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Life, with death on the side
by Laura Bloch Bourque

Several years ago my best friend flew to Texas where she was a show-and-tell bionic woman for her niece's fourth-grade class. Her brother's donated kidney gave her the strength to make the rare visit.

Linda's life, and in its wake, my own, changed radically when at the age of 12 she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. She was sent away to Boston's Joslin Clinic to learn about her new disease. She returned to school, a few weeks later, a celebrity. This was really big; a life-long health issue. Linda had to carry around medical testing equipment and she had an excuse to leave class whenever she felt the need for sugar.

As good friends on the same bus route, I became her official assigned companion. I was trained by her mother to handle things should she have a “reaction” caused by a sugar imbalance. We were put into all the same classes through the remainder of our years in school, a privilege that was the envy of everyone.

The whole thing was very cool – except when responsibility for the life of my friend seemed to be in my hands. In these always scary moments, screaming to be heard over Linda's shrieks, I would absorb punches and kicks as I carried out my duty to get something sweet into her thrashing body.

After awhile we became accustomed to the unpredictable routine. This was a disease that we could manage, together. We were sweet 16 when Linda's mother told me that she would not live to be 30. She said she wanted me to understand how important it was for Linda to take proper care of herself but, to a teenage mind, it seemed to explain why she didn't.

When I mustered the courage to talk to Linda about it, she told me that she'd learned of this during her first stay in the hospital, overheard through the door as her mother got the news from a doctor. Linda had chosen not to tell me then, and I think I'm glad.

Throughout adolescence Linda wantonly grasped at life's pleasures, like a child told she has to leave a great party early. As we navigated the uncertain, hormone-driven waves of youth, the doctors also informed her that she would never be able to conceive a child.

Through stubborn insistence Linda is alive today, more than two decades beyond expectations. She attended her son's high school graduation and is now a proud grandmother. Her pregnancy, like so much of her survival, was an inexplicable medical miracle. For months, teams of experts wrote off her complaints of discomfort as intestinal gas. When things got serious, she was admitted to the hospital and after three weeks they diagnosed her as six-months pregnant.

Estimated billions spent on medical research should get some credit for her longevity, but I know that it was the joy brought by this unexpected blessing and the unfaltering love of her husband Gary, that has sustained her.

The pain Linda has endured has been constant and crippling, burdening her body with years it has not lived. A partial list of donated or manufactured body parts includes; an artificial leg, an insulin pump, a transplanted kidney, many repaired heart parts, corneal implants and over 80 penal-foreskin grafts to mend an ulcerated elbow. She has managed to shock the world's top experts with her persistence.

A few years back, I met a five-year-old girl who had just found out she is diabetic. I told her how fun it was being in the all the same classes with my best friend through school. My heart ached when she looked up to ask, “Is she still alive?” I was stunned that a child still in kindergarten should be burdened with contemplating a short life.

In recent years Linda has become a fanatic quilt maker. Thankfully, her stitches somehow ease the pain. Drugs that attempt to dull the intensity of slowly decaying nerves fuel sewing marathons through wakeful nights and days on end. Multiple surgeries have not deadened her whimsical, upbeat attitude – but there was one time that I doubted her will to hang in there. After a long battle fought with years of laser treatments Linda lost her vision. She couldn't sew and I really thought it might kill her. But modern medicine came through once again to put her back at her machine.

Countless hours of cutting and stitching have created many beautiful, lovingly crafted gifts. She is piecing together a legacy for all whose lives have been touched by her will to endure.

The pain she has lived with most of her life will end some day, but the spark that has given Linda her light will survive beyond the burdens of her bionic body; of this I am sure.