I'm Afraid of...

Dying at night.

It feels crazy to write that, because it's not every night and it's not all the time, but it is something that I think about probably more than the average person. I think I use this blog often to vent my frustrations. Or clear my head. Or share funny stories. It's not often that I like to be truly vulnerable on here, in real time. Usually I write about things a few days or weeks later, with a different lens, a calmer, more rational lens.

But last night I had one of those nights. You know that feeling that you get, where right when you're falling asleep, you feel like you step off a curb or miss a stair step or something and you jerk awake? Well I sometimes get those, except it's the middle of the night, and I feel jerked awake by a sudden fear that my blood sugar is low...like really low. I jolt awake, certain that I'm disoriented, confused, and near seizures. Only to check the CGM or prick my finger and see that I was cruising at 124 and steady. And there are some nights like these, where the fear doesn't subside for the rest of the night.

Or sometimes the fear sneaks in other ways. Like when I groggily hear the CGM go off, warning me that I've dropped below 85, and I just decide to ignore it and hope I'll stay in the 80s. And then it goes off several more times, and by the time I finally pay attention, I'm LOW below 55 and I've wasted 45 minutes pretending it wasn't going to happen and now I'll waste another hour tending to it.

Or when I am camping, and I have to be separated from my food. All food, even my sugar tabs. And I set my low alert to 90 just to be extra safe and I send myself to bed with a BG of 290 because I'm terrified of having to wake up and run to the bear canister. I sleep with my CGM tucked into my beanie, to be extra sure of hearing the vibrations. I wake every hour and a half, to be sure that I'm not accidentally sleeping on the side of my body where my sensor clings to my leg, thus cutting off signal and potentially not alerting me to my brain's starvation.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that I'm sleeping alone now for the first time in my diabetes career. But part of it has always been there, because to be honest, I have no idea what it looks like to have a severe hypoglycemic attack and it's very possible that I could die quietly in the night even with someone sleeping right next to me.

So, yeah. Having diabetes, it is what it is. Anyone could die in the night, at any time and I get that. To borrow a phrase from Bob's Burgers, I'm no hero. I still put my bra on one boob at a time, like anybody else. But maybe I know a little something about fear that I didn't before. 

Death by Stubbornness

Every two years, I get CPR certified as part of my job requirements. And so every two years, I watch the lame safety video on offer about all the various diseases/conditions/ailments/disasters that might befall people on my watch and which I, as a First Responder, now have a duty to, well, respond to.

There's anaphylactic shocks and EPI Pens, choking, asthma, and of course, good old T1D and hypoglycemia. While I hated the feeling of watching a safety video about myself, I did think it was interesting the part of hypoglycemia they chose to highlight---the attachment to tasks and resistance to eating/addressing the problem. The actor is trying to finish some paperwork, and getting increasingly frustrated and unable to complete the task. Yet when his concerned friend suggests that he check his blood glucose and eat a snack, he repeatedly refuses and remains focused on the task at hand.

I think, to a non-T1D person, this might be hard to understand. You have a "condition." You're obviously not well. Your body is *literally* sending you signals that you are dying right now. Because you are. Your brain, picky eater that it is, is starved for glucose and will shortly no longer be functioning as you'd like it to. Your systems will shut down, one by one, and in a way, it will seem as though you have died of stubbornness.

I know that there is some counterintuitive neurological explanation for all of this. Your body is being flooded with                       and yada yada yada. But I also think that this symptom taps into an essential weakness in a T1D person's personality. And that is, simply, to not have to deal with diabetes. To not have it. To climb a flight of stairs and eat the dinner they want to prepare, rather than hastily devour a granola bar on the front landing while the neighbor's kids watch. To have a conversation with the person addressing them, rather than mumbling "mhmm, uh-huh" distractedly while chugging a juice.

And so, while you're at your weakest, you have to be strong with yourself. You have to admit, I'm sick. I need a break. I need to be awkward, be uncomfortable, expose a part of myself that I'd rather not. I have to reprioritize, reorganize, and rethink. Most importantly, I need to eat something and think about all the rest of this later.

When I find myself in this place, just trying to make it through X before I deal with my blood sugar, I try to rein it in with a firm reminder to myself. This will be easier when it's over. And it's usually true.