

"But I don't see any pumps," he said.

"Sometimes pumps are sort of hidden underneath shirts," I told him.

In the event that anyone was looking for his, Charlie picked his shirt up and tucked it behind his pump, for all to see that he was a member of the club. He wears his badge with pride.

In the office, waiting for the CDE to arrive, Susanne reminded me that this A1c will not be good. She knows I'm prone to high hopes.

"So what do you think it will be?" I asked her.

"In the 9s," she said.

"I'm gonna say 8.5."

Twenty minutes and still no one has come into the office. Thirty minutes. Still no one. However, I did notice that the nurse who took Charlie's A1c, dropped off Charlie's medical history folder in a slot just outside the door of the exam room.

Hmm.

With still no one coming in to see us, I saunter out into the hall and take a little drive-by of the bulging folder. I notice a long yellow paper sticking out of it. If an A1c is written on it, I can't tell. It's a bad angle.

"I can't see it," I whisper to Susanne inside the room.

Susanne comes over all "pfft"-like and rips the yellow paper out of the folder and we scurry into the room with it.

We are disappointed to realize that it's just the receipt for our copay. $20. Fabulous. Not much excitement in that.

The nurses round the corners with stealth, turning in an out of the office hallways with medical history folders like the ghosts from Pac-Man. And like the ghosts, they are equally expressionless and unfriendly.

"They're coming!" I pressure Susanne as she nervously stuffs the yellow copay form back into the folder.

At 40 minutes, I said "screw it," and grabbed the whole folder from outside the door and ran into the room with it as if we were stealing the answers to next week's mid-term exam. Inside was a piece of paper fastened to Charlie's medical history with the number 8.1 written on it.

All things considered, it wasn't so bad.

We didn't even come close to beating Charlie's high score.

And that's fine by me.