“Andrew, I have some bad news for you.”
That is what my GP said to me after testing my blood sugar in her office on a Wednesday afternoon.
I had gone to see her to talk about a routine appointment about a long term prescription I am on. I had been feeling a bit headachey, but nothing unusual for me at this time of year. For some reason – maybe I said something, maybe it is standard to ask, or maybe her GP instincts kicked in – she asked me for a urine sample at the start of the appointment. When she tested the sample, it was high in sugar, so she asked if she could do a finger prick blood test of my blood sugar. It came back as 22 mmol/L.
“You have diabetes,” she continued “and you need to go to hospital to get your blood sugar under control.”
I was a bit confused at first. My migraines are odd, and they have been mistaken for diabetes before, but the blood sugar test has always come back as normal. However, I didn’t spend all those years at Cambridge so I could ignore objective data, so off to hospital I went.
As I walked from the GP surgery to the station, I called Belfast Friend, who has had type 1 diabetes for years, and I have had many lunches with him where he injects insulin as we sit at the table. He’s never made diabetes look cool, but he has made it look manageable. I was a bit stressed, and managed to mess up calling him. Then I called Michael and told him what was going on. He said he’d meet me at the hospital once he was off dialysis.
At the station, the train I needed to get was just pulling away from the platform as I arrived. The driver saw me, and he stopped the train to let me on. The next train would probably have been an hour or so later. That driver helped me that day.
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.
Fred Rogers
Once I was on the train, Belfast Friend sent me a text. I called him back and told him what was going on. I told him I needed him to tell me everything was going to be OK. We talked, and he calmed me down. And he said his immortal words.
It’ll be grand. Sure, you are old enough now that you don’t have to worry about the long-term complications.
Belfast Friend
Belfast Friend, with his kindness and very Northern-Irish humour, helped me that day.
At the hospital, I checked in and I waited. I was triaged. Michael arrived and sat with me. I was called in to have blood taken and sent out to the waiting room again. Michael had to go home – dialysis can be exhausting – and I waited. Eventually I was called in for treatment.
The emergency department was really busy that day. It wasn’t like they are on TV. It was full of people with serious injuries, like wounded legs and such, but very little drama. Every bed, every chair was occupied by someone receiving treatment. I was given a drip, sitting in a chair in a corridor. Eventually, I was taken to a very quiet room to have an ECG done. It was well after midnight by this point, and I hoped that this was where I would be spending the night. Once the ECG was done, I was taken to another chair to wait; the quiet room was actually their resus room, and they needed to keep it quiet. On TV, resus rooms are never quiet.
Eventually, I was taken to the acute medical assessment unit, and I was able to go to sleep.