And Then, Suddenly, Life Stepped In

By J. Hues
Print This Item

Rolling With The Punches
Volume 2 #16
And Then Suddenly, Life Steps In

She: “Please, come get me. I don’t know what’s going on and I’m scared.”
He: “Okay, okay. Can you tell me where you are?”
She: “No, I don’t know. I’m scared. Come get me please? I’m really confused and-- and I don’t know what’s going on.”
He: “Okay, sweetheart. I need to know where you are. What can you see? Are you at the hospital?”
She: “I can see a yellow overhang. My blood-sugar is really low. I don’t know what to do. Come get me, I think I need to eat.”
He: “Honey, I can’t come get you unless you can figure out where you are. Did you make it to the hospital for your appointment? Are you at the hospital?
She: “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m in the car.”


MATCH CANCELED

True story, names changed to protect the innocent and all that nonsense. Folks, life can throw you a nasty curve sometimes. Her EEG was scheduled for yesterday at 1:00pm at St. Mark’s Hospital. He received the above call at 2:42pm yesterday afternoon.

He: “Are you in the hospital parking lot?”
She: “I think so. Yes. Will you come get me? I don’t know where I am.”
He: “You need to eat something, is there anything in the car you can eat?
She: “I don’t know.”
He: “I’m going to come get you, but first let me see if somebody from inside the hospital can come out and find you to help you. Okay?
She: “Okay.”
He: “You’re going to be fine, Laura.”
She: “Okay.”
He: “Do you know what part of the parking lot you’re in.”
She: “I don’t know, I’m really confused. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

She’s crying now, scared out of her mind. He tells her he’ll call her back and calls up St. Mark’s, telling security that he thinks she’s in their parking lot; at least that’s where she says she is. Gives the description of the car. Of her. They begin to search. She’s diabetic, Type 1, and she’s obviously in a serious reaction (when their blood sugar, or glucose levels get too low they can become disoriented, almost as if they’re drunk). He decides to wait to make sure they find her before he leaves, so he can be sure she’s secured and being taken care of. He has no cell phone and is forty-five minutes away from the hospital, at work.

He tries to call her back but she’s not answering her cell phone anymore. Security contacts him. No luck, they can’t find her. She’s not in the lot. She’s in the car, confused and disoriented with no idea what she’s doing or where she is and she’s not in the hospital parking lot. He tries her work to see if she’s gone there, all the while trying her cell phone between phone calls, and he calls the local police where they live to send a car by, but she’s not at home either.

Finally, he gets through to her.

She: “Hello.”
He: “Laura, I need you to tell me where you are.”
She: “Hello.”
He: “No, I need you to help me here.”
She: “Hello.”
He: “Hello! Can you hear me?”
She: “Hello.”
He: “Laura, honey. Where are you? Tell me what you can see?”
She: “Hello.”
He: “Shitshitshit. Um…”
She: “Hello.”
He: “LAURA! I can’t come get you if I don’t know where you are!”
She: “Hello.”
He: “Did you leave to find something to eat?”

She hangs up. Her blood-sugar is dropping. Goddammit, her blood sugar is dropping, she has no food, she’s in the car, he has no idea where she is, she has no idea where she is and she could be anywhere in the city. What to do? What to do? What to do! He calls her doctor again, his office is just down the street from the office. It’s one hour since she first called. Doc is going to check the parking lot and advises he keep trying to get through to her. “Yell at her,” Doc advises. “Try and shock or startle her. If her adrenaline starts to flow her body will start to raise her sugars.”

He spends the next hour in a series of phone calls that are so surreal he begins to questions his own sanity. By this time, he’s moved to a private conference room (he’s still at work) with a speaker phone so he can try and yell at and startle her. Each conversation is brief as she always hangs up on him and sometimes there are lulls between the calls as she stops answering for awhile. As it goes, he wishes he had a cell phone so he could leave and go start looking for her, but he’s the nexus of the search effort and it is essential that he keep trying to contact her (she’s been hanging up immediately on anyone else who calls and at least ‘talks’ to him). At one point she answers the phone singing “I love you” over and over again before lapsing into a bizarre parrot, only mimicking what he says with bizarre inflections.

