Phone Call

When I read Kerri's post yesterday, I stopped short.  It took me three times to get through reading the whole thing.  I was shaking in fear; I had tears falling down my face; I was thanking God that I am still alive; I was planning the next time I get to see my friends; I was trying to put a smile on my face.  I went through and read other blogs (many I've never read before) just to find out more information about this little girl and what happened to her.  Other than being scared out of my mind, I read this and realized I might have lived through the time when this would happen to me.

I called my mother, which I postponed most of the afternoon, and while I didn't want to ask the question, I did; "Mom, have you ever heard of the dead-in-bed syndrome?"  I knew that if my parents knew about this when I was a child, they also would have protected me from this information.  I had to explain what it was to her, and then I sat there and said "uh huh, yup, okay" etc while my mother talked to me.  She was at her desk at work, so she looked it up and said, "well the good thing about you is that you were never a good sleeper anyways.  And oh yea, you had night terrors too."  Mom said that they didn't know about this, but immediately told me that if they had, I would not have. "That would have been something Daddy & I would worry about: not you."  She said that there was a lot of information they would find out about at the support group, but never at the doctor's office.  "You were always off having a grand old time and we were finding out all this information that made us think: how come no one has told us this yet."  Like the fact that a low might be scary, but that you can usually survive a low, but if you run out of insulin, you won't survive.  We continued to talk about that for a while and as we were hanging up, I had more tears streaming down my face, trying to sound as though they weren't there and mom telling me not to worry.  When I went on facebook at the end of the day, this was my mother's status: "Be brave.  Even if you're not, pretend to be.  No one can tell the difference."  While I don't know for certain whether they are related, I'm guessing they are.  I try not to worry about diabetes, but sometimes it shows up and slaps me in the face.

I took Kerri's words to heart though.  I wrote my friends who live far away; I've been on the phone with my mother for a lot of the day; I held Girl Genius's hands so much yesterday afternoon; I look forward to seeing my friends this weekend; and I will embrace the crap out of my far-away friend when I get to see her in three weeks.