Making It So

Today has been an interesting day. I woke feeling short of breath and had a hard time forcing myself out of bed. I hurried through breakfast and left my coffee on the counter when I headed, late, to work. At work I got more coffee, but only felt worse, lightheaded. After an hour I took myself off to the ER, feeling like I was going to pass out.
I did not pass out in fact, not even when the nurse had trouble with my vein and had to manipulate the needle, the physical reaction to which left me sweaty and ill. In the end it was decided that I had suffered “near syncope” which means that I felt like I was going to faint but didn’t, and the information that my blood sugar was “on the low end of normal.”
The nurse who took my blood sugar said that it was 70. According to the American Diabetes Association, that is the lower bound of normal; below that one may experience symptoms of hypoglycemia. Symptoms like fatigue, lightheadedness, headache. Experiencing this at night may lead to waking with fatigue and headache, and furthermore has a symptom of night sweats, which I have and didn’t realize were a symptom of anything.
This means that I now have a working hypothesis about why I’ve been feeling do bad (my blood sugar gets low at night) and a solution for it (have a snack of protein and complex carbs before bed, or when I wake up halfway through the night). I can also ask my doctor about a glucose tolerance test, which I haven’t had; I only know that my fasting blood sugar is right in the center of normal.
Having a hypothesis, something to investigate and ameliorate – something that would sufficiently explain both why I feel so severely but unpredictably bad and why the doctors keep finding nothing wrong with me – makes me feel much more optimistic that I may figure out how to be as well as I want to be. Hell, after resting and eating a proper meal, I felt well enough to play Wii Sports for a while.
It’s late and I won’t add to my story tonight, but there will be another “Temple River” installment soon. Thanks for tuning in; I don’t mind shouting into the ether, but there’s something comforting in the idea that I’m not.