Long time ago, a friend of mine was pregnant. She was a severe diabetic. The doctors feared for her life, but she was determined to have the baby. She was declared not just "High Risk" but the 'highest risk' patient any of them had ever encountered.
Her insulin roller coastered to extremes, and more than once, she lapsed into unconsciousness and 911 had to be called. Her husband would phone me after these events, and explain how low her sugars got, and how she barely survived. It seemed to me, odd that he was more concerned with how this affected him than by what it could do to her or the baby. But I attributed that to his general immaturity, and perhaps, genuine fear that he would be lost without the love of his life.
They came to visit me during her 8th month of this high risk pregnancy. In the middle of the night, her husband woke me up to tell me that she was 'crashing' (her sugars were diving) and she was about to lose consciousness.
Since he had been through this so many times before, I asked him what we should do. He said we should prick her finger and take a measure of how low her sugars are. I figured that was a first step. I wanted to call 911, but he told me that unless she is unconscious they won't come.
The thought of my friend going into a unconsciousness was terrifying to me. Frantically, we searched in her bag for the needle that is sterilized and used to take her blood tests.
Her eyes looked panicked. She could barely move, and she looked mad. I knew she hated needles, figured that was it.
"After we find out how low it is, what do we do?" I asked, still rummaging.
His response stunned me. "Oh, we just give her some sugar water and she comes out of it."
I was stunned. I stopped searching and looked at him as he looked, almost gleefully at his pregnant wife, drifting away. "That is all we have to do to save her life???" I asked.
"Yeah, yeah," he said, almost as a throw-away.
"If that is all we need to do to save her, WHY are we going to measuring her sugar levels?"
"Oh," he said. "I just want to see how low they are. Last time the paramedics said they had never seen anyone survive with such low numbers. I think she can beat that record."
Apparently, as his wife could pass from this world at any moment, and his unborn child along with her, he was going for some nondescript 'record' or 'personal best low'.
I had to choose from my instinct to clobber him or save her.
I went to the kitchen, found a chocolate bar (we were out of sugar) and placed it in her mouth. Her eyes were almost solid black now, and I knew she was mad. She sucked at it, and slowly was able to claw her way back to full consciousness. Orange juice followed.
He was upset with me. "Don't!" he pleaded as she started coming back. "We will never know how low it was this time! We will never know how low she can go!" I think he thought that her low sugar numbers would get him into the Guinness Book of Records, or some other small flake of fame hall.
She survived, the baby is now in college and long ago, she ditched that bum.
To this day, what stands out in my mind was how taking immediate action would not only relieve her symptoms and possibly save her life, but how, instead of helping her, he was looking to see how bad it could get and if she could go lower than before, and live.
Another New Low
What brings that episode to mind, for me, is when I hear on the news, people criticizing the Obama Administration for taking action to slow, then reverse the economic decline, which they walked into after it was already over the cliff.
I hear the comment, over and over again how he will fail because 'We still don't know where the bottom is.'
Okay, in the absence of a perfect forecast as to exactly at what point everything fails and we all die, they see no part for them to play other than to criticize?
Instead of anticipating the exact fatal point of no return and debating it, why not just all focus on getting us out of this.
I'm not sure if they are going for a 'personal best' in that Flake Hall of Fame I mentioned earlier, but I do know this: If we don't rid our system of those unhelpful types, we can be assured that we will, sooner rather than later, know what that point is---for absolute sure.
The baby in this case, is the future.
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