Tapas Sharma

Doctor: "Your HbA1c is still climbing on the metformin and the gliclazide. It's time to start insulin." Patient: "What's actually wrong with me?" Doctor: "Type 2 diabetes. Your cells don't respond to insulin properly, so the sugar stays in the blood." Patient: "They don't respond to insulin." Doctor: "Correct." Patient: "And you're giving me insulin." Doctor: "More of it, to push past the resistance." Patient: "If my key stops turning in the lock, do you cut me a bigger key?" Doctor: "The analogy isn't perfect. Insulin still moves glucose out of the blood." Patient: "Into where?" Doctor: "Muscle, liver. And fat tissue." Patient: "So it makes me fatter." Doctor: "Weight gain is a common side effect, yes." Patient: "Does fat make the resistance better or worse?" Doctor: "Worse." Patient: "So next year?" Doctor: "We'd adjust the dose." Patient: "Up." Doctor: "Typically." Patient: "My brother-in-law started on twenty units. He's on ninety and he's four stone heavier." Doctor: "It's a progressive condition." Patient: "It's progressive because the treatment feeds it. What makes the blood sugar in the first place?" Doctor: "What you eat. Carbohydrate, mainly." Patient: "Then I'll stop putting it in rather than paying a man to shove it into my belly. Keep the pen. Write 'declined, cut the bread' and underline it."

A man came on Tuesday to take soil cores out of Gerald's field for a carbon survey, and he had planned to be an hour, and he was there until dark, because the bull would not stop following him. He had a steel auger, a bag of tubes with lids, a tablet, and a grid of forty points on it that he had to hit in order. He had done the lane field in the morning. The lane field was easy, because the lane field is bare and there is nothing in it, and he came through the gate into Gerald's forty acres at one o'clock with the confidence of a man who has read that beef cattle are docile. They are. That is the problem. A bull who has never been frightened of anything has no reason to leave, and a Hereford has no reason to stand still either when something interesting is going on, and a stranger kneeling in the grass turning a steel rod into the ground is the most interesting thing that has happened in that field since the hot air balloon. Gerald came over from the south corner at the pace he goes everywhere and stood four yards off and watched the first core come up. The man stood up. Gerald did not move. The man walked to point two. Gerald walked to point two. The man knelt. Gerald stood over him, nine hundred kilos of mild interest, and breathed on the back of his neck, and the man said afterwards he had taken that core faster than any core in his career. Forty points. Gerald attended all of them. He did not touch the man, the auger, the bag or the tablet. He stood four yards off, then three, and when the man moved, he moved, and when the man stopped, he stopped, and the robin rode the whole survey between his ears and sang at the man from there, which the man had not been trained for either. The cores were the thing. The lane field's came up pale, a few inches of brown and then yellow clay, the way a field looks when it has been turned over every autumn for forty years and everything that was ever alive in it has been let out into the air. Gerald's came up black. Black to the bottom of the tube, every one, forty of them, and the man held the two side by side at the gate for the farmer and did not say anything, because he did not need to. Then the man said he had never been followed before. The farmer said Gerald does not follow. He supervises. The results are coming in a report in the new year. The farmer does not need the report. He has had the report in his field for four years, lying down in the south corner at noon on it, putting his dinner back into it, and he could have told the man which tube would come up black before the man had got the lid off. The man asked, packing the van, whether the bull was always like that. The farmer said he had never seen him take that much interest in anybody, and that he thought Gerald had wanted to make sure the man got it right.