Blast from the past

  Insulin shock in its varying forms was a regular in our life, and at twenty plus years of marriage I was really skilled at recognizing various levels of problem and heading them off. He tested glucose levels eight times a day, carried glucose tabs in his pockets and we had a canister of them in the car as a matter of course. I could tell by voice tone, word selection and a subtle set of body cues what his levels were at any time, within about five points.  Can you say hyper vigilant?  Can you say codependent? Yup, that was me.

So the day that this went down was one that was over the top with incident any way. There was a health fair that I was in a booth at, and my husband came along to check out all the other booths and get any free tat that was going.  Mine was the early shift, from 8 to 10, and then I had to get in to my office to see some clients and was going to meet husband at a coffee shop for lunch. So busy, no time to be checking in and keeping tabs on his blood glucose levels, he was distracted with the fair, so you can see how this was going to go down. 

I dropped him off at the coffee shop with the stated intent of his getting some food and hanging out until I joined him for lunch.  He made his way inside, and I went on to my appointments, which ran a wee bit but not too much over the stated times.  These things happen.

By the time I got back to the shop to meet my spouse things had been out of hand for a while I guess. He told me later that he remembered walking in but nothing past that.  I walked in to find him laid out on four chairs twitching and mumbling with two freaked baristas and several wide eyed patrons gathered around observing his disintegration into a medical basket case.

I was greeted with two questions. 1 .are you related to this guy? The answer to that was yes and, 2. Is something wrong with him? The answer to that being Hell yes, so why has no one taken steps to call an ambulance and get things rolling?  People seem to not respond well to things outside their own experience.  I stepped outside to make sure of the address and called 911.

 Now, my husband was a regular with the EMT crews in our bailiwick. We were on a first name basis. They knew him, knew me, and knew the drill that worked best. But I wasn’t sure about the guys in this neighborhood. They do tend to rotate around but I was bracing for having to get their attention and have them listen to me so that they didn’t do some typical things that would foul up the next five days in terms of trying to keep blood glucose level-ish.  Note the ish. Also note that I was not keeping a really tight eye on the spectators or I might have seen what was brewing and maybe headed it off.  No, I don’t think I could have managed at that.

While I was assessing the situation and setting up how to convey a lot of very complicated medical history to people (who tend to dismiss perceived amateurs as having no pertinent information) really fast so no one did something stupid, one of the wide eyed spectators had done his own observations and drawn his own conclusions, such as they were.

Then he sprang into action.  Mr. Spectator pulls up a chair, bringing himself into range of the cane, (not a wise choice under the best of circumstances which this wasn’t) pulls his bible out of his pack and proceeds to speak very kindly to my husband about how what he really needed was to bring Jesus into his life and cast out the demons controlling him.  Then he upped the volume and repeated the statement in case my husband couldn’t hear him. With every repetition he added more e’s to Jesus. It must be a stress thing.

Then he sat back and watched to see if there was an effect.  Apparently whatever he was looking for didn’t happen so he begins again at a louder volume and adds in a prayer about the mercy and healing and cast these demons tormenting this man out Right Now… and he got his effect.

My husband picked up his cane and with great precision and accuracy whopped him across the side of the head and knocked him off the chair.

Mr. Spectator picked himself up, picked up his bible, moved out of cane range, and damn if he didn’t begin again, louder and with more emotion. His eloquence could have used some work but he made up for it in sincerity and repetition.  (“Jeeeeesus Heeeeeal this poooooor Soul….”)

By this time I can hear the sirens so I know that the experts are going to be there momentarily so I just keep back and observe.  I did not have a lot of energy to waste on engaging an idiot.  Part of me is pissed as hell at the entire cluster fuck, part of me is noting the absolutely epic absurdity of the situation, and part of me is deeply sad because my husband had a wild and wooly sense of humor and he was missing this.

When the emergency crew arrived things began to happen very fast, as I told them what was up and gave them the info they needed. Then we got interrupted by Mr. Spectator who wanted to give them his version of a medical report as to what was really going on.  Several times he did this.  As things progressed he got gently crowded into a corner by the muscular backs of several fire guys who were surrounding my husband and holding things like IV bags as they started the lines and set up the D-40.   He continued to protest and try to get his version of what was going on across to anyone who would listen. By this time I was just really irritated with the interference and I lost my manners.

 I pulled the crew leader aside and asked if anyone there had been eating burritos or something of that nature.  He actually said that yes one of the crew had been eating something of that sort, and was so to speak loaded for bear.

 I made a request; He blinked, nodded and said that he thought that could be done. He quietly passed the word as to what I had asked for and there was kind of a massive reshuffling of people around the back of things where Mr. Spectator had been backed into.  It took about forty seconds before the guy fired his weapon.  There was a lovely, loud, long, melodious fart back in that corner, followed by something that if it had been a color would have been olive green tingeing towards chartreuse.  It wasn’t silent but it was absolutely deadly.  I only got it from a distance but I have smelt dead skunks that were better than that.

It spread out and up and gave us both time and distance to do the medical things that needed doing. All you heard from Mr. Spectator was coughing and sputtering.

At this point the glucose took hold and my husband came up to the surface, looked at the selection of expert faces surrounding him and made his comment on the entire situation. “Oh, fuck.” He said.

After that things settled down pretty rapidly, my husband trundled off to the emergency room in the ambulance, I made ready to make tracks home for some food.  So guess who takes this time to come up and lecture me on the possible reality of demonic possession in a medical emergency?  Yup, he did.  I am not going to tell you what I said.  It was entirely unbecoming of my civilized self and not something a lady would say.  At that point I wasn’t one, and I must say it was satisfying.  I have not had the opportunity to let myself go before and I wouldn’t have known that I could string together “self important egotistical interfering ass hole” into one grammatically correct sentence, and then enlarge on the theme.