So last night, as of writing, I very nearly died. This comes off somewhat melodramatic, I know, but I regard it as a simple fact. Last night, the part of me that makes me a cyborg and prevents me from being dead suffered a catastrophic failure. Possibly multiple catastrophic failures depending on how you count, and how much blame you give the hardware for trusting it.
That last sentence doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context, so here’s an illustrative example: take your average AI-goes-rogue-and-starts-hurting-humans plot. In fact, it doesn’t even to be that extreme: take the plot of WarGames. Obviously, McKitrick didn’t intend intend to start an accidental nuclear war, and even tried to prevent it. But he did advocate for trusting a machine to oversee the process, and the rest of the film makes it pretty clear that, even if he’s not a villain, he’s at least partly at fault. The machine, inasmuch as a (at least probably) non-sentient machine can take blame, was responsible for the film’s main crisis, but it was literally just following its instructions.
Last night wasn’t quite as bad as that example. My life support didn’t go rogue, so much as the alarm that’s supposed to go off and warn me and others that my blood sugar is dropping critically low didn’t go off, at least not at first. The secondary alarm that is hardcoded and can’t be silenced (normally a fact I loathe) did go off, but only on my receiver, and not on my mother’s.
By the time I was woken up, only half-conscious at this point, I was so far gone that I couldn’t move my legs. I’m not sure if the problem was that my legs wouldn’t respond, or that my brain was so scrambled that it couldn’t issue commands to them. I picked up my phone and immediately texted my mother for help. In retrospect, I could and probably should have called her, either on the phone, or by screaming bloody murder until everyone in the house was awake. The fact that nether of these things occurred to me speaks to my mental state.
I felt like I was drowning. It didn’t help that my body was dumping all of its heat into my surrounding linens, creating a personal oven, and sweating up a small lake, and shivering all at the same time. I don’t know why my autonomous nervous system decided this was a good idea; I suspect it was simply that the part of my brain that controls temperature was just out of commission, and so was doing everything it knew how to simultaneously and at maximum capacity.
I was drowning in my mind as much as on land. I struggled to pull together coherent thoughts, or even incoherent ones. I fought against the current of panic. I couldn’t find the emergency sugar stash that I normally kept on my nightstand, and I couldn’t move to reach the one in the hall. I looked around in the darkness of my home at night, trying to find something that might save me.
And that was when I felt it. The pull of darkness. It was much the same tug as being sleepy, but stronger, and darker in a way that I can’t quite put words to. It called to me to simply lay down and stop moving. I had woken up because of the alarm, and because I had felt like I was baking in my own juices, but these things wouldn’t keep me awake if I let go of them. My vision darkened and lost its color, inviting me to close my eyes. Except I knew that if I fell asleep, there was a very good chance I wouldn’t wake up again. This was, after all, how people died from hypoglycemia. In their sleep. “Peacefully”.
I didn’t make a choice so much as I ignored the only choice given. In desperation, I began tearing open the drawers on my nightstand that I could reach. I rifled through the treasured mementos and documents like a stranger would; a looter in my own home. At last I found a couple of spearmints, which I presumably acquired long ago at a restaurant and left in my drawer when emptying my pockets. I frantically discarded the wrappers and shoved them into my mouth, crunching them between my teeth. I could feel the desperately needed sugar leech into my mouth. It wasn’t enough, but it was a step in the right direction. I found some throat lozenges, and similarly swallowed them.
I kept pillaging my nightstand with shaking hands, until I hit upon what I needed. A rice krispy treat. I spent several seconds searching for an expiration date, though I’m not sure why. Even if it were expired, it wouldn’t have changed my options. So long as fending off death was the goal, it was better to be hospitalized for food poisoning than dead from low blood sugar. I fumbled around the wrapping, mangling the food inside, until I managed to get it open. I gnashed my teeth into the ancient snack, swallowing before I had even finished chewing. I continue to rifle through the drawers while I waited for the Glucose to absorb into my bloodstream.
