Fat (2 page)

     I always knew that in coming back to my hometown to practice pediatrics, I risked having to care for the kids of some familiar faces.  I went to high school with half of the faces in this room.  But in caring for Albert and Kate’s only kid, they had erased the boundary between doctor and patient, and instead I became just another member of their family.  Hell, here I am at a made up birthday milestone, posing with him for the family and friend paparazzi.    

     I eventually pass Xander down the line to some more eager arms, having to audibly grunt and conjure up every bit of my bicep strength to pick him up to make the handoff, and then I got up to stand at the outskirts of the living room and kitchen.  Look at that kitchen.  Boxes of bulk Cheerios and organic baby food stacked against the wall.  I turn and look out the window to the driveway curbside and I see reams of flattened food boxes lying on the grass waiting to be taken by garbage men, who no doubt wonder to themselves when this couple had quadruplets.

     Albert and Kate actually did have twins, and Xander was the larger; so large as to have literally consumed the life out of his twin brother.

     The preciousness of a lone survivor is rewarded with the spoils meant for two.  “A miracle”, always say mom and dad, “a miracle that Xander survived”, in between kisses from forehead to toe, “A miracle he’s how he is now.”  Awwws and sniffles and tearing.  My eyes were tearing from the effort of quelling down bubbling vomit. 

     When Xander came out of mom, he was large, limp and flushed.   He looked like a piece of raw jumbo shrimp.  His body was struggling to adapt to the influx of too much blood, stolen from his womb-mate via vascular malformations.  He spent weeks in intensive care getting his hematocrit normalized with exchange transfusions of saline for blood before being brought home.  His brother subsequently came out small, limp and blue.  Raw escargot.  His brother spent days in intensive care trying to get his hematocrit normalized with series of blood transfusions and died from complications of severe anemia, the heart eventually failing to pump his thinned blood to all the vital organs of his body.  If you had placed them side to side at the time of death, Xander looked as if he was a few Russian nesting dolls removed from un-encasing his brother.

     There was a clear winner of that shared womb.  Even with the multiple attempts by doctors to level the field with amnioreduction and foetoscopic laser treatments while they were both in-utero, only one survived.  Xander was a pure consumer, and in the most basic Darwinian struggle, he had consumed his way to victory.  Though, he did almost kill himself by consuming too much, but maybe that was worth the risk to ensure he won.  A lesson already ingrained in the womb: whoever consumes the most, wins by the most.

     Now, Xander appears to want to become the last man on earth by out-consuming the rest of the world.

     Party break time.  My temples were pounding, and my body felt weak from the strain of feigning fun.  Sneaking into the back hallway, I just plopped down onto the carpet right across from the bathroom.  If anyone finds me I can dismiss my absence with saying I drank too much coffee or that the pound of birthday cake they force-fed me was just not sitting right.  I peeked around the corner into the baby’s room.  All DaVinci furniture.  A cherry wood changing table.  A BOB jogger tucked in the corner.  The room looked much smaller than its actual square footage, space being shrunk by a swing, a play center, chests of toys, every species of stuffed animal, enough picture books stacked into a bookcase to illustrate the history of the Earth, boxes of chlorine free diapers and wipes in gross, and a 50-inch flat screen television mounted on the ceiling above the crib playing baby stimulating nonsense on a loop.  

     A toilet flushed.  I scrambled to my feet just as the bathroom door swings open.  Albert. 

     He jumps aback. “Hey, geez, you scared me.”

     “Sorry, Al.  Just waiting.  Too much birthday cake.”

     “Me too.  You having fun?”

     “Of course.  I always have fun.  Xander is really growing up.”

     “Yeah, he sure is.”

     A beam of sunlight from the hallway window caught Albert’s face and betrayed drying watery streaks.

     “Hey Al what’s with your eyes?”

     Rubbing, “What?  No. Just made a birthday cake deposit in there.  Way too much cake and coffee.  I’ll let you get to it then, too.”

     Albert smiled and scooted past me back to the party.  I guess I’ll have to go into the bathroom to continue my break.

