Another Day Another Near-Death Experience

Okay let’s not get melodramatic here, it wasn’t exactly a near death experience. And no, it didn’t involve a motorcycle. It didn’t even involve a trip to the emergency room. It did, however, include a visit from a couple of EMTs.

First, the boring back story:

As part of the protocol to control my diabetes, I take two types of insulin. The first, called Novolog, is a fast acting type. Injected before each meal or snack, its dosage is based on how many carbohydrates I eat. I take one unit of insulin for every 10 grams of carbs. (I may also take additional units as a “correction” dose if my blood sugar is higher than it should be, but let’s keep it simple.) Let’s say I eat a bowl of cereal with 40 grams of carbs along with a half a cup of milk containing 6 grams of carbs, since the pre-filled syringe I use doesn’t allow me to take half units, I’ll take 5 units of insulin to cover the 46 grams of carbs. My average meal is rarely anymore than 80 grams of carbs so I rarely take any more than 8 units of fast acting insulin. The insulin takes affect within a half hour and stays in my system for about three or four hours.

The second type, called Lantus, is long-acting. I take it once a day and it gives me a steady low level supply of insulin throughout the day. I take 40 units of Lantus per day.

The Novolog comes in a blue pre-filled syringe with a bright orange cap at the bottom. The Lantus comes in a gray pre-filled syringe. Keeping the two straight is essential.

Unfortunately, I’m not always good at keeping things straight and last weekend, in a rush to get out the door and enjoy the day, I squirted a massive 40 unit dose of Novolog into my leg. A half hour later: “I feel funny.”

I tested my blood sugar with my handy-dandy blood test meter and saw that it had dropped to 50. (The goal is to keep it near 80.) A blood sugar reading of 50 isn’t unheard of — it might happen if I misjudge how many carbs I eat, or if I go too long between meals, or if I’m more active than usual. I get sweaty, shaky, a little confused and irritable. The thing to do is to pop a few glucose tablets into my mouth (sugar tablets that I carry around in my pocket) or maybe take a few swigs of Coca-Cola, or whatever else is handy, and then wait for the sugar to catch up. But things weren’t so easy this time. I gobbled a few tablets and tested again: 46. Tested again: 42. Although my blood sugar was uncomfortably low, I was still lucid enough to realize what I had done: Taken more than 4 times my usual dose of fast acting insulin. Umm…Deborah? I think you might need to call an ambulance. Thankfully, we hadn’t left the house yet.

With that much fast acting insulin gobbling up the sugar in my system, there was no way was going to stay ahead of unconsciousness by shoving my gourd with candies.

Apparently the EMTs use the parking area under the elevated highway in front of our building as a “staging area” — where they park while waiting to be sent on calls. Because of this, they arrived at our door in about a minute.

“What’s going on?” the dark haired guy asked. “How are you feeling?”

“Uh, not so good.”

He tested my blood sugar with his own meter — still hovering in the 40s — tested my blood pressure, attached a few electrodes to my wrists and ankles and then stuck an IV needle into my arm. He pulled what looked like a turkey baster, or something for icing a cake, out of his bag of goodies. “Dextrose,” he said. “This should get your blood sugar up nice and fast.” He attached it to the IV tube and I felt an instant coolness as pushed the plunger.

They wanted to talk to me about taking a ride to the hospital, but waited for the dextrose to kick in first.

“Who does the painting?” asked the shaggy blonde EMT. His vocal cords sounded like they’d been sanded down with 40 grit sandpaper. Or maybe just whisky and cigarettes.

“He does,” said Deborah.”

“I did some of these paintings, but a lot of them were done by friends”

“How about the metal work? Who does the metal work?”

Some of Deborah’s recent samples — bronze castings — were on her work bench.

“Me,” said Deborah.”

“She a friend of yours?” he asked, pointing to the autographed 8×0 glossy of Linda Hamilton showing off her guns in her iconic Terminator pose, framed and hanging over Deborah’s workspace.

“No,” laughed Deborah. “I don’t know her. She’s just my inspiration.”

The EMT came across another autographed photo on another wall — of Kate Moss in a bikini. “How about her?” he asked. “She a friend of yours?”

I’ve actually been introduced to Kate Moss once. and I’ve been in the same room with her a dozen times over the years, but without going into the history of hows or whys, it was easier to just say, “No.” And anyway, it was the truth.

“I met her once,” the EMT said. “When I was bar tending in the East Village. Back when she was with that guy…what’s his name..the Libertine.”

At first I thought he meant Johnny Depp and thought it was funny that he would pull out a rather obscure movie from Johnny Depp’s filmography. I mean, The Libertine? Really? Not Pirates of The Caribbean? Then I realized he meant Pete Doherty from “The Libertines.”

“Where did you bartend?” asked Deborah, who has tended bar in a few East Village bars, herself.

“The Dark Room.”

“Oh yeah, The Dark Room, I know that place. I think my friend Lindsay worked there.”

