When you have lived in one place long enough, your sense of the roads you drive becomes burned into your mind. All the curves, all the hills, and all of the stop signs take up permanent residence in your memory. Driving those roads becomes an almost automatic undertaking. Restricted to staring only skyward at the ceiling lamps inside the ambulance, however, one experiences the road from a very different perspective. I felt the inertia of every stop, every start, every acceleration, every move that my unseen driver made. With astonishing accuracy, I found that I was able to correctly anticipate each turn on the fifteen minute ride to the hospital. I knew the shortest route, and, apparently, so did the guy behind the wheel. It took my mind off of having to pee.

At the ER, an entirely new roster of players came into my life. I envy them in their work not one bit. Emergency Medicine is appreciated by people who watch it as entertainment on television. People who seek Emergency Medicine, on the other hand, are generally not in the mood to appreciate anything, especially when they have to wait a while to get it. It is entirely lost on me why they are called a word that is a homonym of “patience.”

As was the case back in 1982 during my four-day sojourn there, the professionals at St. Anne’s were caring, smart, and helpful. They were also busy. That’ll teach me to wait until Friday night to wreck the truck. (FYI: Sunday mornings are bad, too. Lots of palm stitching on bagel-slicers who forget to quit when they reach hand.)

Various nurses, techs, and MDs looked me over, poking and squeezing, checking ranges of motion, and getting me in and out of X-ray. Mercifully, I was allowed to venture under my own steam to a WC. Sure, I could have used a bottle at any time, but I enjoy a good challenge. Builds character.

One of the doctors handed me a prescription for a pain killer, and said that I’d be thanking him for it tomorrow. When you smash yourself up on Friday, it can take until Saturday for you to learn all about “delayed reaction.” That’s when hurt moves in and makes itself uncomfortable, in a big way. This is why you stay away from boxing.

You might be wondering how I know what went on inside the cab during the actual impact when I was so “out of it” at the time. After a few days, I took a ride to the body shop where the truck was being stored and played CSI for a few minutes. I inspected the vehicle inside and out to be sure that nothing else had been taken from the wreck. I always kept a nice set of Craftsman sockets, wrenches, and other tools in a small tool box, and I also kept spare ignition wires, spark plugs, hand cleaner, and a breakdown kit for emergencies on the road. There was a nice set of Hadley air horns inside the engine compartment, too. Everything had been strewn about the truck, but it was all there. The bungees were on the dash. The small storage compartment door that left a mark on the leather shifter was on the floor.

In the days following the accident, some sympathetic people offered me an out by alluding to my “unexpected” low blood sugar. But I disagree. There was nothing unexpected about it. There never is, because it’s a simple, mathematical formula: insulin minus food equals hypoglycemia. Though I had not bolused, my basals had yet to be properly established. You fellow insulin users know how it works. We live with that tidy little equation floating around in our heads every day. Sure, I’ve simplified it a bit by omitting factors like stress, exercise, and correction boluses. But go ahead, load up on insulin without eating, and then let he who doesn’t go hypo cast forth the first glucose tablet.

The answer is in knowing that your sugar is about to fall off the table. These days, I don’t start the vacuum cleaner without first burning a strip, and then, usually, suspending my Paradigm 512 before cleaning the house.

But for a single blood test, this huge nutshell of a story would have never happened. And while there might be a chuckle here and there in reconstructing those events, I will never find humor in the fact that someone other than yours truly could have been injured, or even killed, as a result of my actions. It emphasizes the absolutely paramount importance of testing before driving.

When I first began pump therapy, I did not have sufficient experience to establish safe, effective basal rates for myself. My educators had told me to watch for sudden highs and lows by testing more frequently. But I let one get by me, just one time, and that’s all it took. I learned the hard way about how careful diabetics need to be. Tempting fate by getting behind the wheel without testing is an act of industrial strength stupidity. In the weeks that followed my accident, I got better, bought another truck, and things got back to normal, happily ever after. My bag of luck was very full on that day, and I am not about to forget it.