I texted my mother again, hoping she might wake up and come to my aid. At the same time, I listened to music. The goal of this was twofold. First, it helped keep the panic at bay and focus my thoughts. Second, and more importantly, it helped anchor me; to keep me awake, and away from the darkness.
Whether it was the music, or the sugar, or both, the dark, sleepy sensation that pulled towards eternity, started to ebb. More of the color came back to my vision. The trend indicator on my sensor, though it was still already dangerously low and dropping, was slowing in its descent.
It was now or never. I yanked my uncooperative legs over the side of the bed, testing their compliance and trying to will them to work with me. With trepidation, but without the luxury of hesitation, I forced myself to stand up, wobbling violently and very narrowly avoiding a face-first collision as the floor leapt up to meet me. Without time to steady myself, I shifted the momentum of falling into forward motion, knocking over my rubbish bin and a few various articles and pieces of bric-a-brac that lay on my winding path from bed to doorway. Serendipitously, I avoided destroying anything, as my lamp was knocked over, hit the wall, and harmlessly bounced off it back into standing position.
I staggered towards the IKEA bookshelf where we kept my emergency sugar stash. I braced myself against the walls and sides of the bookshelf as I took fistfuls of this and that item and stuffed it into my pajama pockets, knocking over containers and wrecking the organizational system. So be it. This was a live-to-clean-up-another-day situation. With the same graceless form of loosely-controlled falling over my own feet, I tripped, stumbled, and staggered back to my bed to digest my loot. I downed juice boxes scarfed peppermint puffs stockpiled from post-holiday sales.
By this point, the hunger had kicked in. My brain had started to function well enough to realize that it had been starving. The way the human brain responds to this is to induce a ravenous hunger that is more compulsion than sensation. And so I devoured with an unnatural zeal. About this time, my mother did show up, woken by some combination of my text messages, the noise I had stirred up, or the continued bleating of my life support sensors. She asked me what I needed, and I told her I needed more food, which was true both in the sense that my blood sugar was still low, and in the sense that a compulsive hunger was quickly overrunning my brain and needed to be appeased.
My blood sugar came up quickly after that, and it took another fifteen minutes or so before the hunger faded. By that time, the darkness had receded. I was still sleepy, but I felt confident that this was a function of having been rudely awoken at an ungodly hour rather than the call of the reaper. I felt confident that I would wake up again if I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel safe; I hardly ever feel safe these days, especially after so harrowing an incident; but I no longer felt in imminent danger.
I woke up this morning slightly worse for wear. Yet I am alive, and that is never nothing. It had been a while since I last had a similar experience of nearly-dying. Of course, I evade death in a fashion every day. That’s what living with a chronic disease is. But it had been a while since I had last faced death as such, where I had felt I was acutely dying; where I had been dying, and had to take steps to avert that course. After so many similar incidents over so many years, naturally, they all start to blur together and bleed over in memory, but I reckon it has been a few months since the last incident.
I am slightly at a loss as to what cadence I ought take here. Obviously, nearly dying is awful and terrifying, and would be even more so if this wasn’t a semi-regular occurrence. Or perhaps the regularity makes it worse, because of the knowledge that there will be a next time. On the other hand, I am glad to not have died, and if there is going to be a next time, I may as well not waste what time I do have moping about it. As the old song goes: What’s the use of worrying? It never was worth-while. Oh, pack all your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile!
It is difficult to find a balance between celebrating small victories like not dying when I very well might have, and letting myself become complacent. Between acknowledging my handicaps and circumstances in a way that is sound, and letting them override my ambitions and sabotage myself. Of course, I am neither the first, nor the only person to face these questions. But as the answers necessarily very from person to person, I cannot draw upon the knowledge of others in the same way that I would for a more academic matter. I wish that I could put this debate to bed, nearly as much as I wish that it wasn’t so relevant.
