Reality

On October 15th, 1992 I went to my grandparent's house. Just to throw this out there to stop any confusion going forward, I refer to my grandparents as Mom and Pop. Yes, my grandmother is Mom. My mother is also Mom. Heck, my Great-Grandmother is Mom. Which means that Christmas and Thanksgiving in the 70’s, 80's and 90's was a very confusing time for children trying to get the attention of one particular person as opposed to every human being in the kitchen. It's even worse when my siblings and I try to tell stories to each other,

"so the other day I was talking to Mom"
 

"wait, which one?"
 

"our grandmother"
 

"ok, gotcha"
 

"anyways, Mom was talking about Mom"
 

"wait, which one?"
 

"Our Mother"
 

"ok, gotcha...no...wait...hold on...who were you talking to???"

This is usually the time the tiny people in my brain explode one by one into a conversational map that would rival code breakers in the pentagon. Anyways, I digress. I just wanted to give each and every one of you reading ample opportunity to gear up for the confusion that is my family before we go into the story. I could just simplify it and refer to one as Mom, and one as G-Mom, but honestly, that just makes my grandmother look like a gangster in my head, and That. Can. NOT. Happen. So it's Mom and Mom.

I'm not even sure any of that actually pertains to the story.

So on October 15th, 1992 I jumped in my Mom's 1982 Brown Chrysler Convertible (which in 4 short years would become mine, all mine, until I wrecked it shortly thereafter...please never give a 16 year old a convertible...now a 31 year old can fully handle it, hint hint), and we headed to Mom and Pop's house to celebrate the wonder of my first twelve years of life. See, my birthday was five days earlier on October 10th, and Mom and Pop had a present waiting for me, so there was no place else in the world that I wanted to be than at my grandparent's house gathering my hard earned booty.

When I showed up to Mom and Pop's we went through our introductions, and I waited for what seemed like another 12 years until the adults gave me permission to tear into that little pink envelope on the table in my Grandparents covered porch. This was an age before gift cards, so that little, itty, bitty present meant only one thing...cold hard cash.

And it was.

It turned out Mom and Pop had given me a crisp new $50 bill and I thought for sure I was on my way to becoming the next Donald Trump. Considering at one brief time in my childhood years I earned a whopping $1.00 per week for chores (which was swiftly spent on $.75 Superman Comic Books), this was easily a years worth of salary with a couple of weeks of paid vacation thrown in! I was elated! I jumped up, grabbed my grandparents, showed them an appropriate level of affection (probably on par with a Labrador on Pixie Sticks), and started dreaming of all of the ways I could spend my new found fortune. There were toys to be bought, and I had the money!

I still feel a little tinge of this feeling on pay day. Only now my annual salary is a little bit higher than fifty dollars.

After a good visit with my grandparents, my Mom and I drove back home to our house filled with visions of fun to be had soon.

We pulled up into the garage and walked through the laundry room to come into the kitchen (the first room you walk into after coming in). My mother walked in first and said "Hi Phil" then went to set her purse down. I came in second and saw my Dad standing at the kitchen sink getting a glass of water. I said, "Hi Dad!"

I can literally see every detail of that night in my head. Man, this is really hard to type out. Bare with me.

My Dad turned to me and half smiled, and said, "Hi Kelly. Did you have fun at your grandparent's house?"

"Yeah I did! I got my present."

"Yeah?" Then my father mumbled something I couldn't understand.

“What did you say?”

Again, an inexplicable mumbling, only this time I noticed his face was getting red. My Dad was an Irishman, red happens when we’re really ticked off, or just when we breathe. Let me tell you, this is a lot of fun when you are at the gym getting your workout on and everyone stops to stare. I mean, Rudolph only had to deal with his nose, my whole face lights up like a Christmas tree.

But I was afraid I had ticked him off.

“Dad, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you…” I really don’t have the best hearing on the planet.

