Something's Gotta Give

I’m not drunk enough to write out this story. Which is a shame, since I’m highly allergic to alcohol. As in the “one mouthful and take bets if the ambulance gets here in time” scale of things. And I can’t even chug a soda, because that would spike my diabetic self into the stratosphere.

Herbal tea will have to suffice; it’s all I’ve got at this time of night.

And funny I should mention diabetes…

According to the doctors, back in 2017, I was two days from dying. I was diagnosed with diabetes and congestive heart failure concurrently, and it was the CHF that was taking me out. My skin had just about decided to split with all the fluid I was retaining, when they hit me with all the meds to wring me out. Five days later, and 65 pounds of water weight lighter, I was discharged.

That wasn’t the painful part.

I am such a light touch with meds that overdosing is achieved at normal levels. As near as I can tell, I was given double-the-normal doses, because they took one look at a middle-aged fat chick suffering from both diabetes and CHF and immediately went to “she won’t stick the diet.”

Let’s just say that it was a critical error in thinking on their part.

I think it started when I burst into tears on the fifth day, begging the doctor and my mother to let me go home. I’m not a crier, folx, and I think the out-of-character waterworks scared my mom more than it did me. We can say that it was all due to insomnia (let’s not talk about the two roommates I had, and how they were bad for my mental health for different reasons), but that excuse wouldn’t hold for the next full year.

I was dizzy. I would get migraines. My eyes would blur in bright light. I couldn’t remember anything. I would rage or cry for no reason, or switch back and forth like some demented emotional metronome. I would walk away from tasks, more than once forgetting to turn off the water.

I was losing my mind, I knew it, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

Nightmares, where I would wake up screaming. Or nightmares where my husband would have to wake me up, because I had sleep paralysis. The insomnia didn’t leave, and I was walking in a fog - but I still couldn’t walk a straight line.

I was eating what I was told, which was difficult, because I had to avoid moderate sugar but had to radically eliminate salt.

And then…

In the beginning, I was only going to the bathroom at 2 o’clock, and I would be there in an hour. Then I was hot-footing it in there at 1:30. Then one, which would interfere with my lunch schedule. Not fun. Then 12:30, then noon, then 11:30…

I got really, really good at word seeks.

And my legs would be numb from being there for hours. If I tried to leave, it would start again as soon as I moved.

And I was losing it.

Reality? What’s that? A porcelain bowl. A bed where I burrowed under the covers, but woke up in the dark, cold and screaming. A half-life, where nothing worked right, and I stumbled from meal to meal like a shambling zombie.

My doctors? I begged them to adjust my meds, and all I got was, and I quote, “But, it’s working!”

When I couldn’t take it after three months of living misery, I bawled on the phone to my primary care physician’s nurse. They begrudgingly allowed me to cut the one pill in half.

One. Of the four heavy hitters they put me on.

Insulin, Metformin, Lisinopril, Metoprolol. They wanted to put me on Lasix, too – it’s a water pill that keeps you from swelling up, but my body would just laugh at it. Inject me with way too many CCs of the stuff in the hospital, warn me I’ll be running to pee within five minutes? Try forty-five minutes later, and it was a slow amble. Insulin? Yeah, my body shrugged at that too, and I was off it within a year.

But those last three? Yeah, those…

One of my friends is a geriatric nutritionist, and she had already lost her mind about the dose of Metformin they put me on. She knew it induced dementia symptoms. Lisinopril was known to increase mood swings from weepy to rage and back. Plus, it increased light sensitivity and dizziness.

They blamed it all on Lisinopril. You can only cut that one in half.

Less dizzy and light sensitive, and somewhat less forgetful. I no longer felt like I was strangling in bubble wrap, with the world on the other side. But that didn’t help the galloping trots, or the fact that I was still having screaming nightmares, and of course insomnia because who wants to go to sleep, knowing what was waiting for me?

And I was still losing up to five freaking hours a day, for my prodigious tushie to worship the porcelain throne in the only way it knows how.

It’s hard to keep to an exercise regimen when your legs are numb.

When your sense of time is gone, you’re obsessively checking the clock, because your internal time sense has clocked out and checked into a hotel.

Standing on the brink of a cliff, fog and nebulous shapes all around, and something’s pushing you off the edge. You can’t see it, but you know it’s trying to kill you.

I shut down. If this was what living with a chronic disease was like, I wanted no part of it. My poor hubs and mom, both of them were terrified, but didn’t know how to help.

The line between sanity / awake and nightmare / asleep got thinner and thinner, cloudy mists, pressure to just give up and die, and only inertia kept me from giving in.

Whenever I get a bad cold, there’s a point where I want to suicide. There’s a tripwire deep in my psyche, that allows me to turn to my hubby and say “Honey, time to hide the knives.” This time, the tripwire never fired, and I didn’t even notice that the sharp knives had completely vanished from the house.

Of course, this couldn’t last forever. The rubber band keeping me tethered to life was stretched, and would eventually break.

That break came when two people, that my hubby and I thought we could trust, decided to do something they knew would send me over the edge.

