What low blood sugar feels like

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I want to tell you all about my weekend but I'm too exhausted. I just spent the last 30 minutes sitting on the dining room floor with my head in my hands, trying not to throw up. Rich and I were chatting upstairs when all of a sudden I felt really nauseated. I thought it would pass but the waves of ick just kept coming. We headed downstairs to check my blood and the meter reported I was at 58 mg/dL. At that point I started feeling really bad. I drank a can of Coke as fast as I could without hurling but I was still feeling awful. That's when getting on the floor sounded like a good idea.

I had been feeling chilly when I first sat down but while drinking the Coke I started feeling too warm and thought sitting on the hardwood floor would feel nice. I got on the floor and had a box of Nerds Halloween candy. I waited about 15 minutes and the meter said I was up to 67. As I sat there, I realized I was feeling really warm and by the time I got my sweatshirt off, my undershirt was soaked and I was burning up.

We moved on to a bottle of Sunny Delight juice (which I highly recommend for fixing low blood sugar). As I sat in the floor, drenched in sweat while chugging this sugar water, I was struck by the irony of going horribly low on D-Blog Day. I have no idea what caused it and I had to remind myself to not sound panicked because it would get better soon. Before I could finish the juice, I could tell I was on the mend as the sweat cooled on my neck and I started shivering. Ironically, the shivering is a good sign because I usually don't feel cold until after the low has been treated.

Rich likes to say that the lower my blood sugar gets, the stupider he must be. I get bossy and over-explain things to him like he's suddenly forgotten where we keep the glasses in the kitchen so he can't get me juice. After years of recognizing this pattern, I have to constantly remind myself to just shut up and trust him.

That's one of the most frustrating aspects of low blood sugar. It's like someone has walked up to you and hit you in the head with a drunk stick. You go from lucid to completely out of it in a flash. Not all "lows" are like that. Some of them I can sense coming on way before the meter ever reads below 80, so I can catch them early. But tonight's in particular I was quite literally knocked on my ass.

Mind mapping

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I think we called it mind mapping, but my mind is fuzzy on the term. I remember Ms. McColley's classroom vividly - the chairs in a horseshoe to promote discussion, the way she gushed over Hamlet, and our regular "mind mapping" exercises. It's that process where you write down a word, draw a cloud around it and then branch other words out that come to mind based off of the original one. She would give us a few minutes to work on that and then we would write a short piece based off of the topic. Afterwards, we could volunteer to share what we wrote with the class. I almost always wanted to share what I wrote, proving that even at 16 my life was an open book.

While wandering in the bookstore this afternoon with Rich, Megan and Ben, I ran into Ms. McColley. We both have new last names now, but we recognized each other immediately and I'm so glad I approached her. I loved all my teachers at Norfolk Academy but she was one of my favorites. I never could believe it was actually considered a class to sit and write whatever came to mind, which is what I would have wanted to spend my afternoon doing anyways, so I always felt like I was getting away with something.

As I pulled out one of my blog business cards to give her, it pleased me that the tag cloud on the back reminded me of all our mind mapping from 15 years ago. Ms. McColley encouraged my blogging before it even existed. More specifically, she encouraged my writing, no matter what form it took. I wrote a poem in one of those mind mapping sessions that eventually won an award. And the largest tag on the back of my business card says writer, which I hope pleases her as much as it pleases me.