He: “Did you find something to eat?”
She: “Did YOU find something to eat?”
He: “I need to know where you are?”
She: “Okay.”
He: “Are you still in the car?”
She: “Are you still IN the car?”


And then she hangs up again.

The police are aware of the situation and keeping an eye out but everything hinges on getting some hint as to where she is. Her doctor is checking all the other hospitals. Where would she go? She may have decided to go find some food. There’s no background noise when he calls her so she’s likely still sitting in the car, somewhere.

Each call averages ten to thirty seconds before she hangs up and he’s just not able to get through to her to get any information.

She: “What are you doing?”
He: “Trying to find you. Where are you?”
She: “Picking my nose. What are you doing?”

This one repeated much like this until she hung up. It is closing in on 4:30 now. She’s been at large since 2:45pm and she’s getting less coherent as the time passes and it’s starting to get dark and her doctor’s on the streets and the police are looking as well and he’s the only point of contact with her and he doesn’t know if she’s getting better or worse and he can’t for the life of him get her to tell him where she is. He even tries to get her to honk the car horn, she agrees to do it but never does, to prove that she’s still in the car. Then he starts to wonder how much charge could possible be left in her phone.

He: “Where are you?”
She: “Fucking you.”
He: “No. No you’re not. I need you to tell me where you are.”
She: “Fucking you.”
He: “No! Where! Snap out of this Laura, you can do it! Tell me SOMETHING. anything.”
She: “I love you… What are you doing?”
He: “I’m trying to find you. Please look around. Do you see anything at all.”
She: “Fuck you!”

Ten minutes later she stops answering the phone at all. He prays that her battery died, otherwise… It is now 4:50. More efforts to corral all the local precincts, county police and state highway patrol, giving information on the vehicle and it’s driver. Perhaps she’s on the side of the road somewhere. Perhaps she’s just sitting in a parking lot. She says she never made the appointment at the hospital. She left work at 1:00pm and she’s not returned there; he tells them everything is fine trying not to spread panic too far. Calls a neighbor to see if she’s made it home. “No, the car’s not here.” “Please take this number and call me or have her call me when she gets home.” Trying to cover all the bases. What more can I do? Police are looking, doctor is looking, he’s not looking. Now he’s just sitting. No one left to call. It’s almost 6:00. She hasn’t been answering her phone, he hasn’t heard from her in an hour. What could her blood-sugar possibly be. She probably hasn’t eaten all day. What happens to a diabetic when their blood sugar is this low for this long? He has to get out of there. Go look. Try and find her. Calls come in from different police dispatchers. It’s all “we’ve checked here or there and no sign of her. Let us know if you find her.”

His brother should be home now. He and his wife have cell phones. He calls them and they will meet him at the hospital. Jesus, it’s raining! He hadn’t even noticed. Dark and raining and does it get any better? Rush hour traffic! Forty-five minutes later and he’s there. There they are!, snatches the phone and calls her doctor for any updates (he’d left word at work to forward any information to her doctor; also worried out of his mind and still searching). Doc has been with her since she was three years old, he’s been through some serious shit with her and when Doc gets scared…

No word. Doesn’t know what to do. None of them do. His brother suggests going into the hospital to ensure she’s not there, maybe checked in as a Jane Doe. Past 7 now. Still can’t get through to her, battery has to be dead. That’s what it has to be! He determines to see if she ever made that appointment. She’d left work at 1:00. The appointment was 1:30 to 2:30. She called him at 2:42 disoriented. The test was supposed to put her through a reaction to see how her brain responded (due to seizures two weekends before and at various other intervals in her life). The diabetes is out-of-control quite all of a sudden since the seizures. Wandered around asking people until he found a guy willing to look and see if they could verify if she made the appointment or not; this will determine if she’d been at the hospital when she called first. When he told the guy she was missing and last word from her was that she was sitting in the hospital parking lot, he seemed interested in getting the information.

