Toasted

Everyone knows that in order to have a successful finals week, one must follow a strict and disciplined routine. First I woke up at 8am, no snoozed alarms, this was essential. The snooze button was for the weak. Then I wiped off the layer of dust that had accumulated overnight on my beloved photo of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. As a fellow Latina and woman of the Law, Sonia was my Superwoman. After that, I ate an everything bagel with low fat, Philadelphia cream cheese. I’d made so many bagels in the run up to this pivotal week that my dorm walls had absorbed the smell of burnt garlic and sesame seed. But it was the perfect breakfast, it took little to no effort and satiated me without generating a feeling of disgust and general lethargy. And what I required during finals week was to remain fresh, lithe, and ready to snap up every morsel of knowledge that was presented to me. Because if I didn’t, then I’d leave a tiny gap in the door for it all to wander away: the ivy league law school, the prestigious position at a top firm, and the eventual appointment to the highest court in the nation. Success was a slippery ladder and I intended to seize that next rung. 

Now a few words about my toaster. I know you’re not supposed to have a favorite kitchen appliance but I could not deny the feelings I had for this particular machine: simple to use, stylish and reliable. What more could a girl ask for? I cut my bagel into two perfect halves and went to pop them into the slots. But then I realized, it would take 3 minutes to brown these carbohydrates to perfection and I could use this time to scan through my typed up highlights from yesterday’s studies. 

It was Tuesday and I had managed to bang out most of my finals the day before so I had only one left at the end of the week. But it was a big one: British Literature. Why does a legal savant need to succeed in the realm of Brit Lit you may ask? Not a clue. But alas I needed an A so I could maintain my Summa Cum Laude status and my glittering vision of the future. And the teacher of this particular class, a crotchety old Boomer who had a persistent cough and a lazy eye, was notorious for being unnecessarily critical. It was rumored that if you managed to pull a B or above in her course, you were either a future Pulitzer Prize nominee or you’d made a pact with the devil. 

Unfortunately, there was hardly any space in our ramshackle dorm room. The sad excuse for a countertop was about two feet wide, its plastic surface made to look like granite, peeling at the edges. In order to make room for my laptop, I grabbed my toaster by the divider that separated the two slots. And in a flash, it came clattering down as I felt a sharp bite on the middle finger of my right hand. I looked down to see blood leaking from a cut that must have been made by one of the thin, silver grills. The metallic crash of the appliance woke my roommate, hair webbing her face, dried drool visible on the edge of her lips. 

“What the hell?” she asked groggily.  

“Sorry, sorry!” I returned, bloodied hand in the hair. My eyes darted around the space, trying to remember in what corner I had shoved away my first aid kit. But mostly where I looked I saw piles of unwashed clothes, precariously stacked textbooks and of course my roommate’s skis that took up just about as much space as a full grown human being. 

 I ran to our shared bathroom and wound a wad of toilet paper around the cut as I continued my hunt for a band aid, any band aid. I rooted around under my bed but found nothing except for a stray Hello Kitty sock and an empty bottle of Powerade, neither of which belonged to me. In desperation I scurried to the front desk of the dorm in my giraffe printed pajamas. Upon hearing my pleas, the stoner boy manning the station mercifully reached down and grabbed the plastic, white box with a red cross and rummaged through its contents.

“What size?” he asked, his eyes half lidded, his polo shirt stinking of weed. 

“Just normal is fine,” I said in a panic. The blood had already seeped through the generous amount of 2-ply. I could feel the bodily fluids turn sticky on my clean, left hand as I held the toilet paper in place and applied pressure to the wound. 

The desk boy moved at the rate of the Sloth from Zootopia. I tapped my foot impatiently, hoping it would get him to up the urgency a bit.

Finally, he handed me a band aid, and I dropped the clump of toilet paper onto the desk while I wrapped myself up.

The boy’s face contorted in disgust, “you should probably move that, it’s like a health hazard.” 

I rolled my eyes and snatched it away, relieved that the damage was now contained. 

But the two cent, sorry excuse for a band aid only lasted about three hours before it slid off the tip of my finger and tumbled onto the grimy old tiles of the library bathroom. What I saw beneath was my moist, wrinkled skin and a deep gash in the perfect shape of the Nike swoosh. I tried to continue my day without the assistance of a band aid but whilst flipping through key scenes of Macbeth, I noticed a red smear appear across the bottom corner of the page. I was bleeding again. 

