Just eat some sugar.

When I was 12, I woke up possessed in the middle of the night and got into a fight with the kitchen garbage can.

Okay, actually, I think I got up to go to the bathroom, ended up blacking out, wandered into the kitchen, got extra dizzy, tried to catch my balance on something that turned out to be the garbage can, it didn’t work, and fell over. My sister witnessed most of this and that’s where the “possessed” allegation comes into play. Yes, I can still walk when I am blacked out, I just can’t see where I am walking. It is when I am passed out that I lack motor skills.

Fast forward to my junior year at MSU, with a lot of blacking out along the way, and I spent a few mornings and afternoons in the emergency room. I thought I was going to die. At least, that is what I said and why I was driven to the emergency room, and I am pretty sure I really thought so. Now, these emergency room visits do not include the trips to the ER when I poisoned myself with the old Ragu sauce, the long leftover pizza and the 11 pm, right before they close, McDonald’s double cheeseburger. Oh yeah and when Grandma let me eat an entire watermelon in one sitting, that doesn’t count either. Never eat an entire watermelon… you may think a lot of water is good for you, you are wrong because I was wrong.

The doctors having no clue what to do started with my heart. I never should have brought up the fact that I had Kawasaki Disease when I was younger. That damn carpet. My mom drove to East Lansing and took me to Sparrow Hospital for every heart test the doctors could order. I was abused by a plastic monitor several times, I ran on a treadmill with wires hooked to me, I wore a monitor under my baggy pajama shirt for 24 hours completely wired to class and all, and the best was having an IV in my hand with meds to speed up my heart rate while being strapped to a table that flips you up and down. Result = I have a healthy heart! Yay. Check that off my list for the future. I can continue to eat fast food for every meal because it clearly doesn’t adversely affect me and when I compete in the Olympics as a super-athlete I won’t drop dead from some unknown heart issue.

Finally I agreed to do a glucose tolerance test. I think they wanted to do it earlier but I was too afraid of needles poking my arm. Bad experience with getting blood drawn when I was little…my mom would literally have to pry my fingers and toes off the door frame to get me out of the house and into the car to go to the doctor for blood draws – after she bribed me with the choice of a trip to Toys R Us or Major Magic for every appointment (every week), I got better.

Anywho, we went to do the sugar test and I had my blood drawn at least six times that day. I had an empty stomach and they fed me sugar in a Dixie cup. It was pretty terrible. I will never drink from a Dixie cup again. Turns out I have hypoglycemia.

Explains A LOT, examples include: why I’m always exhaaaausted, why I’m always dizzy, why I see checkerboards often, why my brain shuts down and I cannot make a rational decision until I eat, why I have to eat so often, why I have pulled off the freeway several times for sake of passing out while driving, why I get headaches 3 times a day, why my baby toe goes behind my other toes without me trying to make it do that, why my hands sometimes look like puppets, why my heart feels like it races and why I fight garbage cans. Knowing about my hypoglycemia explains a lot once you know me.

I personally blame my hypoglycemia on the following: why I have to eat at restaurants at least 4 nights per week, why I eat fast food (duh, because it is fast and I need food now), why I hit snooze on my alarm at least 5 times every morning, why I don’t drink coffee but energy drinks with the fake sugar are okay as long as they are mixed with vodka because I don’t notice the hypoglycemia effects when I’m drinking vodka, why I randomly cry, why I always have bruises from not looking where I am going before I go, why glass objects seem to go flying off tables near me, why I get super carsick, why anything I do that seems crazy is not really my fault.

SO, in order to try my best to avoid having the above reactions, I must avoid sugar, fruit, carbohydrates, alcohol and caffeine. My favorite things are sour patch kids, cinnamon sugar pop tarts, cinnamon toast crunch cereal, macaroni and cheese, all pasta, vodka and energy drinks. Yeah, are you kidding me? I’ve managed to really try to eat better and it does help. I can almost instantly tell when I have eaten too much sugar. It makes me semi-brain-dead pretty quickly.

Well if you have low blood sugar then why can’t you eat sugar? Because the reason my blood sugar drops so low is due to the way sugar is processed in my body. Thence, avoid sugar or substances processed in the body like sugar, avoids sugar dropping low! Ta-da!!

Hypoglycemia is super annoying. If I don’t get to eat what I need to eat I am limited in what I can do for the rest of the day. Once I screw up my diet, the only thing that helps is time. And to me the best way to pass time, is to sleep. I’m sure everyone I have ever worked with thinks “damn that girls eats a lot”. But stand corrected people, I don’t eat a lot, I eat often.

My family makes fun of how I get when I don’t eat and after being with me for a year and a half, my boyfriend understands their humor. At least I’m not actually possessed. Then they would have big problems, not me. I mean, what do you do with a possessed daughter? Take her to Major Magic and make sure she doesn’t attack the electronic singing bears when those curtains rush to the sides? Maybe.