“I don’t think I know her. It was a cool pace, though. A lot of musicians hung out there.”

“How are you feeling.” asked the other EMT, who played Felix Unger to the other other guy’s Oscar Madison.

“Pretty good,” I said, as he peeled the electrodes off my skin, giving me a little free hair removal in the process.

“We have to do our job here and try to convince you to go to the hospital. With all that insulin, there’s still a chance you could collapse. You know, worse case scenario, you could die. We have to tell you that.”

“I understand, but I can manage. I can monitor myself.”

“Okay, well, we have to call a doctor and have him talk to you. He’s going to try to talk you into going to the hospital, too. You don’t have to go, of course, it’s up to you. We can’t make you go. On the other hand, if something happens later and you have to call us a second time, then you have to go. You have no choice.”

“I understand.”

The blonde guy called a doctor on his cell phone, explained to him the situation, and then handed the phone to me. The doctor had a thick accent I couldn’t place, which made him hard to understand. He tried a lot harder than the EMTs to convince me to go to the hospital. I told him I didn’t think it would be necessary, and that I’d even gone through this situation once before, several years ago. But he was persistent. Even more persistent than the Verizon customer service representative I spoke to earlier in the week when I called to cancel my landline telephone service.

Eventually the blonde EMT passed me a note. “You don’t have to be nice. Just tell him no.”

And so I did.

Once it was settled, the dark haired guy removed my IV.

“What’s the lowest you’ve ever seen someone’s blood sugar go before they lost consciousness?” I wanted to know.

“Everybody’s different,” he said. “I’ve seen people with blood sugar as low as 20, sitting, talking to me the way you are right now, and other people with blood sugar in the 60s who were semiconscious, and totally incoherent. Everyone is different.”

He told me about a guy in Harlem they get calls for now and then. “His blood sugar drops and he gets violent and combative. He tries punching us and stuff. He never wants to go to the hospital. Doesn’t want us to treat him.”

“Who calls 911?”

“His mother.”

The image I had of the guy, living with his mother in Harlem didn’t jibe with what the EMT said next:

“He’s a professor at Columbia.”

I did have to monitor my condition more closely than usual, and was a little apprehensive about leaving the house until I felt sure the insulin had worked it way out of my system and I was out of the woods, which meant it screwed up our plans to attend a vintage car show in Gowanus, but whatever, there’s been enough vintage vehicle coverage in this blog lately, anyway.

By the way, these picture obviously have nothing to do with the story they accompany. I rode my bicycle to COney ISland yesterday, half expecting a huge crowd when I got there. It was the Friday before Labor Day, after all. But, as you can see, the place was empty.

Don’t Tell My Wife

Call me determined, persistent, stubborn, pig-headed, foolish, crazy or just plain dumb, but I finally took my motorcycle out for a spin. After suffering two motorcycle-related accidents within the span of six months, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous out there — and nearly getting T-boned at the very first intersection didn’t help any — but I kept things slow and tried to be extra cautious. (I’d say I was overly cautious, but if I’d been overly cautious I suppose I wouldn’t have gotten on the motorcycle at all.)

To be honest, I haven’t been kept off the road entirely for all these months. I’ve managed to stay in touch with the rhythm of the streets by engaging in an equally addictive and arguably even riskier endeavor than riding a motorcycle: riding my bicycle. But variety is the spice of life, and I was excited to have my motorcycle back on the road.

It was overdue for an inspection, so my first stop was to a repair shop for a new sticker.

I made small talk with the shop’s owner, who I hadn’t seen since before my first accident, and told her about my adventures. She knew about my broken foot, but hadn’t heard about my broken arm.

“Glad to see you’re all healed up,” she said. “I mean, you look good, I assume you’re all healed.”

“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, twirling my arm in circles. “It still gets sore and tired from time to time, but it’s only mildly annoying.”

“I nearly had an accident myself the other day,” she said. “On the Williamburg Bridge. I hit something — I didn’t even see what it was, a pot hole, a dip, a bump, I don’t know — but it nearly bounced me off my bike. I went flying off my seat for a second. Scary.”

“The roads around here suck,” I said. “No argument there.”

“Let’s go see your bike,” she said.

She inspected the tires, checked the lights and horn and all that business. “Are you sure you like the brake set up that way?” she asked after depressing the brake pedal a couple of times.

“Yes.”

“You can adjust them, you know.”

“Yeah I know.”

“Do you know what this thing is?” she said, reaching down to turn the nut that adjusts the brake pedal travel.

“Yes.”

“You can turn it like this…”

“I know.”

She set the rear brake up to her liking. “Try that,” she said.

I put my foot on the pedal and hit the brake, then reached down and turned the nut to where it had been. She is at least a foot shorter than I am, with small feet to match. A pointless exercise.

“Are we done?”

“Okay,” she said, pulling a sticker out of a box and placing it on the fork. “You’re good to go. Be careful out there.”

“You too.”

