As Type 1 diabetics, we all pay a heavy price for wandering outside the boundaries of caution when it comes to using our insulin, and the ramifications can reach both physical as well as psychological extremes. But everyone makes mistakes. That’s why pencils have erasers. Look at what happened this summer to Roosevelt Sims of St. Louis when he was kicked off an Amtrak train in the middle of Nowhere, Arizona. And surely you’ve read about Mr. Universe, Doug Burns, whose hypoglycemia was mistakenly interpreted as drunkenness by police in a movie theater.

When a nice Toyota pick-up went by the other day, I was reminded of a mistake of my own several years ago – one that cost me a similar truck, but could well have ended much worse than it did.

At the time, my insulin pump was something new, and I began to take for granted the good luck I’d had with it so far. I climbed into my truck, started it up, and began the drive home. Foolishly, even after having been warned to check my sugars at least as frequently as I did in the past, I felt confident that my new gadget would keep me from going too low. Six miles later, I learned otherwise.

Comparable to a sudden patch of turbulence on a flight, the rumble of transitioning abruptly from pavement to off-road terrain ignited the last spark of awareness in me. Barely conscious, my eyes cracked open at the last instant to see a narrow, vertical post careening toward the center of the grill. The trip home was coming to a sudden, violent, absolute, end.

Pieces of my truck’s interior flew around me in a cyclone of shrapnel. Two bungee cords from the cargo area behind the passenger seat shot past my ear and smacked against the windshield. The small door of a storage compartment hurdled the center console and deflected off the 4WD shifter. Something massive grabbed hold of my left shoulder and gave it an enormously powerful yank backward. The airbag deployed, saved me, and deflated in a tenth of an instant. Having sacrificed its own life for mine, its flaccid remains drooped over the steering wheel like a deflating parachute. Everything – the engine, the radio, the off-road rumble, the violence of it all – stopped. Everything, that is, but me.

Check back tomorrow for Part II