The Insulin They Sent Her Home Without

Why I did not just call

You are going to ask why I did not call Dr. Shaw, or drive somewhere else.

I had called already. I made the first call from the parking lot, while my mother fastened her coat, because I had a feeling about that refill. The clinic had closed at noon for the holiday. The recording said to leave a message or dial the after hours line for emergencies. The after hours line rang through to an answering service in Bowling Green, where a pleasant young woman took my name and my mother’s name and said the physician on call would phone me back within the hour.

That was at 5:12. It was now 5:41, and the phone in my hand had not moved.

The next pharmacy is 34 miles away, in Columbia, and it would have asked for the same thing Craig Hollis asked for, a prescription it could see. I had thought through the other way, too. The emergency room at the hospital in Columbia would give my mother insulin tonight, no questions about a refill. It is thirty-eight miles. I had decided in the parking lot that if the gate came down at six with nothing settled, I would take her there, and she would sit under bright lights until midnight in her church coat, apologizing to a triage nurse.

I wanted very much not to do that to her.

My husband Mike was at his brother’s place outside Edmonton, sorting cattle, three hours from us with his phone, as always, in the truck. I had left him a message. I did not count on him.

My father, Arnold Whitlock, died four years ago in March. Until then it was my father who ran my mother’s medicine. He kept her pills in a plastic weekday box on the kitchen windowsill, and at bedtime he dialed her dose into the pen himself. I took it over after he was gone. I took over the checkbook and the pill box and the pharmacy runs. But in four years it had never once crossed my mind to ask where the pharmacy’s reminders went.

I was about to find out.