In retrospect, I’m glad they showed their true colors when they did. At the time, I couldn’t deal with one more betrayal. External, at least, not internal.

So I completely checked out. I was done.

I stopped taking my meds. I figured hubby could make some money back by selling them, and I was a lost cause, so why take them all?

I remember not wanting to kill myself, because I was afraid I would get trapped in the nightmare world.

I recall three days of hallucination, maybe five, hubby remembers a different number.

I remember looking for the knives, and not finding any.

I remember running outside stark naked, looking to cool off in the river, and my poor hubby trying to get me back inside. I have no idea what the neighbors saw.

I remember hubby desperately calling a friend to sit on me, because he couldn’t keep his eye on me all the time; he needed sleep too.

I remember refusing to eat. I remember voices crying, begging me to eat.

And I remember waking up one day.

And I could think again.

I was being stared at by white faces, that finally were in focus. Hubby. Friend.

I still don’t know which of the above really happened, or was hallucination.

I didn't know what month it was.

I didn't know what season it was, it was that bad.

Did you know, that when Lisinopril and Metoprolol are prescribed in doses more than your body can take, it completely masks every physical symptom of low blood sugar? You body chemistry tilts, slowly cooks your brain, brings on deadly ketoacidosis?

We found out that day, when hubby and friend looked up the drug interactions, and found the correlation.

By that point, I’d almost died more than a few times from extremely low blood sugar, and we couldn’t pinpoint why. I’d visited Death’s door so often I should’ve installed a bench.

I had already been frustrated that I had TWO nutritionists in the hospital, one for diabetes, one for CHF, and each contradicted the other’s recommendations. When I told them to talk to each other and tell me what I could eat afterward, I was labeled “difficult.”

I was a very angry person.

“But it’s working,” hunh? I’d narrowly escaped death again, and was getting no help from the people who were supposed to help me.

On my own authority, I cut my meds into quarter doses. If I felt decent, I might increase them later.

(It’s been eight years. Nope. With two of my meds, my official dosage says “lick the pill.” Only my primary care physician actually LISTENED to me.)

I fired my heart doctors. Screw you, Nurse “But it’s working” and Doctor “he likes his patients to have their bras off, that’s just how he is” with your inappropriate questions that I didn’t answer.

It took a while to crawl out of the hole the meds put me in. The brain is still a part of the body, though separate, and regular diet and exercise does help to get back to some level of sanity.

I now have alarms on my phone for meals and snacks, including one at 10:15 PM for no-salt corn chips and low-salt hummus. Did you know that nightmares usually accompany low blood sugar in the middle of the night? And that I was too warm, so hubby would find me sleeping above the covers in front of a fan? It took quite a bit of blanket adjustment to get sane.

I exercise just before bed by doing laps upstairs.

I can’t bend over too much, or the migraines and back aches (possible sciatica) come rushing in.

I don’t exercise right after meals, or the dizziness comes roaring back.

I use featherweight polarized sunglasses to keep the migraines at bay.

The nightmares are still there. I just had four nights in a row of them, but at least I can wake myself up now. Losing weight makes it worse, curse you diabetes, small wonder no one wants to when the docs are on you to do it.

And the "interesting" dreams? You've read them, if you’ve read some of my odd stories. There’s something very therapeutic in getting them out of my head and onto electronic paper.

The betrayal? It’s always the closest ones to you, that stab the deepest. We still have to interact with them, otherwise we lose contact with our granddaughter. I can admit it here, because they don’t read my stories. For some reason, they’re angry as anything that I’ve found some support and minor success here. Hubby loves pointing out my latest accomplishments, and watching the jealousy burn them. Of course they haven’t apologized. They know they’re in the wrong, but admitting it would mean realizing something terrible about themselves, and they can’t have that of course. Not that it matters now – I’m out from under the brain fog, I see what game they were playing, and declared game over by withdrawing from interaction except when necessary. I run interference when hubby is dragged off by our granddaughter, so they get to play without control-freaky helicopter hovering. Not fun for me, but satisfying for hubby, and he deserves that unalloyed time.

I couldn’t tell you when the sharp knives returned, but one day they were back when I needed to cut an apple.

We have since cut another narcissistic feeder out of my life, and my diseases are stable. Tomorrow we make a fresh very-low-salt soup, so I stop eating leftovers that are just too salty for my body to handle. And we exercised between storms blowing through today, and thankfully didn’t lose power.

The black swallowtail butterfly that came out of his cocoon weeks early was terribly unhappy about the temperature plummet. He let me know in no uncertain terms that I need to let him OUT, and I told him that there aren’t any flowers blooming that he can eat from, and there are no lady flutters out there to mate with even if I could release him. Lots of birds that would gleefully eat him, though. So he slurps “synthetic nectar,” and sulks.

I live for my hubby, and my parents, and our granddaughter, and the neighbor dogs, and my flutters. And my glass bead torch, and the craft classes I teach, and squished pennies I collect. And the craft projects I make.

I’d lost my loves in the fog. It took a long time to find them again.

This time, I won’t let them go.