This time Dad turned to me, red faced, eyes glaring and began to shout at me in what sounded like a foreign language. I was terrified. My mind raced as I wondered what he could have been saying. I was so afraid I was in trouble. All I wanted to do was run into my room and hide. My dad wasn’t just breathing, he was angry. Scary angry.

Dad looked away from me for a moment, as I continued to wonder how my night of sheer 12 year old bliss was about to turn into something much much different. He reached for a glass and drank some water.

Half of the water spilled out of the left side of his mouth.

Dad began screaming at me, again in a language I couldn’t understand. Mom came running.

“Phil, you’re having a stroke!”

The next thing I knew, Mom was calling out for Sean, Damien, and Brendan to give her a hand getting Dad into the car.

I just stood there in the kitchen. I had no idea what was happening, so I just stood there holding my pink envelope.

After the garage door closed and my Mother and Brothers were whisking my Father away to the Emergency 

room, I looked up and said,

“Fifty dollars! Mom and Pop gave me Fifty dollars!”

I had finally figured out what my Dad was saying to me. He wanted to know what I got for my birthday. I thought maybe, just maybe if I could decipher what my Dad had said, everything would be ok.

It wasn’t.

My Dad was indeed having a stroke. The cause? Rampant, out of control Type 2 Diabetes.

------------------------------------

Twenty years later in February 2012 I was now a 31 year old woman (and desperately holding on…I don’t turn 32 until October). Everything was going great. I finally had a job back in the mortgage industry as a Junior Underwriter, I had graduated from Liberty University with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies, which meant one delightful thing above all else, that since I had graduated already, I didn’t have any homework anymore! The nights of Statistics and Neuro Psychology were a thing of the past and I was elated.

Only, I wasn’t.

For some reason, out of nowhere, I was starting to feel depressed. And by depressed, I mean, struggle to get out of bed, and try to not have 10,000 attention pleading posts on Facebook before noon, kind of depressed. As a good Baccalaureate, I promptly began self-diagnosing. I have learned through the years to never go to webmd. Seriously, never. I’m the girl that can go to webmd because I have a cold and wind up huddled in my shower sobbing over the cancer that stupid website told me I must have. So, I don’t go to webmd.

Apparently the DSM IV is not any better. Before I knew it, I was trying to find out what might be wrong with me, and I was a Paranoid Schizophrenic with possible Dissociative Identity Disorder, with at LEAST two to three other Depressive or Anxiety disorders to throw in for good measure. Rather than bidding adieu to life as I had known it and admitting myself in to the nearest Psych ward (after all, maybe I was exaggerating) I decided to do what Kelly does best.

I ignored it.

Then one day I’m sitting up at work, happily thumbing through files trying to gather conditions for underwriting when suddenly I start breaking into a sweat. Now, I know I was working hard, and I had been unconditioned from a couple of months of not working out, but come on! I was in a seated position, in an air conditioned building, and I should not have been sweating. Then I noticed that my pulse started to pick up. Faster and faster my heart began to race until I felt like I needed to scream just to release the sudden anxiety I was feeling.

I was having a full blown panic attack.

I was dizzy. I felt like I was going to throw up, or start crying, or run away from my desk and hide in the parking garage, no! Jump off of the top of the parking garage!

Wait…what?

Go! Life’s too hard. Just go jump off of the top of the parking garage!

No. That’s stupid. That’s suicide.

Exactly.

What? No! There’s nothing actually wrong with me. I’m doing great. I’m very happy in life right now. I don’t actually have a reason to be depressed.

Then why are you depressed?

I have no idea! But this internal dialogue I’m constantly having is starting to make me rethink that Paranoid Schizophrenia thing.

You’re not Schizophrenic. But, you should probably go jump.

That’s precisely what a Schizophrenic brain would tell me to do.

I’m pretty positive the fact that you are analyzing this makes you non Schizophrenic.

Thank you internal dialogue voice for telling me to kill myself but comforting me in the fact that I might not be having a psychotic break.

You’re welcome.

At this point I’m pretty sure I just put my headphones in, continued to work, and did my best to ignore that very very strange thought.

