SWEET AND LOW

My friend of over ten years, Charlie, had a stroke about four years ago.

Since his partial recovery we have gone to lunch together nearly every week.

Today I went to his house to wheel him to the car for our weekly luncheon outing.

As he was getting his shirt on, he suddenly became conversationally unresponsive. He could not tell where he was, what time it was, nor could he tell me his address.

His skin was cool but clammy, and he seemed almost to be nodding off to sleep.

I feared that he was experiencing a mini-stroke(TIA-transient ischemic attack).

After a few moments of not being able to elicit a coherent answer from him I decided more help was needed, so I called 911.

In about four minutes the EMTs were attending to him. They did a blood sugar test and found that his sugar had dropped to 30. A blood sugar of near 100 is normal and it was clear that Charlie had begun to experience hypoglycemia in the extreme.

The EMTs began an infusion of glucose and when the bag was about half empty they checked his sugar levels again and it was coming up.

Suddenly Charlie became aware and alert and began to resist the further efforts of the EMTs.

I knew he would be OK.

In fact, within six or eight minutes, Charlie was back to his normal self, joking with me and grumbling at the mess the EMTs had made (which they did clean up, BTW).

We went to lunch as previously planned, only an hour and a half late.

Charlie had no further symptoms and seemed fine when I left him, but the experience has left me tired and not ready to engage in anything political right now.

If you'll excuse me, I'll go take a nap and resume blogging tomorrow.

God bless you, and thank you, Lord, for watching over my friend, giving the EMTs the wisdom to properly assess what was going on.

See y'all tomorrow.