So over the last weekend, my wife and I were out of town and while we were coming home, we drove past the hospital where I could have died. On the other side of the freeway was a local spaghetti restaurant where my wife and my parents went after they came to see me every day and I really like the place. There are a couple of locations around here, none exactly close to where we now live, but not exactly a huge drive, so I want to go again sometime.

Anyhow, people ask about it from time to time so I figured I’d fill in some more details. Why not, right?

So this is probably 27-28 years ago, I don’t remember exactly and it doesn’t really matter, but I got sick. Really sick. I couldn’t even get out of bed, it was so bad. It was one of the worst bouts of illness I’ve ever had in my life. I called work and they said to take as much time as I needed. I just slept for like 24 hours straight.

The next day, I still felt terrible, but at least I could mostly stand up and stumble around. I thought it was a really terrible bout of the flu or something. I tried to take a shower and I couldn’t really do it. My wife came home and I was sitting on the floor of the shower, letting the water just wash over me. I’d been there for hours.

The next day, I was still the same. My wife was getting nervous, but I kept saying I was feeling a little better. I’m pretty sure this was a Friday. She went to work, came home and I was in the shower again. She said screw this, put me in  the car and drove me to the doctor. This is back in the day when you could get a same-day appointment or just walk in and they’d see you.

The doctor couldn’t find anything immediately wrong. Yes, I looked like death warmed over, but I didn’t have a fever, there was nothing wrong with my lungs, everything looked right, but it was clearly not. So he took blood to send out to a lab because they didn’t have the capability to do it in-house and said they’d let us know.

Monday comes, I kept trying to tell myself all weekend that it was getting better, but it really wasn’t. My wife wanted to just stay home with me, but I convinced her to go to work, but around noon, she came home because the doctor had called her and said “you get him to the emergency room right now!”

So, off to the hospital and by this point, I’m totally delirious. I don’t remember most of the next 12-18 hours. They took one look at me, put me in a wheelchair, rushed me into the emergency room and started running tests. The doctor had called with the test results, but they confirmed it anyhow.

My blood sugar was over 1200. Now anything over 600 is considered highly dangerous and you need to call 911. Right around 1300 and you’re in a coma and I was rapidly heading that way. When I became aware again, and it was hours later, I was still in the emergency room with 4 IVs in my arms and they were desperately trying to get it down. I could have gone into a coma and it’s anyone’s guess if I might have come out of it. I asked, as best as I was able since my throat was parched and they wouldn’t give me any water, otherwise I might just start vomiting uncontrollably, to tell me the truth. The only thing he would say is “we’re doing our best”.

So a while later, it’s hard to keep things straight, but my parents showed up. Keep in mind that at this point, I’d only bee married for a couple of years, we had no kids, so they came up to see me because the hospital implied that they’d better do it or they might not get another chance. I have no clue what happened, but I heard it referred to as “catastrophic adult onset” once and I think that fits.

I finally got myself into a private room with all the IVs and they hung out until the hospital threw them out, and then they went to the aforementioned spaghetti restaurant. I’d been there before, it was really good, but it was close and probably the only place my wife knew of in the immediate area so that’s where they went. I don’t know any more of what happened after that.

I spent close to 2 weeks in the hospital. During that time, especially in the early days, they still weren’t sure how well I’d recover. It could have caused kidney failure, heart damage, brain damage, it could have made me blind, in fact, I feared that the worst because blood sugar can really screw up your vision, even short term and I could hardly see the TV in the room. There’s a long list of things that could have happened to me. Luckily, none of it did.

The hospital pastor came around a couple of times and wanted to pray with me. I chased him away. Not once in this entire thing did I ever pray. Not once did the thought of any gods even cross my mind. I had doctors, they were doing the best they could, that’s how it goes. In fact, I had to keep telling the chaplain to take a hike because he must have thought I was kidding. It wasn’t until I threatened to complain to the hospital administration that he stopped coming by. I don’t need your stupid voodoo. Leave me alone.

