Getting to the Bottom of Things
I was always a sickly child. At the age of fourteen, I began trying to clean up my diet and get better.
At age seventeen, I wrote a high school research paper on Functional Hypoglycemia. In other words low blood sugar that exists for no readily identifiable reason.
As a teenager, it was relatively common for me to lay in bed reading all day and eating cheetos and not eating properly. After doing that for hours and hours, I would get up and walk down the hall and find myself face down on the floor blacked out and having vivid, bizarre images like weird dreams due to having such extremely low blood sugar.
Or so I thought.
And I thought that for decades, that blacking out and more or less hallucinating were due to low blood sugar.
I got married at age nineteen and he soon joined the Army and we moved away. I cleaned up my diet, drinking no sodas at all for a few years and getting unsweetened tea at fast food places instead.
Most of my blood sugar issues resolved. I stopped feeling faint. I stopped having constant anxiety and a racing heart. The low-blood-sugar induced nightmares went away.
When I did fail to eat for some reason, it was never as bad as it had been in my teens.
And then in my forties I finally learned that standing up too fast and blacking out from it is caused by a particular kind of blood pressure issue, not blood sugar, and marijuana is one of the things that causes it.
So decades after these incidents stopped, I finally realized that me blacking out so bad that I found myself face down on the floor and hallucinating went away not because I got my blood sugar issues resolved but because I moved away and stopped living with someone who was secretly doing drugs in the same household as me.
My blackouts were not due to my low blood sugar. I was suffering from exposure to street drugs without knowing it.
Getting to the bottom of things can sometimes take a long time because it can take a long time to sort out what really happened and the hardest part of getting well boils down to "Hell is other people." And that detail also makes it challenging to write this blog.
At age seventeen, I wrote a high school research paper on Functional Hypoglycemia. In other words low blood sugar that exists for no readily identifiable reason.
As a teenager, it was relatively common for me to lay in bed reading all day and eating cheetos and not eating properly. After doing that for hours and hours, I would get up and walk down the hall and find myself face down on the floor blacked out and having vivid, bizarre images like weird dreams due to having such extremely low blood sugar.
Or so I thought.
And I thought that for decades, that blacking out and more or less hallucinating were due to low blood sugar.
I got married at age nineteen and he soon joined the Army and we moved away. I cleaned up my diet, drinking no sodas at all for a few years and getting unsweetened tea at fast food places instead.
Most of my blood sugar issues resolved. I stopped feeling faint. I stopped having constant anxiety and a racing heart. The low-blood-sugar induced nightmares went away.
When I did fail to eat for some reason, it was never as bad as it had been in my teens.
And then in my forties I finally learned that standing up too fast and blacking out from it is caused by a particular kind of blood pressure issue, not blood sugar, and marijuana is one of the things that causes it.
So decades after these incidents stopped, I finally realized that me blacking out so bad that I found myself face down on the floor and hallucinating went away not because I got my blood sugar issues resolved but because I moved away and stopped living with someone who was secretly doing drugs in the same household as me.
My blackouts were not due to my low blood sugar. I was suffering from exposure to street drugs without knowing it.
Getting to the bottom of things can sometimes take a long time because it can take a long time to sort out what really happened and the hardest part of getting well boils down to "Hell is other people." And that detail also makes it challenging to write this blog.
