2000-08-13 - 20:45:44

Diabetes, Part 2

Let's see, where was I?

mid-April, 1995

The Manager put a "family emergency" sign up and drove the seven blocks to my apartment. He found me half-dressed and somewhat incoherent. At his urging I got completely dressed and he drove me the two blocks to the hospital emergency room.

By doing this, did he save my life? Maybe yes, and maybe no, but I'm going to give the tie to the runner and say yes he did.

I was still pretty rational because I was able to answer the questions put to me at the emergency room pretty well. With that and the Manager's description of my symptoms they had a strong inkling of what was wrong with me. They took a blood sample and tested my blood sugar. I remember very clearly what happened next.

A rather harried-looking woman with a mop of medium-brown curls stomped up to me. I remember wondering why she wasn't wearing doctor's clothes, but she did have a stethoscope around her neck.

"You idiot," she shouted at me, "your blood sugar is at 805!! Don't you know that you're a diabetic??"

Rather blearily I replied: "No I didn't know, and your bedside manner sucks, lady."

So I guess I must not have been that out of it after all. However, 805 is an unbelievably high blood sugar. To give you an idea: normal is about 110.

So I was admitted immediately to the hospital and I stayed there about 10 days.

I was very, very sick, and not just because of my high blood sugar. I had been drinking so much water for so long that I had washed a lot of the electrolytes out of my system. For the first three days I was in the hospital I took all my meals through a tube in my arm. This was the only way they could find to fix my messed-up body chemistry.

As I lay there in my hospital bad, my mind was careening all over the place. It seemed perfectly normal at the time, but later I realized I was quite delusional. For instance: I thought that the announcements over the hospital PA system were little in-jokes made for my benefit. I heard names of friends, comic book and literary characters, and so on coming over the loudspeaker.

As I found out later, I wasn't completely insane. The wife of one of my friends was a nurse at the hospital and I heard her name quite a lot. As for the rest, who knows?

Everything seemed to be in a chaotic jumble, and this feeling was increased by the news coming over the television in my room: someone had set off a bomb in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds of people. Nothing made sense anymore to my foggy brain.

When I was off the intravenous feeding I started wandering around my room and the hallways of the hospital. I was very simple and childlike and rather clumsy. I seemed to be covered by bruises because I kept stumbling into things.

My fogginess and clumsiness concerned the doctors so much they decided to run a series of tests to see if I had suffered any brain damage from my high blood sugar.

Yes, I know. Sometimes a little brain damage can be quite helpful. However, I passed all the tests with flying colors. Nothing wrong with my noggin!

However, I was still very simple-minded. Maybe the dull hospital routine had something to do with it. More likely it was my incredibly high blood sugar. Later my diabetes doctor told me that blood sugar that high is the equivalent of straining Karo syrup through your brain. A lovely image.

I was on the sixth floor of the hospital and when I looked out the window I had a good view of a large portion of Frown Town within my sight. It was odd, but from my vantage point the town I grew up in looked more like a forest than a city. Very few roofs poked above the pale green cover of the springtime trees. Looking directly down I could see the cars moving on the road. From that height, they all looked like matchbox cars. Life in the real world seemed to be reduced to the size of a tabletop diorama.

I got calls and visits while I was floating on my pink cloud. The Manager came to see me just about every day, reporting on what was going on at the store. My editor from the newspaper came to see me. My brother gave me a couple of phone calls.

I barely noticed it at the time but there were some people who didn't even bother to visit.

My mom didn’t visit me in the hospital, but that was understandable since she was practically an invalid. She did call me several times, though.

However, I didn’t get any calls or visits from my dad at all. Hospitals make him nervous, so he doesn’t like to think about anything that deals with them. So it goes.

And, as I mentioned before, I got no calls or visits from my alleged girlfriend, Anti-Romantic Girl. You know, I should have paid more attention to that fact. It would have saved me much annoyance later on. Ironically, it was while I was convalescing, I decided to try to get closer to ARG. Again, this shows that my judgement was probably not at its best.

In spite of my foggy mental state, I did more than just lounge around in my drafty hospital clothes. Various hospital people were showing me how I was going to have to live, now I was a diabetic.

For starters, I was going to have to be much, much more careful about what I ate. Apparently in your life you can only eat so many cookies and candy bars, and I already had eaten most of my share. Sigh.

However, the most difficult thing was learning how to give myself insulin. I've always had a hatred of needles, and now I was obliged to shoot myself in the stomach twice a day. At first I was very afraid, or as afraid as I could be in my fuzzy state, but eventually it just became routine. It's amazing what you can get used to when you have to.

After ten days I was judged well enough to be sent home. On one level it wasn't that big of a journey since I could see my back porch from my hospital window. However, on another level it was a tremendous step - now I had to learn how to live on my own as a diabetic.

I have to admit that I panicked. I asked a visiting nurse to come see me for the first week that I was out of the hospital. However, after a few visits it was plain that she really couldn't do anything for me that I couldn't do for myself.

Since then, things have gotten much easier for me. I've lost a good deal of weight, and that has helped to control my blood sugar dramatically. There have been amazing scientific and medical advances just in the last five years in the treatment of diabetes and the benefits have trickled down to me. I no longer have to inject insulin; instead I'm controlling my blood sugar with pills and diet.

And eventually the mental fog lifted. In fact, I started to realize that I had spent much of the early-to-mid 1990s in a sort of a fog. In fact, I think that it's taken me nearly five years to get back to how I used to be before I got sick.

This may sound a little crazy, but getting diagnosed with diabetes is probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before my little trip to the hospital I was on a long slide downward. My weight was at a lifetime high and I really didn't care. I was sleepwalking through life, if what I was having could be called a life.

A long time before I had to go to the emergency room, I knew something was wrong but I did nothing about it. Of course part of the reason for this was the fact that my thinking was being affected by my high blood sugar. However I think to a small degree I think I just didn't care what happened to me. I remember contemplating the fact that I might have cancer or some ailment like that with a sort of blasé fatalism. So what if I died? That would certainly be the end of my problems.

However, being diagnosed with diabetes made my dilemma more concrete. Either I could fight against this disease, or I could give up. The later effects of diabetes are not pretty: losing fingers and toes, blindness, brain damage... no thanks, I think I'll pass.

And so when faced with a choice between oblivion and life, I chose life. Good thing, too or else I wouldn't be here writing this!