The sky was gray and threatening rain and there was a slight chill in the air, but I wasn’t ready for an all-day ride anyway, so I didn’t care. I hopped on, kicked the bike to life, and headed out for aimlessly cruise.

Hello stop-and-go streets, hi construction debris, howdy cars, trucks, backhoes and bicycles, hello pedestrians who don’t bother to look before sauntering into the street. Did you miss me?

Osteo-what-ia?

So it seems my broken bones can be attributed, in part anyway, to osteopenia. I’m still waiting for the results of some blood tests to get a little more information about what’s going on, but apparently my bone density isn’t quite up to snuff. From what I’ve read there’s some controversy over how to treat it — if to treat it at all — but unless the blood tests reveal an underlying cause other than my diabetes, the only treatment I foresee is to do what I should be doing, anyway — eating right , exercising, and being extra careful on my motorbike. Which implies that I intend to continue riding — a source of contention in our happy little home. No need for a showdown about it quite yet since my arm is still healing and the weather isn’t ideal, but soon, I think. Soon.

Throw the Teller a Curveball

It’s certainly not enough to retire on, not enough to even take a year off to travel the world, but it was enough to throw the teller for a loop.

“Where did you get this?” he said, after turning the check over several times.

“It’s an insurance settlement from a motorcycle accident. I got it from the insurance company.”

He turned the check over several more times, punched a few keys on his computer terminal, held it up and showed it to the teller next to him, picked up the phone and punched a few numbers on the keypad, then stood up and said “Wait here a minute,” and walked away.

He came from behind the glass and walked to an information kiosk where he was joined by several other tellers, all dressed in blue T-shirts for “Customer Appreciation Day.” They formed a circle around the check and looked it over. One of them sat down and entered some information into a computer.

As I stood around waiting, feeling like a criminal, I was approached by another young man in a blue T-shirt, “Here,” he said, handing me a 69 cent pen with the bank’s logo printed on its side. “It’s customer appreciation day.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ve been a customer for over twenty years. I was wondering when I’d get a pen.”

The first teller came over and apologized for taking so long, but said they weren’t sure how to verify the check. “Have you ever gotten one of these before?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I wish.”

“That’s the problem. Wait here,” he said, and then rejoined the gaggle of tellers to continue their investigation.

Finally the teller returned to his seat behind the glass, processed the check and handed me a receipt. “Here you go. Have a nice day.”

As I started to leave, two blue-shirts called me over, “Sir, excuse me, sir.”

Now what

“We were just looking at your account and noticed you’re not enrolled in our debit card reward program. It’s absolutely free. You earn points every time you use your debit card to make purchases. You can then use those rewards to buy all kinds of things. It’s free. Would you like to sign up. It only takes a minute.”

“Sure, fine.”

Afterwards they handed me a bag of junk: another pen, a water bottle, a keychain.

“Thanks.”

Now, if I spend a couple of thousand dollars with my debit card, I can get a free basketball!

With the check safely in the bank, I headed home. “How do you like my motorcycle now?” I said to Deborah, when I showed her the deposit receipt.

“Next time you might not be so lucky,” she said.

The Home Stretch

When my doctor first prescribed physical therapy twice a week for six weeks, I balked. “I have a fifty dollar copay,” I said. “Twice a week for the next six weeks comes to six hundred bucks. I can’t possibly swing that right now.”

“How about once a week?” she said. “Talk to the therapist and see if he can show you things to do at home. Maybe your wife can help with some of it.”

Fifty bucks a week still sounded rough, but I knew that if I ever wanted my arm to be more useful than a limp chicken wing, I’d have to pony up.

Just beyond the locker rooms, the facility opens up to a huge white room equipped with a bank of massage tables, a rack of free weights, a couple of stationary bikes and treadmills, some weight machines, a pile of rubber bands and several pulleys attached to the walls. All together it looked like a cross between a private gym and an unusually well-lit fantasy room in an S&M parlor.

In self-exile for the past two months, protecting myself from the cold and the crowds, sleeping in fits and spurts all night, and all day too, totally uninspired and unproductive, I felt like I was dying. I was, of course, but I’d never felt so keenly aware of it before. Physically, I ached all over. My broken arm ached most of all, and the awkward positions I’d been sleeping in because of it made the rest of me ache, too. I felt like I’d been folded into a wooden postal crate and was being shipped to the other side of middle age. Farewell sweet bird of youth, cue the violins.

Thankfully, physical therapy has allowed me out of the crate and off the bus. Well, okay, not really, I mean I’m still not getting any younger, but at least now I can stand up and stretch along the way.

Hurts so good.

Those Birds Must Be Cold

The clouds in the distance are resting on the horizon, obscured by the skyline, looking like mountains. Right now, the view of the cloud-mountains from my desk makes me feel like I’m in a different city. Out west somewhere. California, maybe, since I also see gulls outside — a reminder that New York City is near the ocean, which is often easy to forget. Actually, it’s easy to forget that New York City is near anything other than itself.

Seven and a half weeks since I broke my arm. I’m off to get more X-Rays.