“So what do people like me do?” she asked, her mood matching the drab hills around them.
He frowned. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PRESTON MOVED silently through the living room of the suite he’d rented in Cheyenne to the doorway of the bedroom, and leaned a shoulder against the portal. When Emma didn’t look up, he knew she hadn’t heard him, which didn’t come as any surprise. She was too focused on her sleeping son. Worry creased her forehead as she sat on the bed beside him and pulled his hand out from beneath the blankets.
“You’ve got to test him?”
When he spoke, she glanced up and attempted a smile, but he could tell she was too tired to put much energy behind it. “Five to eight times a day.”
The tone of her voice suggested it was a never-ending chore. One she hated—but not because of the trouble it caused her.
“Why don’t you show me how it’s done?” he asked.
She gestured him over, and he sat on the other bed.
“You change the depth of the lancet by adjusting this.” She handed him a blue penlike device that turned at the end. “You don’t want the needle to go in too deep, or it’ll hurt worse and take longer to heal. You want it to go deep enough, though, or you won’t get enough blood.”
Preston saw that she’d fixed the setting at a depth of two-and-a-half, but he didn’t know what two-and-a-half meant, other than that it was greater than one, which was the lowest setting, and less than four, which was the greatest.
Holding the boy’s hand to the light, he could immediately spot five or six places on the pad of each finger where Max had been pricked before. “You wait until he’s asleep on purpose, don’t you?”
“If I can. It’s not much, but…” She shrugged. “It’s one less poke that he has to know about.”
“How badly does it hurt?”
“The finger pricks hurt more than the shots because fingers have so many nerve endings.”
Preston resisted the urge to set the lancet aside and begin massaging her back. She seemed so weary, so anxious. He wanted to relieve some of that tension. “Can’t you poke him somewhere besides his fingers?”
“I can do some alternative site testing on the forearms, but the reading isn’t as accurate, and it’s harder to draw blood.”
“I haven’t heard him complain about the pain.”
She smoothed a hand over Max’s hair. “He usually doesn’t say much about it. He’s a brave boy.”
Fighting his natural reluctance to do anything that would hurt a child, Preston pricked Max’s finger so Emma wouldn’t have to. A drop of bright red blood oozed out, which she captured with a test strip she’d inserted into the glucose meter. The meter beeped only a few seconds later.
“How’s he doing?” Preston asked.
“He’s two-fifty. I’ll have to give him a unit of Humalog and get up in three hours to test him again, in case my guess is wrong and the insulin pulls him too low. He also has his background insulin working, which can be pretty unpredictable.”
He stared at Max’s sleeping form. “Would it hurt him that much to let him stay high, if he’s sleeping?”
She pushed a needle into the top of one of Max’s insulin bottles and drew out a small amount of clear liquid. “It could, if he went into ketoacidosis.”
“Which is…”
“If he doesn’t have enough insulin to be able to break down the sugars in his blood, his body will start metabolizing fat to get the energy it needs. When the body breaks down fat stores, it throws off a by-product called ketones, and that’s bad for the kidneys. It’s bad for the whole body, really.”
“So ketoacidosis is what we’re trying to avoid?”
“Even if he doesn’t go into full-blown ketoacidosis, you have to worry about other things. High blood sugar damages all the body’s major organs. Diabetics who don’t control their blood sugar end up blind or on dialysis. Some even lose a limb due to severe nerve damage.”
“And low blood sugar results in what happened at the pool.”
“Exactly.” She pinched the back of Max’s arm and inserted the needle. He didn’t even twitch. “It’s all about maintaining the right balance. A healthy pancreas constantly adjusts. There’s no way to completely replace that with a handful of shots every day.”
Capping the syringe, she dropped it into the paper sack where she’d been keeping all the other used needles.
“If he goes low in the night, what do you do?”
“Wake him up and feed him a small can of peaches.”
“What if you’re sleeping and you aren’t aware that he’s low?”
She put Max’s diabetes supplies back in the black pouch. “That’s the risk I take every time I close my eyes. His brain requires sugar to survive. A body will conserve as long as it can, and shuttle what it has to the brain. But if Max goes too low and there’s simply not enough sugar in his blood…”
Her words dwindled off, which was all the answer Preston needed. If Max went too low, he could die. Here today, gone tomorrow. Just like Dallas.
Sorry he’d asked, Preston stood up. He sympathized with the burden Emma was carrying, wanted to help her. But he couldn’t help without caring, and he couldn’t care because he couldn’t withstand losing what he’d lost before.
“I’m going to the Laundromat,” he said, and moved abruptly to the door.
“Hurry,” she said. “I can’t wait to get out of this swimsuit.”
Preston thought about the lingerie and other items he hadn’t given her yet. He supposed now was the best time to dig them out of the van. She needed them. And he’d be gone when she looked through the sack, so he wouldn’t have to hide his reaction when she pulled out those skimpy panties.
Maybe he couldn’t offer Emma any real emotional support. But he could certainly give her some clothes.
EMMA COULDN’T believe it. Judging from all the tags and the receipts she found carelessly wadded up or tossed into this bag or that, Preston had spent nearly fifteen hundred dollars on her and Max. Yet, when he’d left an hour earlier, he’d handed her the bags without even waiting for her to open them.
Standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom, she admired the elegant cream robe she’d just put on. It was made of silk and fit her as perfectly as everything else he’d provided. Except for a pair of white sandals that pinched her toes.