For better, for worse, for highs and for lows

BY LAURIE GORDON
He looked like a demon as he entered the bedroom. His eyes were glazed and rolling back in his head as sweat poured down his face, dripping onto his shirt which I quickly realized was already saturated. It had come over him in a matter of minutes — just since he'd gone to brush his teeth. He was confused, he was disoriented and as had happened several times before during our three year sentence to this disease called type 1 Diabetes, he became angry when I tried to help him.

“Think quickly, do something!” my mind raced. You're never prepared for this because it's as unpredictable as a wild animal. It is a wild animal. He'd become a wild animal! I needed help. He's too much bigger than I am. I had no choice but to call in the cavalry. Though my 10-year-old daughter had a friend for a sleepover, she is well aware of our rare yet serious confrontations with a severe diabetec low and could tell by the way I called for her that it was an emergency.

My husband's gut reaction deep from within was, “Not the child, keep her away from this horror.” But in his state, he couldn't vocalize it, and even if he could have, I wouldn't have listened. I couldn't. I had to get him carbs before he passed out. He tried to push me away, staring at our daughter and shaking his head. Perspiration poured from his temples as tears poured from my eyes. He was a different person now.

Our daughter followed my lead as she had several times before. One time he'd thrown a water bottle and the other severe low he'd had in her presence he'd been barely conscious and she'd had to stay with him where — God willing — I had found him in the middle of the night while I'd raced to the other room and grabbed the emergency glucagon shot. She'd then helped me prop him up enough to pour juice down his throat until, finally, he was able to mumble incoherently and eventually came around.

This time, we each grabbed an arm and I signaled to her to keep a tight grip. I took more of his weight on my side in case he went down. His eyes had a wild look in them as his fight and flight reaction slowly turned to some vague understanding that he had to let us help him. Gently but firmly we led him to sit down and got him carbs and tested his sugar. After a while, he became stable and he was very sleepy so we tucked him into bed and I checked on him throughout the night. The next morning, he remembered some but not most of what had happened — mostly that he felt confused and upset and frustration that it had happened at all.

A severe diabetic low can be horrific. For my husband, it's a living nightmare — a state of blurr where he's suddenly out of control and battling a monster that's trying to control his body and mind. For the caregiver, it's equally demonic as you see someone you love transform so rapidly and so completely into someone they are not. During the episode and afterward you grapple with the reality that it's not really the person: it's the sugar low that's acting as this beast.

My husband was diagnosed with TD1 out of the blue in April of 2012. After having an insatiable thirst, needing to urinate constantly and then discovering he'd lost 9 pounds in four days, he arrived home on a Thursday evening the color of dusty ash. He'd seen an intern covering for his regular doctor two days prior who'd said his blood sugar “was a little high,” and sent him off with a bottle of Metforim and a glucose monitor. That nearly deadly April evening, we took his sugar and the machine said “Hi,” which prompted me to immediately Google search what that meant. Google didn't mess around with its answers. All were in caps or bold and some in red, and each implored to get to the Emergency Room a.s.a.p. My husband procrastinated as long as he could until I finally got him into the car and we arrived to learn his number was well over 600. If he'd had dinner that night, the number would have risen to the point of a diabetic coma and probably death.

That weekend, he was suddenly a type I Diabetic and was dependent on insulin to survive. Our lives would change dramatically, and I quickly learned that though there are so many support groups out there for all kinds of things, save some blogs, they don't really exist for spouses of a Type I diabetic. You just have to figure it out yourself and don't count on most family or friends to “get it,” because they don't see what goes on behind the scenes. That weekend, as my husband lay in the hospital and we both, in our own way, tried to wrap our minds abound what was happening, I went back to church. I hadn't been in years save Christmas Eve and an occasional Easter. I don't know what Father Griner --upon whom I had never met until that Sunday --said in his sermon, but it had a message of carrying on in the face of change. Pretty ironic, pretty perfect for what we were facing. At the time, it was overwhelming. My husband had loved fast food. That would now be history along with the addition of insulin shots, blood testing and carb counting.

Now, low-carb cooking has become second nature, glucose tabs are a constant on my grocery list, and the girl at the ShopRite Pharmacy counter knows me by name because I'm in so much for test strips, long acting and short acting insulin and occasionally a new monitor. As to my husband, he owns a business called Back on Track through which he mentors kids and teens to make positive life changes in the context of fitness and motivation. Sure, at first he was down about his diagnosis and subsequent life change. Who would have thought he'd have to test his blood 10 times a day or give himself shots to survive. Fortunately, we're both pathological optimists and since his diagnosis, he's come to find the silver lining in what some consider a perpetual cloud of having type 1 diabetes. He shows kids who are pre-diabetic what it's like to have to shoot insulin, speaks of the power of overcoming adversity and leads by the example that, for the most part, this disease isn't getting him down.

We've got this, for the most part, and “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, and in sickness and in health” now has some additions: for Lantus, for Novalog, for carb counting, for glucose tabs and for highs and for lows.” The one thing I can't control is the beast that comes out of the man I love when he hits a bad low. I can't predict it and I can't control it. The best I can do is to try to tame it.

Writer's Note: Diabetic lows are scary and can be deadly, yet no one talks about them. It was time someone did. Thank you to Jeanne Straus for letting me voice this first person. To comment on this piece, please visit www.townshipjournal.com.