She HAD been there for the test. Checked out at… “let me double-check this. Looks like she checked out at about 2:30.” He struggles to assimilate this information. She’d called him twelve minutes later in such a state of disorientation she didn’t know where she was or if she’d had the test. TWELVE minutes prior she’d been inside the hospital. How could they have let her leave? Didn’t they know. Did they check her blood sugar? Feed her; they knew she’d not been allowed to eat for four hours before the test. They knew she was diabetic!

Highway patrol calls. Any word? “We suggest you file a missing persons report at the precinct where she was last known to be.” Well now she WAS known to for sure be at this hospital, last seen at 2:30 when she wandered out dazed and confused to get in her car and call me crying and terrified. But the lot had been searched, so she must’ve left. God, he’d told her she needed to eat, what if she’d decided to leave and find something to eat. She could be anywhere! The cell phone keeps ringing but never with information.

And it’s never her. Calls the neighbor again. No sign of her. It’s past eight o’clock and he’s trying really hard not to think of the worst-case scenario but it keeps playing unbidden in his mind. Gotta keep moving. Doing something. It doesn’t help to be standing here talking to people on the phone. Where would she go?

She was supposed to return to work after the test so maybe she determined to head back to work; it’s almost impossible to gauge what her mind decided to do in this condition. When was the last time he breathed? They get in the car and head north, examining the parking lots. It’s later so the cars are fewer but none of them are here. The police call again revealing information he hadn’t known. After he’d gotten off the phone with her the FIRST time she’d called 911 but had been unable to tell them where she was either. He guesses they hadn’t tied the two together because their 911 caller had said she was on the highway heading south (which would be toward our home). “Let’s go file a missing persons report since we’re just down the street.”

While waiting for the policeman to come out...

He: “Hello.”
Neighbor: “She just pulled up.”
He: “Jesus, are you sure?”
Neighbor: “Yeah, I’m looking at the car. I talked to her and she was crying and said she didn’t know where she’d been for the last ten hours and she went in the house.”
He: “Thank you so much for calling. Thank you.”

She’s home. Forty minutes away from where he is right now, but she’s there and it’s 8:50pm and she’s been gone so long and she hasn’t eaten and she doesn’t know where she’s been and she’s crying, but she’s home. He calls and gets dropped right into voicemail. And again. And again. He calls to advise her doctor. “Thank god, I was back at the hospital sweeping the parking lot again. Have you talked to her yet?” So he calls again and now, finally, he gets her. “We can send an ambulance by.” This is the police dispatcher standing there. He’s in the station and she’s crying on the phone but she’s understanding what he’s saying and she says she’s scared but she’s okay and he tells her she needs to eat and check her blood and now he’s gotta go back to the hospital to get his car so he can go home but she’s okay, if a little terrified out of her mind. Nix the ambulance… for now. She’s responding to what he’s saying. She understands.

He heads back to the hospital to pick up his car; his brother had been driving, and the doctor calls and they’re both at the hospital so they decide to meet up and call Laura. They meet shake hands and though they barely know each other they feel like old war buddies. It’s late and wet and cold and dark and they’ve been through hell together only a cell phone apart. “Let’s go inside. I’m on staff and we can call from there where it’s warm and dry.” So they call and they both talk to her, taking turns (“Doesn’t the speaker phone work on this phone?” “I’m sorry doctor.”) and she takes her blood. It’s at 46. Glucose levels of 70-110 are considered normal. Her levels had obviously been much lower through much of the evening. Dangerously lower. Still too low.

