#DBlogWeek ’13 – Day 3 – How I met your mother

(Or, more accurately: How my mother met your mother)

It’s Diabetes Blog Week again! For the next five days, Karen , author of Bitter-Sweet diabetes, will tell me what to write about. (She did this last year, too). Today, she wants me to write about a memorable diabetes day. I don’t know if this one is my MOST memorable, especially since the most significant diabetes-events tend to be the ones where I’m in no capacity to remember things, but here goes…

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This happened over ten years ago. Add old-age to hospital-grade hypoglycemia, and memories get hazy, but I’ll do my best.

Back then, I was living alone in a second floor apartment in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. I was dating a girl who lived on the outskirts of Queens, NY. Because of the distance between us, we only saw each other on weekends – and the “dates” usually included an overnight stay.

Don’t judge.

Late one Saturday night (or perhaps early Sunday morning – and this is where my memory is really hazy) – I remember the following things:

• A glass of orange juice, which splashed all over because my hand was shaking
• Sweat-soaked clothes and sweat-soaked sheets
• NYPD officers
• An ambulance
• Someone reciting a blood glucose level – in the teens*
• An emergency room
• An IV

*That number was in mg/dL, by the way. For the benefit of folks who use mmol/L, it was less than one. Kinda sounds more dramatic that way, anyway.

There are other things that I remember, a bit later on.

I remember my girlfriend, who followed the ambulance a whole five blocks to the hospital, standing over the hospital bed, looking at my pathetic self.

I remember her parents, who only lived about 20 minutes away on Long Island, standing over the hospital bed, looking at my pathetic self.

I remember my parents, who lived in the middle of New Jersey and over an hour away (less if my father’s behind the wheel, it’s the middle of the night, and there’s an emergency), standing over the hospital bed, looking at my pathetic self.

I remember her parents and my parents, standing over the hospital bed, meeting each other for the very first time.

This wasn’t how I planned to introduce our parents to each other. There actually were no plans to introduce them, but if I had made any, they certainly wouldn’t have been like this. After the four of them left the hospital (I stuck around a bit longer), my parents followed her parents to their house, where they got some sleep and some breakfast. And probably got to know each other a little better too.

Fast-forward to the time I presented my girlfriend with a diamond engagement ring in August 2003. By that time, the daunting task of introducing our parents had already been taken care of. There was no planning needed, no prior “be on your best behavior” warnings, no preparation. It just happened – unplanned.

And everything was good.