The memoir has completed its first draft! Courtney is coming behind and making her edits. I’m coming behind her and making more. Teamwork makes the dream work. Pre-order now (which doesn’t exist).
Also, if you’d like to hear Courtney and me talk about this incident, managing diabetes, and our failures of not getting continuous glucose monitoring earlier, we' have just the treat for you! Listen below to the extended version of the story.
I have a tendency of reaching over toward Courtney at night and asking, “Are you okay?” She’s a light sleeper and will usually answer me regardless of the hour. If she fails to answer, I know there is a problem. This particular night—in Old City Jerusalem—I reached over. Cold and damp. Not good.
The cause? Low blood sugar. If you’re awake, you catch it.
But Courtney was dead asleep. The sweating made her colder as she slept. She really was crashing—soaked through her clothes and relatively unresponsive.
I entered into a controlled panic.
“Courtney, can you hear me?”
If she could, she was playing coy.
“Courtney, I need you to wake up.”
Light murmurs. Some semblance of consciousness but alarming.
I had no means of helping her. Smart people have glucagon pens for these occasions. We did not. Our hotel didn’t have an elevator to our floor. It’s a small hotel in the Old City of Jerusalem. I had to bolt down a few flights of tile stairs, descending at tight, 90-degree angles.
I arrived in the lobby, a little intense-looking, and started asking people for something to drink. The bartender wasn’t there.
“Hello? I need some help. I need something sweet.”
Another tourist spotted me in the lobby.
“Calm down. It’s going to be okay.”
I knew she was just trying to help, but I also knew for a fact that things would not be okay without intervention.
I procured a beverage of some kind—warm, sweet, chocolaty. I headed back upstairs, assuming we were on the home stretch. I had done this enough to know a little sugar and about 15 minutes work wonders.
The only problem? Courtney is too incapacitated to swallow. What I was trying to get her to drink just fell right out, getting into her hair and onto her pillow. So gross, but we hadn’t gotten anywhere near bringing her sugars to a normal human level.
And there was so. much. shrieking.
During this entire ordeal Courtney wasn’t speaking; she was just shrieking. Loudly. The noise she landed on was one part banshee, one part getting stitches with no anesthetic. I was sitting there, wondering why nobody was waking up to help us out. What kind of team had we traveled with? It wasn’t like the walls were thick. Our door was perpendicular to another, and we did not even get a knock asking, “Is everything okay?” You’re quietly begging that someone can hear this noise, wake up, and lend a hand (doing what? No clue). The other part of you just wants your wife to shut up so that you don’t draw more attention.
Apparently, people did wake up, but they “thought it was a cat” and paid no mind. I’d married a diabetic cat.
To that point, Courtney hadn’t improved any. How do I bring my sweaty, incapacitated wife down several flights of stairs and get her into a taxi so that we can get to whatever hospital we need? What was the Hebrew 9-1-1?
I look for help one more time and someone whom I assume is hotel staff brings me to the kitchen.
I should’ve been laser-focused on Courtney, but the kitchen was hideous. Dishes piled everywhere. These were the dishes that were used for breakfast! I probably could’ve found my plate if I’d looked closely enough. Now I had two problems: (1) my wife was maybe on the brink of catastrophe, and (2) I wasn’t sure I could eat at the hotel anymore. By the end of the trip, I wasn’t eating breakfast anywhere we stayed, but that could also be because I didn’t really want sliced tomatoes for breakfast—or ever.
The procurement of honey packets realigned my priorities.
I got back to Courtney, honey in hand. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started dipping my finger in the honey and rubbing it on the inside of her cheek while she shrieked. Some of it mixed with spit and got in her hair as she lay there. Finger, honey, cheek, shriek, sticky hair. Rinse and repeat.
I learned later that substances like honey can get absorbed into the bloodstream under the tongue. Thus, even though the cheek isn’t the tongue, there was enough honey in her mouth that some got absorbed.
When Courtney recounts all of the chaos, she remembers staring up at a ceiling fan in our room that was spinning. That’s it, just spaced out, confusion, and a ceiling fan. Must be nice to not register all of the chaos and trauma going on. That part is for me, and now for you.
After some time had passed I assessed the situation. Next step? Check her blood sugar. So I found her glucometer, pricked her finger, and squeezed a drop of blood on it. I fully expected to see something in the 20s, which is the “better figure something out or your wife may die” zone.
However, her sugar was comfortably over 100—which is the “live your life and enjoy it” zone. A reading in that range and she should be fully functioning.
Great. Now what?
The shrieking had slowed but Courtney, while conscious, was still not really responsive. I had no bullets left. The script I have is “give her 15 or so grams of carbs and 15 minutes and she’ll get back to normal.” I didn’t have a “and if she doesn’t, then do this” move. In a little over two years of marriage, we had played that game enough times and every single time I had been able to work it out.
Unable to work it out, I began settling into another thought.
During all of the shrieking, the flights of stairs, and the stress, I thought, “I guess this is the rest of my marriage.”
I genuinely believed that something inside Courtney had died (physically, this time, not emotionally) and I needed to settle in for a marriage where the rest of my life would be taking care of my immobile and generally unresponsive wife.
This thought process wasn’t resignation or fear; it was ownership of my new phase of marriage.
But there we were, on the top story of a small hotel in Jerusalem in the middle of the night in the midst of a medical emergency, and I was doing everything I could for her.
When all my interventions proved woefully inadequate, it was there that I thought, “Here we are.”
And it was truly us.
Courtney interrupted my thought process by barely mumbling, “Ccccooolld.”
She’s cold? Well that would make sense. She had sweated through her pajamas. I’d be cold, too, but I’d still be able to move. Her blood sugar had been so low for so long that she was also dealing with hypothermia as her body fought for survival.
I was fresh out of campfires and electric blankets there in Jerusalem, but I did have a bathtub that, by God’s grace, had a detachable shower head. I picked her up and put her in the tub. I’m glad I didn’t need to carry her down three flights of stairs. The fifteen feet from the bed to the bathtub seemed Herculean enough. Shoutout to all the nurses who move people every day.
I began to spray her down with warm water while I left the stopper in the tub to fill it up. This felt like how you would spray a pet, not a wife.
Within moments, she snapped back. Because she was back in the land of the living, she quickly realized her hair was a sticky, gross mess and decided to shower. I went into the room and emotionally surveyed the impact of those last moments. She emerged conscious and clean. Soon after, she shared how much her mouth hurt now. Apparently, she had tried to eat the honey on her cheeks by gnawing on them, causing sore cheeks for the rest of the trip.
All worth it, though. Courtney was back. We were back.
Her pillow was gross.
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