The Insulin I Carried to My Mother’s Door

The clinic

The night vet was a young man named Dr. Ostrander with a gray beard he was too young for. He took one look at Tucker in my towel and called a tech over.

“DKA?” he said to me, because he could tell from my scrubs that I’d know the word.

“Probably. Four eighty-seven at home. Ketones I didn’t check. He missed two doses.”

“Missed two doses,” he repeated, writing it down. He looked at my mother and then back at me. “That’s not like a cat with a chart this good.”

He turned the laptop screen. There was Tucker’s whole history from Dr. Lindgren’s office, because the two clinics share records. Two years of rechecks, every three months, never late. Every curve. Every weight.

“Somebody has been taking very good care of this cat,” Dr. Ostrander said.

My mother sat down in a plastic chair by the scale like her legs had gone out.

“His ketones are up, he’s dry, and his sugar is too high,” the vet said after he’d checked. “We’ll put him on fluids and an insulin drip overnight. The next twelve hours matter. He’s old, but he’s tough, and he came in early. If you’d waited till tomorrow, I’d be having a different conversation with you.”

“How much?” I asked, because somebody had to.

“Probably sixteen to eighteen hundred, with the overnight.”

I nodded. I had about that in savings. I was already counting it. My mother stood up from the plastic chair.

“I’ll pay it,” she said.

“Mom, you don’t have to.”

“Yes,” my mother said, “I do.”

She handed the girl at the desk her Visa, the one she keeps in a separate pocket of her purse for emergencies.