The Ring That Paid for Her Nights

Carol

Emma’s diabetes nurse was a woman named Carol who drove up from the Des Moines practice to the outreach clinic in Fort Dodge twice a month. She was about sixty, with short gray hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she talked to Emma like Emma was a grown woman.

“Your nights are the problem,” Carol told her in January, looking at the graph on the computer. All those little red dips at three in the morning, lined up like fence posts.

“I know,” Emma said. “I’m sorry.”

Carol took her glasses off. “Honey, you don’t apologize to me for your pancreas. Your pancreas quit. That’s not something you did.”

Then she turned the screen toward me. “She’s a good candidate for a pump. The new ones talk to her monitor. When the monitor sees her heading low, the pump backs off the insulin on its own, before she ever gets there. Most of my kids stop having night lows within a couple of weeks.”

I remember I had to hold on to the edge of the exam table.

“What does it cost?”

“Depends on your insurance. Let me send the order and see what the supplier says.”

The supplier called me ten days later. The pump and the first three months of supplies came to a little over nine thousand dollars. My plan through the clinic had a high deductible, and pumps fell under durable medical equipment, which they covered at a lower rate. Our share came to three thousand four hundred dollars and change.

They wanted the patient portion before they would ship. They offered a payment plan through a finance company, and I applied right there on the phone. I was turned down. The divorce had left a boat loan on my credit that Brent had promised to pay and had paid late for a year.

So I did the math I had been doing my whole adult life. I had our tax refund in savings, the one I had been holding for new tires. It was seventeen hundred dollars. That was my half, almost to the dollar.

The other half was Brent’s. It said so on page six.