The Drop

Earlier tonight, after a day of working out and hanging out with my family, I came home to relax and as I awoke from a nap, I realized that my blood sugar was rapidly dropping. It’s like feeling that someone has altered your equilibrium.

You’re weak, yet you can walk. You’re unfocused, yet you know what you have to do. You think you’re relatively low when you feel the beads of perspiration emerge from your pores, yet you don’t really know how low you are until you see the number.

Tonight, my number was a 33. Yeah, that’s totally not normal. In recent days, I’ve dropped to 44 and 45. I know, I know I have to watch it. Scottie Pippen’s number is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sorry for the cliche statement.

So as anyone who can express their thoughts with words, I wrote a bit directly on my Facebook page using my phone while laying on my bed, t-shirt still soaked with the sweat from the drop, feeling that at 9:30 p.m. I was going to go to bed just to wake up refreshed and start over again tomorrow. However, I started feeling better, washed the dishes and here I am, making a long overdue blog post out of the Facebook post that is too long for anyone in their right mind to read. It’s too long for social media, but hey, that was my outlet.

With that being said, here it is. The Facebook post no one should have had to endure without clicking on a link to my blog. Thanks and have a good night.

You never realize how much you take your body for granted until its use is challenged. For people with diabetes, the thought is always in the back of your mind.

You feel every time your blood sugar goes up, each time it goes down and always have the desire to feel the best you can. You’ll give up favorite foods, sacrifice sleep and succumb to stabbing your fingers just to keep your body in check.

You’ll never really have a peace of mind, no matter how many devices you have attached to your torso. However, you’ll find it pretty cool to make light of the situation by calling yourself a cyborg and knowing that it really is true.

As someone with type 1 diabetes, your blood glucose does drop to the point of fear. Knowing that you might black out before the orange juice hits your lips; feeling bullets of sweat drip down your face, your back; hyperventilating even as you shove glucose-increasing food in your mouth and praying that the feelings stop as quickly as they came. They usually never do.

The situation quite literally knocks you out. Your body feels like a rung out towel. You look as though you did an hour of cardio, hair and shirt wet, leaving you feeling cold, even in the middle of summer. You want to sleep, giving your body time to bounce back from the low that might have killed you, had you not felt it. Tunnel vision, lack of leg function and weakness is not foreign in these situations, making it scary to live alone; making it scary just to think about not being able to function. Everything you take for granted is questioned.

As you level out, things slowly get back to normal. But you’re impacted. You’ll never forget the feeling. It makes you want better. Makes you hate the disease you didn’t ask for. Makes you wish you had a normal body. And in the end, you know you’ll never have what you want but ultimately, the education, experiences and lessons learned have made you everything you are and everything you’ll ever be.