Once more I asked the nearest authority figure for help and they begrudgingly came to the rescue with a crisp, new bandage. First it was the Librarian and then a TA and then the cashier at the campus McDonalds and then the Librarian again. None of the normal sized, run of the mill band aids were doing the trick. I needed a mega band aid. 

So I gave in, sacrificed a solid hour of studying, and trekked across the campus’s downtown to the nearest Walgreens. It was close to 9pm at this point and the harsh light of the drugstore nearly blinded me. But when I found it, the box sang to me like a trove of enchanted treasure: a multi-pack of 24 tru-stay, waterproof band aids in various sizes. 

I returned to my dorm and wrapped my entire middle finger in the largest band aid in the box. I sighed deeply and collapsed onto my bed and closed my eyes…just for a moment. 

Or so I had thought. 

I jolted awake at 10:17am to my roommate poking me in the shoulder with a ballpoint pen. 

“You fell asleep in all your clothes,” she said. I looked down and saw she was not lying. I was sprawled onto my bed like Flat Stanley in my mom jeans and Patagonia pull over.

I had forgotten for a sweet moment about my finger until I went to dust off my Sonia Sotomayor photo and saw that I had already bled through my mega band aid. I swore under my breath and replaced it with the only other mega band aid from my box. And I went about my day. 

It was all fine and dandy until Thursday morning when I took a shower and mega band aid number two slipped off and shot down the open drain. Waterproof my ass. I held my finger up to my face and saw the Nike swoosh was still perfectly intact. It had been over 48 hours by this point and it had not even begun the healing process. Was it my platelets? Were they faulty?

I returned to my dorm, my thick hair wrapped tightly in a towel and I opened my laptop. I had full intention of kicking off my final, full day of studying. Today I needed to go over my Jane Eyre notes in depth and then I needed to run through the highlights from the last two weeks of studying at least twice. But instead I hesitated, my hands hovering over the keyboard, my bulky middle finger now wrapped in three, overlapping band aids. 

It wouldn’t hurt just to check…

I opened a new tab, navigated to Google and then typed in 5 simple words, “why won’t my cut heal?” 

The first results was from Web MD and it listed the following possible reasons for a slow healing wound:

• Infection
• Poor Circulation
• Poor Nutrition
• Diabetes
• Excessive Swelling
• Repetitive Trauma

I assumed my nutrition wasn’t the problem since I popped a Flintstone’s gummy vitamin at the end of each, long day as a special treat. I moved on. I wasn’t experiencing any swelling and hadn’t incurred repetitive trauma. That narrowed it down to three possible options: infection, poor circulation or diabetes. 

I opened a new Google tab and wrote “signs of infection”. The synopsis at the top of the results page noted fever, sweating and chills of which I had none. Crossed it off the list. I did the same for “Poor Circulation”. The responses came back with items such as “pins and needles” sensations, sore muscles, bulging veins and more. I felt pretty secure in crossing that one off as well. Just one more and I could set my anxious mind at ease. 

Signs of diabetes included: frequent UTI’s, increased urination, increased thirst…

All things that I had experienced in some shape or another. In fact I had to pee at that very moment for the third time in four hours. My mind started jogging, running, racing. I wasn’t 100% sure I had a UTI last month but my bits had been burny and itchy for unexplained reasons. And thirsty. I was always thirsty, my mouth always bone dry even when I finished off an entire Hydro Flask full of water.

I searched another site that warned me of the four T’s:

• Thirsty
• Toilet
• Thinner
• Tired

Tired??? I was always tired. Every moment of my existence I had been at least slightly tired. 

There was only one plausible explanation: I was an undiagnosed Diabetic.

I frantically opened a new tab, “what happens if I have undiagnosed diabetes?” 

The answer: untreated diabetes can impact vital organs such as your HEART, BLOOD VESSELS, NERVES, EYES and KIDNEYS. 

Good Lord God in Heaven. 

New tab: “signs of kidney failure”. The response: tiredness, shortness of breath, nausea. 