Had I ever considered suicide before? Sure. I’m not going to lie and say that I’ve never been in that kind of pain, or felt that kind of despair that I thought I’d do anything to escape it. I struggle with hopelessness and feelings of failure often, but I don’t often feel like jumping off of the 6^th floor of a parking garage. I knew this was very very odd. I knew I had been feeling depressed, and obviously ignoring it was now turning into random panic attacks and crazy self talk. So, I did what Kelly’s don’t do very well…I reached out for help.

I turned to my best friends, and even a family member and told them how strangely I was feeling. Out of nowhere, with no inciting incident, I was feeling depressed. And now, my brain was playing tricks on me and I was seriously, very seriously, considering ending it all.

My family and friends were fantastic. They didn’t shame me. They didn’t tell me “you should pray it away”, or hide behind any theology. They comforted me and said, “yeah, this isn’t like you at all. But sometimes people need help, and that’s ok. If you need help, let’s get you some help.”

The funny thing is that when you spend weeks feeling depressed, and then a few days having random panic attacks and suicidal thoughts, you eventually find reasons to blame on being depressed. Which only furthers the depression because now you were physically devastated by a chemical imbalance, AND emotionally disturbed by whatever excuse you came up with.

I spiraled further and further out of control until I was completely convinced I was going to check myself into a mental hospital in Dallas. I didn’t know what was wrong, but something was very very wrong within me and I no longer felt in control.

This was a Thursday.

I left work at 5pm as usual and began my drive from Dallas to Irving. I had plans to meet Tom and Erica for dinner, and I wanted to get there soon because I was starving. The weird thing is that I shouldn’t have been. I had had a huge lunch at noon of a cheeseburger, French fries, and even a chocolate shake the size of my small bucket (because I had been feeling so low, I decided chocolate milky frozen goodness was the way to go. I mean if I was going to have hospital food all weekend with the other crazies, I may as well enjoy my lunch!), and this was only five hours later. I had easily consumed 3,000 calories. I should be good to go until Tuesday. But here it was Thursday at five, and I had dinner plans I was racing to get to.

Tom, Erica, and I met at a Thai restaurant that shall remain nameless, basically for being some pretty yucky Thai food and I don’t want to get sued. We ate, we laughed, we had a good time, and then we all got in our cars and drove off towards our respective homes. Erica and I being roommates were headed toward the same place, but since we were both coming straight from work, we hadn’t ridden together.

So there I was in my car alone. I tried to distract myself with a good sermon. I put on one from the Village church, and listened for a minute or two. That old and now familiar feeling started to come over me though. First it was the sweating, then the heart racing. I turned off the sermon and picked up my phone. I called Erica (who happens to be a Licensed Professional Counselor), and she answered.

“Erica, I need you to stay on the phone with me.”

“Umm…isn’t that why people call?”

“No, I need you to stay on the phone with me, because if you don’t, and I don’t have someone with me right now, I’m going to throw my car into a wall, or one of the highway supports.”

“Ok…are you ok?”

“I don’t think I am. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I shouldn’t feel this way, but I do. It’s like my entire body is on fire, and I can’t figure out why. NOTHING is wrong, but I’m panicking. I’m really really panicking.”

“Ok, then breathe Kelly. In through your nose, and out through your mouth. Long, deep, slow breaths.”

I did as she said, and in a few minutes I was feeling better. Minus the blinding shame and embarrassment I was feeling for feeling so damn out of control.

But physically I was doing better. Erica’s ridiculously good at what she does.

Just in case I stayed on the phone with her though.

“Hey Kell, do you mind if I stop at CVS on my way home? I want to be there for you, but I want to pick something up first.”

“Ok, but if I throw my car into Lake Lewisville, I’m blaming you”

I am NOT a kind person sometimes.

“Don’t throw your car into Lake Lewisville Kelly. Just go home. Keep breathing, and I’ll be there shortly.

