Fat Read online

  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.

  “How much milk does he drink, Kate?

  “We finish a gallon every one or two days.”

  I know Albert and Kate don’t like the taste of milk so that “we” is really just a “he”.

  “That is way too much milk for him.”

  “He loves it, and would drink it all day if he could. So we let him because milk is healthy, right?”

  Milk is a great food, but like everything, in moderation. Carrots are great, but if that’s all you eat, you’ll wither away as your skin turns starkly orange. Literally die looking like a carrot. Xander’s problem with milk is simple science. Red blood cells need iron to function. Milk is not that great a source of usable iron. It’s tough to get iron otherwise when milk is being abused as the major part of an unbalanced diet, so dark vegetable
s and lean red meats become an afterthought. This kid just drank himself to iron-deficiency anemia. Here’s a two year old kid already causing health problems by overconsumption of food – a milk monster. And he has a sippy-cup in his hands right now, sucking back on that white as if he were a man with a breast shaped mug filled with beer.

  “In moderation, Kate, you have to only let him drink milk in moderation. You have to cut his entire diet into one of moderation or he’s going to get unhealthy, er, unhealthier.”

  I think back on the history of his office visits, when I initially gave just gentle suggestions that Xander was a bit chubby, and then started stating the kid was fat, and then just telling Albert and Kate to stop feeding their roly-poly so damn much. Now here we are at two years of age and my words have dented them as much as a bullet into Superman. Maybe today I should show Kate a picture of what I see is up the road for Xander: his head pasted on a nude Rosie O’Donnell.

  During many of Kate’s office ramblings, I often day-dreamt about calling DCFS, reporting abuse via over-feeding, or in the least claim neglect of health, but ultimately, has any kid ever been taken away from his parents due to the kid being too fat? Neglect is not feeding your kid; it is not feeding your kid too much, right? Maybe if I had gotten the process started early, Xander vs. the State of Illinois could have become a landmark case, maybe the next Scopes monkey trial, the next Roe vs. Wade. But the only open case going on right now was Xander vs. Milk, and Xander was absolutely winning.

  Albert and Kate always had the same response: “Oh, he’ll grow out of it.” Deluded ridiculousness. Fat is not a pair of OshKosh B’Gosh overalls. Body rolls and extra breasts are not like pubertal acne. The only thing Xander is growing out of is being able to externally verify his sex as his penis is fast disappearing into his pubic fat pad. Instead of just being a fat little kid, he’s going to become a fat grade-schooler, a fat teen, a fat adult and a fat-ass corpse. Let’s say best case scenario he becomes tall like his dad – he’ll just be a tall fat guy that may be able to create an optical illusion with his height that he’s only obese and not morbidly obese.

  I had the nurse do a fingerstick hemoglobin. Xander didn’t make a peep as she got a drop of blood from his fingertip. I half expected the blood to be milkshake thick with chunks of fat globules, but it was a normal runny red. Xander seemed oddly interested in the whole procedure, and was ecstatic about the SpongeBob Band-Aid. His hemoglobin was 9.4. This aspect of being a doctor must be like being a homicide detective: in pursuit of solving a case, the only true consistent discovery is the disappointment in humanity.

  “You really let Xander drink that much milk?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Maybe I’ll try a series of simple sentences this time.

  “Xander is anemic from drinking too much milk. He can get really sick if you let him drink that much. All that juice is not helping, either. He’s drinking way too many calories. He’s ridiculously overweight.”

  “Oh, Dr. Grant, you’re such a worrier. I’ll try to cut down on his milk. As for his weight, I am sure he’ll just grow out of it. He’s just going to be our little football player!”

  Fuck.

  THE WHITE WHALE

  Albert and Kate have been inviting me out to dinner for months, and I have been skillfully dodging them with excuses of being a too busy doctor. The last time I saw Xander was when Kate rushed him into the office for a cold last winter. “He’s just got a cold, Kate.” “But he has a cough, runny nose and fever.” “That’s a cold, Kate.” You can tell a lot about a parent as to when during the normal 7-10 day course of a cold, they bring their kid in to see the doctor. Some rush their kid in after mere hours of symptoms, as if the standard cold symptoms were the tip of some life-threatening illness – telling of overprotective and over-bearing helicopter parents, or people with bags of rocks for brains. Some parents wait until about day 3, when a cold’s symptoms typically are at their worst, again attributing the normal worsening and persistent symptoms of a typical cold as some harbinger of death – jumpy and paranoid parents, but better than the overprotective and over-bearing, though very much still that their brains are bags of rocks as well. Both types of parents are bringing in their kids with the expectation of some antibiotic, not understanding the uselessness of antibiotics in treating viral illnesses, and carrying senses of entitlement that every boogery nose needs instant meds on meds, regardless of efficacy, because they as parents somehow knows more medicine than everyone else. Why did I waste my years on college, med school, internship, residency and years of private practice when all I needed to learn medicine was to have a kid and be able to Google a list of symptoms? Then there are the parents that don’t bring their kids into the doctor’s office for simple colds, parents that know what a cold looks like, remembers what a cold feels like (as everyone has had a cold before), and just takes care of their kids with home care until they improve in 7-10 days. As a result, smart and sensible parents like that are unfortunately the ones that I don’t get to see too much. Kate brought Xander in that day after 2 hours of runny nose and fever. Thankfully I’ve been able to avoid them since. But because of the seemingly never ending requirement of Continuing Medical Education to keep my licensure up to date, I go to Wisconsin Dells for a conference and decide to eat at the hotel’s restaurant for dinner instead of ordering room service and catching Bulls vs. Bucks on TV.

