PART 2:
The endocrinologist’s name was Dr. Hannah Kim, and she had a way of talking I will be grateful for until I die: flat, plain, and completely uninterested in anybody’s opinion of me.
"Your pancreas is failing," she said. "You have adult-onset Type 1 diabetes — autoimmune. Your body has been destroying the cells that make insulin, probably for over a year. The shaking, the sweating, the slurred speech, the confusion, the episodes where you ‘zone out’ — Mrs. Brooks, those were hypoglycemic crashes. Your brain was running out of fuel. A glucose of thirty-eight in a courtroom is not a lifestyle. It is a medical emergency that happened to have an audience."
I asked her the question I had apparently been asking everyone, in one form or another, for a year. "Can stress do that? Can being — emotional — make the number do that?"
"No," she said. "Feelings do not lower a glucose reading to thirty-eight. And alcohol—" she glanced at my chart, "—is not required to explain a single episode in this file. What is required is insulin, monitoring, and an explanation to that court. You’ll have all three."
Mark’s messages found me that evening. The first asked if I was all right. The second asked what the doctors were saying. The last one — the one I read twice, then photographed with the hospital bracelet still on my wrist — said: "You couldn’t even stay sober for your own custody hearing. My mother was right about you."
I did not delete it. For a year, deleting had been my religion: Mark would say something with a hook in it, Ruth would sharpen it at church, and I would smooth it all away because I wanted, God help me, to be easy to love. Lying there with a glucose monitor on my arm and my brain finally fed, I understood that smoothing was how a woman disappears from her own story. I took screenshots. I saved everything.
Then I did the thing Dr. Kim’s honesty had made possible: I remembered April.
In April, I had "an episode" at school — slurring in front of my own class, God forgive me, twenty-six third-graders watching their teacher come apart. The school nurse, Mrs. Abernathy, got me to her office, and because she is a thorough woman who trusts instruments more than gossip, she did two things: she wrote an incident report, and she checked my blood sugar on the office meter before she let anyone drive me to urgent care. It was 44. It is in the report. Mark’s lawyer had described that day to the court as "the incident at the school, where Mrs. Brooks appeared intoxicated in front of children." He had read out the report’s first line. He had not read out the number.
And at urgent care that same afternoon, with Mark sitting beside me holding my coat, the doctor said the sentence that had been waiting seven months to matter: that episodes like this required a full endocrine work-up, because a metabolic cause could not be ruled out. Mark drove me home and told me the man was covering himself, that it was stress, that I should stop googling my symptoms and scaring myself. I believed him, because believing him was easier than believing my own body was quietly breaking.
That night in the hospital, my monitor alarm woke the nurse twice. Twice, asleep, with no courtroom, no gallery, no reason to perform anything for anyone, my glucose fell out of the safe range and kept falling. The machine wrote it all down in a language nobody could call dramatic.
In the morning Dr. Kim stopped saying "episodes."
"You have a diagnosis now," she said. "And a treatment plan. What you do not have — what you never had — is a drinking problem. I will write that in exactly those words for the court, if you want me to."
I said yes before she had finished the sentence.