He can barely think. She’s eating SweeTarts (for a quick sugar rise) and the doctor will call her and he’s going to go home now and he and the doctor shake hands and let her go and make her promise to eat more and keep checking her blood and he tries so hard not to speed on his way home. He opens the door and she’s sitting there, eyes puffy and swollen from crying and she’s trying to apologize but he won’t hear it. He’s so happy to be touching her. Now he finds a way to breathe again with her in his arms, real and alive and (mostly) well.

There are still many questions to be asked and she starts to remember bits and pieces of where she’s been and the doctor is going to be laying out some strict guidelines for awhile and the tests will continue to find out about the seizures and why she’s suddenly so out of control, but she’s here. She’s been diabetic for almost twenty years now, insulin dependent (two shots a day) but never so scared as now. She drove home on instinct, but prior to that. For three hours she was completely out of touch. Any number of things could’ve happened. Thank God she made it home and as he and the doctor kept telling her over the phone “The most important thing, the only thing that matters right now, is that you’re okay.”


INFORMATION ABOUT DIABETES

Taken from the KidsHealth.org section on Diabetes.

What Is Diabetes?

Diabetes mellitus (pronounced: die-uh-bee-teez mel-uh-tus) is a chronic (continuing over long periods of time) disease. It happens when a person's body loses the ability to make enough of a hormone called insulin or when the body can't use the insulin it does make properly.
When we eat food, our bodies digest it (break it down) in the stomach and intestines. During this process, sugar is released from the food and is absorbed into the bloodstream as glucose (also called "blood sugar"). Insulin, which is produced by the pancreas (an organ located near the stomach), helps the body move glucose from the bloodstream into the cells, where it is converted into energy that cells can use - energy that allows you to run, go to school, work, and do other everyday activities. When a person has diabetes, her body has insulin problems, making it hard to move glucose into the cells and convert it to energy. As a result, glucose builds up in the bloodstream, leading to high blood sugar levels and other problems that can make a person with diabetes very sick if she doesn't receive treatment.
Type 1 diabetes (sometimes called juvenile diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes) is the kind most often seen in kids and teens. It can occur at any age during childhood (the greatest incidence in girls is around ages 10 to 12, and in guys around ages 12 to 14) and adults sometimes get it, too. In Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas usually loses the ability to make any insulin at all. People with Type 1 diabetes must control their diets and inject themselves with insulin each day. (Insulin doesn't work when taken by mouth. If you swallow it - such as you would a pill - insulin is destroyed by the digestive process in the stomach and intestines.)

Laura suffers from Type 1 Diabetes. Of all diabetics in the US, only 5-10% are Type 1, almost all of them are children or have been afflicted since childhood. And yet, presumably because the baby boomers are getting Type 2 Diabetes at an astounding rate and they are in policy-making positions, the vast majority of research being done is for Type 2 Diabetes. While it is understandable that the majority of diabetic sufferers are Type 2, these are basically al adults while it is their children afflicted with Type 1. The priorities of this policy are mysterious at best. There is currently no cure for this disease, and proper management and control of the disease is the only way to prolong a diabetic’s life. Ultimately, there are major health complications due to the stress this disease puts on their bodies and almost all of these diabetics have shortened lives and die of diabetic complications.

If you would like to contribute to the ongoing research to find a cure for diabetes, now is a perfect time to do it as Bristol-Meyers Squibb Company has signed on with the ADA (American Diabetes Association) to double the donations of anyone. To do so follow the link to http://www.diabetes.org/main/aboutus/donations/bms2x.jsp or call 1-800-DIABETES.

Another organization that focuses primarily on Type 1 Diabetes is the JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation). You can donate there online at https://www.jdrf.org/support/don_donation.php or call 1-800-533-CURE.

Every dollar helps us inch closer to a cure!

Next week we’ll be back to the regular shenanigans, I guess I just wasn’t feeling real funny this week.

news | reviews | interviews | forums | advertise | privacy | contact | home