To Siri with Love by Judith Newman

Author:Judith Newman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Eight

Doc

The endocrinologist shows me the chart. At first she says nothing. I hope she uses her words, I think. I can’t really read charts, but I don’t want to admit this. I got a 490 on my math SATs, not that that number is seared into my brain or anything. Anyway, all I see are some lines going up and a dot way below those lines, and that dot is fourteen-year-old Gus.

“Gus was in the bottom 5 percent for height for his age throughout most of his life,” Dr. Gabrielle Grinstein begins, “and now he’s at the bottom 3 percent. That’s not a huge drop-off, but a blood test might tell us a little more . . .”

Gus had quietly been playing Disney Villains on my phone, but now he is paying attention. “I have to have a blood shot?” he asks nervously. I don’t mention that if things are the way I expect they are, that one shot is the least of it. But one thing at a time, right?

Gus is short. Not Lollipop Guild short, but close. His weight is in the twenty-fifth percentile, while his height now is in the third percentile. At fourteen, he is not yet five feet tall.

I try my best to avoid doctors. I mean, not entirely. Do you have a spear sticking out of your head? OK, fine, let’s go. Otherwise, no. The best advice my mother, a doctor, gave me was: Don’t go to doctors. They will find a problem, whether or not you have one. Or, failing that, they will judge you. Particularly for fretting about something as seemingly inconsequential as height. A few years back these concerns sent worried friends with a mini son to the endocrinologist for testing. The doctor stared them up and down. The husband is five foot four and the wife, four foot ten. Finally he said, “So, what were you thinking here? That he’d be playing for the NBA?”

But this was different. John and I are not giants, but we’re not wee, either. I’m five foot eight, and John, height reduced from age and now about five foot seven, swears his draft card had him at five foot ten. “Men all lie,” says Dr. Grinstein cheerfully when I give her his stats. “Let’s go with five feet, nine inches.”

There is no surefire formula for predicting a child’s height, but the estimate goes like this: add the mother’s height and the father’s height, add five inches for boys or subtract five inches for girls, and divide by two. That’s five foot ten, in our case. A child generally falls within four inches of this height estimate, which would mean Gus should be anywhere between five foot six and six foot two. Should, but will not. Even making five foot six, which would be great, is extremely unlikely at this point.

Dr. Grinstein explained to me that the blood test she was taking may not even show a growth-hormone deficiency. To really know if he had one, Gus needed to have his blood levels checked in a hospital setting over a period of several hours.

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