So I did what I was told. I drove home, walked into the house, and without turning on a single light, walked straight back into my bedroom and laid down on my bed, still wearing my shoes, and stared at a ceiling I could barely see. I didn’t know what I would do that night, but I knew that as long as I was laying in my bed staring at the ceiling I couldn’t do much.

After a few minutes, a knock came at my door. Obviously it was Erica, but she was being polite, and I was being depressed, so clearly I ignored it. I’m telling you, sometimes I’m not a kind person. Erica came in anyways. She turned on the lights, sat down next to me on my bed and held out a bag. Inside, where I fully expected to see the latest Hallmark “you’re not crazy, but please don’t kill yourself” tome, I instead found a glucometer.

For those that may not know, a glucometer is one of those little devices that people use to stab the ever loving crud out of their fingers in order to draw blood to check their blood sugar (or glucose) levels.

This was NOT what I was expecting to see.

I was a little livid. After watching diabetes kill my father and severely debilitate others, one of my greatest fears was that one day I too might be diabetic. I checked my blood sugar levels every time I went to the doctor, which, since I’m rather accident prone, is fairly often, and I had never come close to diabetic levels.

Except once. But that was obviously a fluke.

So, my best friend in the whole world was crazy. And to add insult to injury, she thought that the reason for my craziness was blood sugar related.

She was right.

I finally gave in and stabbed my finger with the little torture device and the reading came back as 597.

597

Ok, so that might not mean anything to you, but doctors worry about diabetes if you are over 120. I was five times over worried. I was at get thee to a coma levels.

Of course the machine was broken.

Except that Erica checked her’s and her blood sugar levels came back normal.

Erica began panicking. I began ignoring. I texted a friend of mine who is diabetic and said, “how accurate are glucometers?” She more than insinuated that they were pretty darn accurate. I told her my levels and she told me to go to the emergency room immediately.

I told her I’d sleep it off, and that I had had a lot of sugar that day.

Can I please reiterate that I was crazy? Never trust somebody who’s glucose levels are so high that their brain is literally being cooked.

So, I out stubborned my friends, and slept at home that night, promising to make a doctor’s appointment for the next day. That Friday night I went and saw a doctor who used a similar glucometer and found that my blood sugar levels were over 600. I spent most of that night in the hospital emergency room wondering how the heck this had happened.

All I could think of was that night in 1992, and I cried and cried knowing I now had my father’s disease.

That weekend my diet changed. I removed all sugars in my life and went hard core Paleo for 30 days. Within days of starting Paleo, the entire depression I had been dying under was gone. I was back to my old self, with normal brain ramblings, not the kind telling me to leap tall buildings in a single bound. After a month, my blood sugar levels had dropped 400 points.

Since then, I’d love to report that I stuck with it and dropped 150lbs and now life is wonderful. The truth is, little by little old patterns crept back up. My blood sugar is still stable, but a little weight has crept back on. Screw you fat cells and all of your toxicity!

So that’s where I’ve been. I am now a Type 2 Diabetic.

It’s tempting for me to feel like a fraud, and a failure. It would be easy to live in a self deprecating world where I cry out mea culpa for my bad habits.

But I know where that leads. That leads to crazy Kelly…and not the fun loving one that goes down closed roads in Ireland…on ice.

It leads to a funeral.

And quite frankly, I’m not ok with that.

As much as I love Jesus and can’t wait to see Him, I know it’s not my time. I know I still have things to do here.

So here I’ll stay. And rather than shaming myself, I’ll simply dust myself off and start all over again.

Today I did that. Today my life was filled with Salmon and Supplements. Today I began working out again.

Today I lived.

And I’ve got plans to do it again tomorrow.

No one ever told me that diabetes could show up with mental, emotional, psychological symptoms. I never had the extreme thirst, or need to go to the bathroom a million times like other folks get. My vision didn’t blur and I certainly didn’t experience any sudden weight loss. No, I just lost my mind. I lost myself. And you almost lost Kelly.

Praise God for good friends and glucometers.