Lucky Idiot
“Come ooooon…..” I whined, zipped into my coat practically before my boy, R, was dry from the shower. “I’m reeeeeally hungry now”, pointedly putting my boots on as he tried to brush his teeth.
That should have been clue number one, the raging hunger. Fair enough it was already past one o’clock and getting late for lunch But then, we hadn’t eaten breakfast until gone eleven. This was pretty excessive hunger.
By the time we were standing, well wrapped up against the cold, at the bus stop outside my gastric juices were foaming and gurgling and my stomach was beginning to ache. As we sat on the bus the ache turned to nausea, my head beginning to throb ever so slightly.
We stepped off the first bus, waiting for our second ride into Greenwich, and I leaned against the wall to steady myself.
“I don’t feel hungry anymore” I muttered. “I just feel really ill.”
“I guess” I added, almost as an afterthought, “I’d better test my blood sugar, to make sure it isn’t that.”
I fumbled with cold hands in my bag, withdrawing the black zippered case, flipping it open, inserting a strip and applying blood. I watched the little lines dart round in a square shape on the screen of my Freestyle Mini for what felt like an interminable period - something that almost invariably pre-empts a high result.
20.1
“Shit. I’m really high.”
“How high?” R asked as I’m glancing down at the screen of my 522, first cursing it for not warning me, then cursing myself as I realised mistake number one: having earlier silenced a pump alarm without really taking in what it was telling me – that I was already high and on the way up back then.
“Pretty high.” I replied
“Yeah, how high is pretty high?” he asked, without a hint of accusation.
“Twenty. That’s why I was so hungry, and why I now feel so sick”
“What do you want to do?” he asked gently, after guiding me to a seat, buying me a bottle of water and assuring me that no, it really didn’t matter if I was sick right there on the pavement, yes he would hold my hair, and no my breath didn’t smell like pear drops. “You want me to get you home?”
I shook my head.
I made him sit there in the freezing cold, arms wrapped around me as much to keep me warm as to support me, watching buses that would take us where we wanted to be go flying past, for a full thirty minutes as we waited for the insulin to kick in, the sick feeling to go away and normality to return.
“I’m sorry” I mumbled, more than once.
“It’s ok, it’s not your fault” he assured me.
But I think it was. Earlier I’d made the elementary mistake of forgetting to reconnect my pump after disconnecting it. I’d compounded the error by not actually checking my blood sugar at that point, or attempting to bolus for missed basal. I’d well and truly wrecked any chance of getting out of the situation by failing to properly acknowledge the earlier high alert. All of which goes to show that both a pump and a continuous monitor are only as good as the person using them.
“I could have reminded you too though” was his response. “And next time I will. It can be my responsibility as much as yours.”
This crappy situation had a silver lining. As I started to feel better I smiled to myself, really happy to have found someone prepared to embrace this head on.
Sometimes, at least as far as diabetes is concerned, I'm an idiot.
But I feel like a very lucky idiot.