     I grab a seat onto the furry blue covered toilet seat.  It’s impeccably clean in here.  And smells just like Xander.  I expected at least a waft of week old possum, but whatever went on before I got here, it was long dissipated.  Even the diaper genie smelled flowery.  A bag of old baby shit smeared on cloth and plastic had been made to have no hint of mustiness, methane or acridity.  That is until I threw up into the bathtub.  Way too much cake and coffee.  

     I turn on the bath faucet for a second to wash down the brown and black, and then take a Kleenex to wipe my mouth.  The trash is overflowing with freshly used Kleenex.  If it was any other guy in here before me, I would’ve assumed they were jizz rags.  But this had been Albert.  Never a smudge, from prep school to college to fatherhood, from lacrosse team captain to crew team captain to his own law practice, from home to church to home to church.  This was not the guy that would take a break from his own son’s birthday party to tug one out in the bathroom to a copy of
Marie Claire
.  These were tear rags.  Why did this guy steal away to cry alone in the bathroom?

     Married too early, kid too early, and the kid carrying your name is a load.  Every stage in life should’ve been an improvement from the last, and it had been, until now.  Imagine the long-awaited fruit of finding a worthy mate, years of financial preparation, months of living by ovulation cycles, and forty weeks of careful care being a excrement factory of a butterball turkey with your surname on the birth certificate.  Life was less a Church of Latter Day Saints commercial and more a focus of pumping food into a never-satiated mouth so it can make more shit and piss to clear away.   Crying alone in the bathroom was a no-brainer. 

     I walked out of the bathroom, stomach getting queasier as I hear the white noise chatter, then hear a higher pitch of suckling noises coming from Xander’s bedroom.  The door is cracked open just a bit. 

     Imagine a breast engorged so that it has grown proportionally larger and voluptuous, not in an artificial implant forced rise or in an obesity related flop forward, but in the way of fantastic genetics -- natural fullness held into impossibly high soft mounds by only the elasticity of its own skin, with mousse-whipped delicate cafe-au-lait centers pointing directly at you.  Then imagine a pale pot bellied pig gnawing at the teat.  Suckling pig never sounded so unappetizing.  I expected the breast to deflate, making the slow flubbering of a dying balloon.  The electricity of discovering partial nudity dispersed into the ground rod as if grandma had suddenly walked into the scene.  Xander was ruining breasts.  Perfect breasts. 

     He was ruining lives.  Dad was already broken.  And in the privacy of Xander’s room, Kate dropped the glow of party host and settled in to show her fatigue.  A graying forelock seemed more apparent, her shoulders sagged, and she was fighting sleep as she was feeding Xander.  His occasional biting was the only thing keeping her awake.  I’m sure she wishes she could bite that baby back.  Or bite her boobs off and slowly bleed out.  Or go back a year and bite off Al’s member so it couldn’t have pumped in the seed that fertilized her egg.  Or go back and decide not to marry the first guy after breaking up with a longtime boyfriend.  Or not decide to get pregnant during year one of marriage.   She used to love traveling and indulging her inner foodie -- she once blew an entire semester’s book money on a four star bender of haute cuisine -- but now she was just a feedbag, a vessel for providing breast milk.  Her eagerness to speed into motherhood must now feel like a sow galloping to the slaughterhouse.  

     She started to stir back from her wink of a nap.  She looked towards the door. 

     I shuffled back to the party.  Al was chitchatting with some big-haired grandma in between bites of cake, everyone was picking through heaping plates of buffet in between open mouthed bursts of laughter revealing partially masticated gobs of food on teeth, and new guests were continually arriving with their crock pots of foodstuff to replenish the buffet line.  No New Testament Jesus miracle needed here to feed thousands, just a one liner at the bottom of the invite: “Potluck lunch.”

    I just kept walking, slipping unnoticed out the door.  My car was blocked in by a Mercedes SUV.  I just took a sharp left turn through the lawn, clipping an inflatable blue bear, and jarred over the curb onto the side street, and pressed the gas.  I got home rather quick.  I slept the rest of the day uninterrupted.  Food coma.                  