This is where I compare myself to atheists in foxholes. At least there, you have very little time to reflect and think about it, whereas I had nothing more to do than stare at the blurry TV and think. You also don’t tend to have clergy in the foxhole trying to save your soul. Yet, I never even asked myself about gods or about dying. There I was in a potentially life-altering or even life-ending experience and the idea of gods was entirely irrelevant.

Then, over the days that followed, they started to remove IVs. I’d been mainlining insulin and Ringer’s lactate since I came in. It took forever to rehydrate me.

So they told me I was Type-I diabetic, which I had expected since my grandfather and father were both diabetic, so I had it coming from both sides of the family. It is what it is, I knew. They started showing me how to inject insulin and test my blood and all that stuff. Once all the IVs came off, I was ready to go. I’m a really terrible patient, I admit. Even when I had just one IV on one of those rolling carts, I was getting up and going out in the hall, dragging this wheeled pole behind me and they kept getting mad at me, but I don’t care. I am not someone who just lays around if I don’t have to. So I checked myself out, against their recommendations, and went home. I had work to do.

So I get home and the American Diabetes Association sent me a monitor, they do that kind of thing, back when they weren’t cheap and easily obtainable everywhere, and I got back to work. I had a couple of vials of insulin that went home with me, plus a couple of syringes, but they’d sent prescriptions over to the local pharmacy that we used so we went to get them.

This is kind of a funny bit so I’ll include it. Somewhere between the hospital and the pharmacy, something got screwed up. You would normally get a box of 100 syringes and that should last about a month or so, depending on how often you needed to inject. Little clear plastic syringes with orange caps. I should have gotten one box, plus a vial of fast-acting insulin and one of regular and I’d be all set. Anyhow, when I showed up, they had 10 boxes of needles. I said I don’t need 10, but since the insurance had already paid for it, I took them anyhow. I guess that if I was going to be doing this for the rest of my life, what difference did it make? I still have a box in the garage with about 950 syringes in it. They are useful when giving pets their shots, which I tend to do myself when I can. In fact, for anyone who might be skeptical, that’s an actual picture of the box.

Therefore, I started my new life as a human pincushion. I saw my doctor every week for a few, just to make sure things were going okay. I jabbed myself to test my blood 4x a day, took insulin twice, started to feel better.

For a while anyhow, until I had to start taking less and less of it. If I took too much, obviously, my blood glucose would crash and that’s dangerous too. I got to the point, very quickly, that taking hardly any at all would leave me incapable of moving. Hypoglycemia isn’t a joke. So I started carrying around glucose pills intended to raise my blood sugar, which I thought was stupid. Why take one thing to lower your blood sugar and then take another thing to raise it right back up again.

My doctor said we had to find a way to keep me on it somehow, since I was clearly Type-I diabetic. Again, I’m a  bad patient so I just stopped taking it. I kept testing my blood, but it was always right in normal range. I could eat whatever I wanted, I could do whatever I wanted and nothing changed. That lasted for the next 12-15 years.

It was maybe 15 years ago when it came back, this time as Type-II. I’ve been on medications ever since, very well controlled. Every once in a while, the doctor swaps me out for some new formulation to see how it works and it never works any better than what I was on, but if that’s what he wants to do, fine by me. I’m as happy and healthy as I can expect to be at my age. Probably healthier than most would expect. I get my blood tested every 4-6 months and it’s always fine. I get an annual eye exam, since diabetes is hard on the eyes, and it’s always fine. I have the very beginning of cataracts, but according to my optometrist, pretty much everyone my age does. We’ll handle it when they get worse, but that could be a decade or two. Who knows if I’ll even be around by then.

I did all of this, with the help of modern medicine, entirely without any gods. The idea of talking to myself and expecting some magical man in the sky to help me out is ludicrous. I’m not a weak-willed or weak-minded person. I don’t need imaginary help. I’ve got it on my own and so do you. If you need an imaginary friend, you’ve got mental problems. Learn to stand on your own two feet. Stop being terrified of reality. That’s the only thing that actually matters. You can’t get away from it regardless, imaginary friend or no.

Grow up. Learn to deal with it. You can do it, just like I did. It’s the only rational way forward. Give it a shot.