I was tired, yes, but no shortness of breath, no nausea. I sat for a moment in silence, absorbing the frailty of my body and the expanse of my life with a newly diagnosed chronic condition. 

I would have to deal with this, yes, see the Doctor, get a blood test. But it would have to wait 24 hours until this final was out of the way. 

The hours dragged on as I attempted to study but every twenty minutes or so I would reach for my phone and look up things like, “life expectancy of a diabetic,” “can I still eat chocolate if I have diabetes?” “Which Jonas brother has diabetes?” And deeper and deeper I fell into the rabbit hole. It took me until 3:30 in the morning to complete my study goals due to my constant, self-imposed distractions. 

By 11am on Friday, the time of my Brit Lit exam, I was a wealth of Diabetes not-so-fun facts. I had slept in till the very last moment and awoke with a pounding headache. I was intending to make my everything bagel as usual but I couldn’t even lay eyes on my toaster, the nasty little turncoat. So I went into my exam with nothing in my stomach, telling myself that I’d feast on a double decker burger and a heap of cajun fries from 5 Guys after the test was finally finished. 

I arrived at the classroom designated for the exam, all the sanitized desks perfectly in their rows, spaced out so symmetrically, you would think the Professor had measured out each space with her trusty tape measure. 

I sat down at my assigned desk and removed the essay booklet from my backpack along with my favorite pen, a cute, smiling doggy perched at the top. I clicked his rigid tail to release the tip. I filled out the obligatory information on the cover of the booklet and waited for our Professor, equipped with an athletic stopwatch, to utter a single word: 

“Begin.”

There were two essays that I needed to complete. The first question read: Explain how familial relationships relate to the moral constructs of the protagonists in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 

I couldn’t help but smile. I had read Frankenstein on more than one occasion and knew exactly how I was going to structure this essay within seconds. I began to scratch madly away until I made it to paragraph three. And in one abrupt motion, I grabbed at my desk as I suddenly felt off kilter, like I had been sitting quietly on a see saw and someone had just plopped down at the other end. Then my stomach grumbled. 

I tried to breathe, calm myself. I was just hungry, surely that was it. I picked up the pen again, looked at the closed, crescent eyes of the cheerful pup. “Be zen, be zen like this dog,” I told myself.

And then I felt another wave, this time in my stomach. I was going to throw up. 

But I didn’t. 

I started to write again, unsure of where I had disembarked my train of thought. 

I was now distracted by a new, throbbing noise deep in my ear drum. I could hear my own heartbeat and it felt quick, erratic. I paused to lay a couple of fingers on my wrist to check my pulse. I tried to count along with the ticking hand on the wall clock. My heart rate was close to 90 beats per minute. Not ideal. 

It was then I noticed I was breathing much more quickly, in time with my racing heart. Shortness of breath. 

My bandaged hand was shaky. 

I became possessed with an anxiety that made me shoot up from my desk. My Professor barked at me, “what are you doing?” 

I clutched at my chest, certain it was about to give out and leave my lifeless body on the scratchy carpet. 

“I…um…need to go to the nurse.” My Professor merely squinted at me with her one, working eye and shooed me off. 

When I arrived at the nurse’s office, I showed him the swoosh, explained that my platelets clearly weren’t plating, went through the list of diabetes symptoms I had now memorized and begged him to take a blood test to determine my glucose levels. 

But instead he laughed.

“I think this is a case of finals fever,” he said dismissively, leaning back in his rolly chair. “But don’t worry, I won’t tell,” he whispered as he put a finger to his lips. He then continued flatly, “who do you need me to write a note to?” 

But I was so incensed by his condescension that I stormed out without a note. 

I dragged my feet to my Professor’s office and offered her the same story. Her stony face gave nothing. 

“So from what I understand, you would like to retake my exam because you cut your finger on a toaster?”

“It’s a serious wound,” I said softly. 

“It’s a small cut,” she said with venom.

I ignited like a stick of dynamite. “Would you say this is small?” I asked, madness in my wide eyes as I stuck my middle finger up to her hooked nose. 

It was over. I received a failure for the final which meant my grade plummeted below a D for the class. 

That evening I returned to my dorm and removed my photo of Sonia Sotomayor from its gilded frame. I stuck it in the toaster, pressed down on the button and watched it melt away.