Chapter 1: New Life

On September 12th, 1993, I found myself sitting on Laura’s hospital bed in room 407 at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. My beautiful wife of just short of three years was sleeping peacefully while I scribbled in my journal with tears streaming down my face. Her battle with juvenile diabetes was an ongoing one that had become engrained in our marriage like an unreachable knife in the back. It was a way of life for us: one minute we were happy together at home, the next she was back in the hospital dealing with another infection. I was twenty-three; Laura had just turned twenty-four. We wereso young! It seems impossible to me now that such a young couple were capable of enduring as much as we had to so early in life. But we didn’t know any different. To us, juvenile diabetes wasn’t just some obscure disease that many people never have to live with. It was more like a third member of our family, like that despised, distant relative who seemed to stop by at the worst possible moment and linger long after his welcome had worn out.

Laura started having pain in her lower back on the 10th. It was so severe that she, who had a pain tolerance that would have put even the most seasoned athlete to shame, told me to take her to the emergency room. The pain had been creeping in for days and she had scarcely mentioned it. Oftentimes I was oblivious to how much pain she was in because she kept quiet about it in part to spare me the worry; but usually it was unintentional. Laura was diagnosed with the disease when she was nine years old after slipping into an unexpected coma. In a nutshell, she had been in pain most of her life for one reason or another and had come to accept things as they were. She had learned to live with suffering as a way of life. So by the time she asked me to take her to the hospital, I knew she was past the point of endurance. And that always scared the hell out of me.

This visit was different than any that had preceded it. Prior hospitalizations included everything from minor infections, to high or low blood sugar levels, to surgeries that necessitated the amputation of a couple of her toes. This time, upon discovering a serious kidney infection in her right kidney, the doctor had to take extra care to give her the correct antibiotics because Laura was also six months pregnant with our first child. From the ER, they admitted her to a room on the fourth floor which, at the time anyway, was the maternity ward. She was in the hos