  I was just waiting for my table. Damn fifteen minute wait for this dinosaur themed restaurant. The triceratops robot nodding at the front door was taunting me. It appeared to start shouting my name.

  “Dr. Grant! Dr. Grant!” The voice was ricocheting off the robot and not coming out of its jaws. “Dr. Grant! It’s me Xander!”

  The kid came running at a full sprint up to me, every foot strike sounding like it was breaking tile. He had a King-sized Hershey bar in paw and his face was smeared in chocolate. He was in swimming trunks and a slightly wet white T-shirt clinging to his rolls. At least he ran the few dozen feet to me and burned off about a dozen calories.

  Kate came up just behind him.

  “Hi, Dr. Grant, crazy seeing you here!”

  “Hi, Kate, what are you guys doing here?”

  “Just a quick weekend at the water parks up here, Xander loves the water, he’s like a fish.”

  He obviously looked more like a whale. A small one, but still a whale. No way was he resembled any type of fish. Maybe she meant fish in the colloquial use as referring to any sea creature as a fish.

  “Where’s Albert?”

  “He’s meeting us here tomorrow, after he gets off work. What are you doing here?”

  “Just here at this cardiology conference until tomorrow.”

  “Are you here by yourself?”

  “Yeah, sure am. These conferences are a great opportunity for me to get away for some alone time.”

  Except when I run into patients. It feels like when as a kid I would run into teachers running errands. Breaking away from set roles in routine settings gets weird. It’s always a bit awkward going to the neighborhood Portillo’s Hot Dogs and running into the parents and the seven year old kid who was just at the office with such bad constipation and withholding that he crapped his pants during the peristalsis release of the rectal exam, and then watching him eat nothing but cheese fries when I just gave the parents a lecture on how they needed to up his fiber intake and try to cut down on cheese and starch. Or the mom that is now stuffing her giggling one year old with handfuls of McDonald’s who had just rushed her daughter into my office without an appointment spouting off loudly in the waiting room about some mystery life-threatening illness that had symptoms of poor eating and a “fever” of 99.2 lasting an hour, and then spending the entire visit demanding antibiotics to cure her baby lest her baby become more lethargic without some emergent treatment. Or running into the fattest patient in my practice a few hundred miles away at a Midwest version of a Vegas hotel, and then getting a live show of him erasing chocolate.

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nbsp; “Why don’t you join us for dinner here then? I know Xander will love it.”

  Then right on cure, Xander popped the rest of his candy bar into his mouth and piped up, “Yeah! Please, Dr. Grant? I’ll teach you how to draw a stegosaurus.”

  Even an overly chubby kid’s cocoa-smeared, moon-faced smile was impossible for me to shoot down. So here I am being seated in a booth in the shape of a brontosaurus, across from Xander and Kate, about to spend the next few hours eating dinner with them and learning about all things Xander. Time needed to bleed out quickly, and awkward silences would only prolong the pain. I started by asking a question I knew would kill at least half-an-hour without much of my participation: “So, how’s Xander been?”

  So Kate went on about how much he could read now and all the activities she had signed him up for and how he was going to kindergarten in the fall and how great a kid he was. I could tune out her voice easily, just as I could tune out dozens of wailing babies in a nursery as I focused on examining just one, but now my focus was being steered to using my peripherals to examine two other types of babies. I must have always had my nose buried in Xander’s chart during Kate’s ramblings at his office visits, and Kate must have dressed conservatively at those visits, and the sourness that descended onto my disposition in anticipation of Xander’s office visits must have also put pause to my manhood, because now I couldn’t stop looking at her somethings. To me, Kate was not classically beautiful, a little too much forehead for that, but she did have two assets that must have contributed to Xander downing breast milk in such quantities when he was a baby. And she had them in full on display in her bikini with her cover-up only partially covering them up. And it was sharply cold in the restaurant. I was surprised at my maleness for continuing to glance at them, knowing on whom they were attached. They were softened from time, but still supple and ample with just barely a noticeable sag. And the cleavage was wonderfully tight in its spacing, not artificially mashed together as with a push up bra or bizarrely frog-eyed like the implant variety.