MILK MONSTER

     Xander’s finally here for his two year old well child checkup.  I’ve been really looking forward to this.  After today, I only have to schedule that kid once a year for checkups.  His first year was rough – scheduled visits at one, two, four, six, nine and twelve months of age.  The second year forward was better, but still too many times – visits at fifteen and eighteen months, and now at two years old.  That was eight scheduled visits no matter if Xander stayed completely healthy.  But unfortunately, that eight was only on top of all the other bullshit “emergency” clinic visits – Kate accidently giving him Tylenol three and a half hours apart instead of the recommended four, a 1x1 centimeter rash that was here the previous day but not visible the day of the visit but still needing diagnosis, and the numerous times he had a “fever” of 98.6 degrees because of a parent-diagnosed condition of a lower than normal baseline temperature of 96 degrees.  These well child visits were painful, as Albert and Kate used the visits as opportunity for an exposition on the minutiae of Xander.  This two year old visit did not offer anything new: a relatively healthy kid with an accompanying rambling monologue describing every hiccup and fart as possible proof why he might not be well.  At least it was just Kate with Xander this time.

     “Yesterday, Xander ate ten chicken McNuggets and a handful of fries, but then only drank half a glass of milk, so I got real worried that he just didn’t drink enough for all that salt, so I really pushed the fruit juice and Pedialyte for the next three hours, but then he threw up all his food, so then I thought he might have lost all of his lunch and might be getting malnourished, so I gave him a bowl of macaroni and cheese with some apple juice, but he threw that up too, so I think he has some sort of stomach bug, so can I get an antibiotic, Dr. Grant?

     “First off, I don’t think he’s sick.  I think he just ate way too much.  Secondly…”

     “But Dr. Grant, he eats that much pretty much every day and rarely vomits.  I mean, if he eats too much every day, why is his weight normal?”

     “His weight is not normal.  Look at his growth chart here.  The points are barely within the boundaries of the paper.  He hasn’t fit inside of the normal curve since he was two months old.”

     “But that’s just his normal curve, his own special curve, above all the other curves.  And he needs to eat to keep up with his full growth potential.  Right now, he just needs an antibiotic to get over this stomach bug.  I don’t want him to get so sick he loses weight.”

     “He threw up all that food because he ate too much; I would barely be able put down a full burger and fries with a glass of whole milk, much less then to chase it with a quart of juice and a half pound of macaroni.  His weight is abnormally high for a baby his age because he eats way too much.  And he eats way too much McDonald’s.”

     “Oh, but he loves it.  Maybe the McDonald’s gave him the stomach bug?  Or food poisoning! Now that I think about it, we did go to one we don’t normally go to.  It was on the South Side.”

     “Xander does not have a stomach bug or food poisoning.”

     “Could we get an antibiotic just in case?”

     “Even if he did have a stomach bug, most stomach bugs are viruses and as I have told you many, many times before, antibiotics don’t kill viruses.  And even by some bizarre happenstance, if he did have some bacterial stomach bug, even with most bacterial gastrointestinal infections, we wouldn’t use antibiotics anyway.  Especially in someone that looks as good as he does right now.”  Xander was now literally hanging off the exam table with just his arms, panting and trying to do mini pull-ups.   “In any case, he does not have any infection, he just ate too much.”

     “Well, we’re going to a buffet with his grandparents for dinner, so we’ll see if he can eat his usual plates.  If he can’t, I’ll just call the answering service later and maybe you can call something in for him.”

     And it goes on like that for another twenty minutes; twenty more minutes of waste before getting down to any of the physical exam or anticipatory guidance issues.  His weight gain is again ridiculous today; another plot point well above the boundaries of the standard curve, exponentially continuing its rise.  I had to hand-draw an extension of the graphing lines onto the top of the paper just to plot Xander today.  The kid has a quadruple chin.  He looked like baby Sumo in just his mawashi.  A two year old should be scampering around the room, getting into the box of exam gloves on the wall or peering under the flip lid of the garbage can or mussing the pile of picture books on the side table, but Xander was slowly lumbering around the room sucking on a sippy-cup of milk.  And at this visit, he looked a bit pale.