Blood Sugar(43)
A couple months after Kangaroo died, I found Mr. Cat hunched under a chair in the dining room. He had never been under this particular chair before, and even though I knew he was still sad and lonely without his doggie friend, it seemed odd. Even depressed, he wanted to be in bed curled up with me and not all alone in the least-frequented room in the house. I called to him to come out from under there, but he refused. I reached for him, and when I touched his flank, he hissed and tensed, clearly in terrible pain.
Rushing Mr. Cat to the animal hospital brought back all the terrible trauma of rushing the lifeless Kangaroo to the same place just months earlier. How could I possibly handle Mr. Cat’s dying too? After many tests Dr. Hamilton concluded that Mr. Cat had severe pancreatitis that brought on diabetes. His blood sugar was dangerously high. He was given insulin and an IV drip of antibiotics and painkillers. After three days in the kitty emergency room, he was out of the woods and was going to be just fine as long as I kept his eating regulated and administered two shots of insulin a day to the scruff of his neck. Mr. Cat could live another ten years, no problem. Maybe even fifteen!
Had I not spent the past several years with Jason, the diagnosis of diabetes and the idea of having to give Mr. Cat shots of insulin would have overwhelmed me. I’ve never been great with needles and often faint when I get shots. That I had braved getting my ears pierced at the mall was a miracle, but vanity beat out fear. Yet now, because of Jason, I understood diabetes, and I knew I could manage and handle Mr. Cat’s every need. And all of a sudden Jason and Mr. Cat had something in common, the same chronic life-threatening disease. And because of this Jason felt more bonded to Mr. Cat than ever before. Both their vials of insulin were kept in the fridge, clearly labeled, side by side. A friendship newly forged.
Jason once explained to me that a healthy pancreas is like a full tank of gas in a car. It doles out insulin all day long. A little or a lot, working with the body to keep everything moving along evenly. Exercise, a stomach bug, an extra slice of pizza, these are things a healthy person doesn’t think about twice. Like with a full tank, you can drive fast or slow, long distances or short, and the gas will be used as needed. But when your pancreas doesn’t work at all, and no insulin is being created and given, you have to constantly guess how much you will need. So it would be like filling up your gas tank ten times a day with only specific amounts necessary to get you from point A to point B. Sometimes you might underestimate and run out of gas; other times you might overestimate and have too much gas. Any slight traffic delay, use of extra energy for your windshield wipers to push off heavy rains, or flat tire could throw off your gas estimations completely. That dance to survive was Jason’s daily life.
And now it was my responsibility to make sure Mr. Cat did the same dance. I had to give him his daily insulin shots and ensure that he ate measured meals. It was a delicate balance, because if I gave him too much insulin, his blood sugar would plummet, and if I didn’t catch it in time and quickly feed him high-sugar treats, he would die.
This severe low that leads to death is most likely to happen when a diabetic is asleep, when the diabetic is not conscious enough to feel the warning signs of a low blood sugar. The tremors and sweat and nausea go unnoticed, and the diabetic continues to sleep peacefully. This is so common it actually has a name, “dead in bed.”
CHAPTER 30
HUMAN
What I wanted to explain to Detective Jackson, but didn’t because I was savvy enough to know saying less would benefit me more while in this “informative, unofficial, friendly” interrogation, was that within just over one year I planned a wedding, got married, bought a house, moved into the house, turned thirty, and endured Kangaroo’s death and Mr. Cat’s near-fatal illness. And throughout all that I had a thriving full-time psychology practice. I was doing my best to cope with it all, but I was tired and stressed out. Or, as I learned in my own therapy, I was stressing myself out.
I knew based on several studies that happy moments in life can be just as physically taxing as unhappy moments. For instance, a wedding is a wonderful, joyous occasion, but the buildup and the planning and the anticipation and the emotional implications and the life changes are still processed in the body as stress, which spikes adrenaline and cortisol. The same can be said for buying a house and moving and doing well at a job. All these things are positive, but can leave a fingerprint of exhaustion, especially when large life events happen all at once, which they often do.
My mother’s yoga teacher forwarded me an email about a study being done on stress and telomeres. The scientists and researchers who created the study needed one hundred type A women for one week of enforced relaxation at a resort hotel and spa in Key Largo. The whole thing sounded like some sort of time-share ploy. An all-expenses-paid week of lounging by a pool and getting pedicures? Jason encouraged me to call. I didn’t want to.
He asked, “What’s the downside?”
“The downside,” I said, “is that I get tricked into this thing and then stuck in a six-hour lecture in a dark hotel conference room about the joys and financial gains of buying a vacation property.”
Jason gave me a look. He saw through to the real reason I wasn’t calling. My alien knew me too well. So I called.
The woman who answered seemed on the up-and-up and gave me a quick preliminary interview. No, I was not on any antidepressants. No, I was not suicidal. Yes, I considered myself type A. Yes, I worked full-time. Yes, I was highly organized. Oh, you want an example? Hmmm. I only use one pen until that one pen runs out. Then I throw it away, and use another pen. And all my pens are purple. Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine Rolling Ball. Because purple is my favorite color, and I like my notes to have a cohesive look and . . . What’s that? Ah. I’m cleared for a second interview. Great.