ninanevermore

.
.
.

I learned a long time ago that with most men, fear and anger look identical. In order to tell if the man is really angry or just terrified, you have to look at the context of his reaction to see what emotion is behind it. Some women never figure this one out, but I am in a unique position in that I have a medical condition that from time to time scares the bejeezus out of the men in my life. Before I was out of my teens, I knew that a man screaming, "For crying out loud, be careful!" is not angry at me for not being careful so much as he is afraid that I'm going to keel over on him and he's going to be helpless to stop it.

It's handy to know this. Instead of getting angry at them for getting angry, I know to reasure them until they calm down.

When I was small, my mother dealt with the situations where my blood sugar dropped too low. My father was confident in her ability to handle anything, and didn't worry too much. By the time she died when I was 15, I was pretty much in control of my own care, but I rarely needed special attention. I told him when he needed to take me to the doctor, or when I needed a prescription filled, he paid for it, and his responsibility ended there. At that point, I was only taking a couple of insulin shots a day, and low blood sugars were rare (in large part because that treatment was so ineffective that my sugars ran a bit higher than normal, and thus is not used for Type 1 diabetes any more).

In college, when I switched to a more aggressive insulin regime that kept my blood glucose level more within the range of a normal person's, I also tended to drop below normal from time to time. To me, this is no big deal. I eat, and the situation corrects itself. I remember one occasion when I was in the car with my father and my boyfriend at the time and I started to feel a bit low. I checked my purse and found I was out of candy, so I asked my father to pull over to a drive through. I was calm, and not yet to the point where I was crying or shaking or sweating. My father, however, got snappish with me: he wanted to know exactly what I wanted him to order and was I sure it was going to be enough?

"Why is he pissed at me? I only asked for something to eat!" I whispered to my boyfriend.

"Your dad is scared, that's all," he told me.

I found this very curious. "I'm going to be okay, Dad," I told my father, "this will do the trick, I promise."

His breathing returned to normal and the cords in his neck relaxed. "Okay," he said, and that was the end of it.

Jeff has seen things that would have sent my father over the edge. Jeff has seen me with a glucose level so low I could not stand or speak coherently. Worse, Jeff has been awakened by me going into convulsions in the bed next to him because my glucose had dropped so low that it triggered a seizure. I have no memories of the times when this has happened, beyond a vague recollection of my husband putting a straw between my lips and barking, "Drink!" I can be otherwise completely unresponsive, but I always drink my orange juice when given the command.

The next day, I'm always a little tired but none the worse for wear. Jeff, on the other hand, looks like he's been through the ringer and it takes him a few days to get over it. It doesn't happen too often, but we've been together 20 years and as far as he is concerned, once in a blue moon is far too many. When I was pregnant, for example, my insulin requirements dropped rather dramatically early on, to about half of what I'd needed previously. I had some scary episodes a few nights in a row before I got the dose down to a level where I didn't "crash" every night at 2 AM.

This last weekend, I started taking a new hormone, a synthetic version of the hormone amylin, which my body used to make along with insulin back when I had functioning beta cells in my pancreas. One of the effects of taking this hormone is that my need for the fast-acting insulin I take with each meal is now cut in half. I was explaining how this works to my husband. One of the things amylin does is slow down or stop the liver from releasing the hormone glucagon, which tells the liver to release the steady stream of glucose it does to keep us functioning between meals..

"I don't know if I like this," he said, "Does this mean you're going to crash more in the middle of the night? And if you do, and your liver is not releasing glucagon, does that mean it's going to be harder to pull you out of them?" He sounded irate, which is how I knew he was scared to death.

"No," I told him, "I'm going to monitor myself very carefully, and it shouldn't cause me to crash in the night."

"Do I need to take a video of you having a blood sugar crash in your sleep so you can see what I have to see?"

"That won't be necessary. I'm pretty sure it looks a lot like a grand mal seizure."

"That's exactly what it looks like. And on the nights I'm not there, there's no one who can help you." When I was pregnant he worked second shift at the airport and came home around midnight, which was how he ended up coming to my rescue so often. Now that he's back on 3rd shift, I am alone with our 4-year-old son on the nights he works. I don't take any shot that is big enough to kill me, according to my doctor. If no one is there and I have a seizure it will cause my brain to release adrenalin (the "fight or flight" hormone), which will cause my liver to release glucose, which should pull me back from the brink after I'm done having convulsions. It all works out, just not as fast as Jeff holding a juice box to my mouth and commanding me to drink.

"I'll start eating a snack before bed, if you are really worried."

"Okay," he said, "Do that." He sounded doubtful, but his breathing seemed to return to normal. I couldn't see him since we were talking on the phone, but I'm willing to bet the cords in his neck relaxed, at least a little.

I woke with a low blood sugar this morning, but not so low that I didn't wake up. Still, the first thing Jeff did when I staggered into the kitchen was pour me a glass of juice and say, "Drink!"

He's going to be impossible to deal with for the rest of the week, I just know it.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *