Trust

I got a call tonight. It was short, and it started with a text: “I’m OK.”

Then she called me to tell me where she was.

My honey needed to blow off some steam. I knew she did. Hell, she would have gladly accepted my company, but I was having a diabetic emergency.

My sugar was super fucking high. How high? I imagine it was about as high as Elton John was imagining when he wrote Rocket Man. My FreeStyle Libre doesn’t report readings greater than 400 mg/dL, so it was clearly higher than that. It had been for hours, and it wasn’t coming down.

This happens sometimes. Life of a Type 1 diabetic.

There are a whole bunch of contributing factors, but suffice it to say that diabetic emergencies involving HIGH blood glucose operate on a different timeline than LOW blood glucose. When I’m low, I can usually tell within ten or fifteen minutes whether what I’m doing is working. When I’m extremely high, I have to wait for the insulin to start doing its fucking job. That can take hours. One to three, to be as exact as I can fucking get, because diabetes enjoys making even simple answers complicated.

We had motored over to Pueblo for a biker event and to meet a couple of Dawna’s friends. Pretty amazing people, actually, and meeting them made the trip worth it. The event itself had a pretty low turnout and seemed more like a gathering of tight-knit friends than an actual event. Couple that with my social awkwardness and, hell, I become even more unapproachable than usual. So we didn’t stay too long.

Meanwhile, my blood sugar was doing its best to turn the evening into something considerably more interesting.

Dawna was extremely concerned about me, but I also knew she needed to blow off some steam. When we stopped for gas on the way back, I stood in the parking lot drinking water while we talked. I told her there was literally nothing she could fucking do to help me through this. I needed to get back to the hotel, change my infusion set and reservoir, take insulin, and wait. Then probably take more insulin and wait some more.

I also reminded her that one of the lovely side effects of extremely high blood sugar is irritability. I was going to be incredibly boring to hang out with and potentially somewhat intolerable to anyone genuinely trying to help me. And I didn’t want to be that person with her.

So I suggested she go out. Blow off some steam. Unwind a little.

We were pretty close to the hotel, so she told me where she was going and reminded me where the hotel was in relation to where we were.

And then we left.

The ride back was absolutely fucking amazing, once I mentally remove the whole blood-sugar emergency from the experience. It was dark, sure, but it was around 75 degrees, with cool pockets here and there. Yeah, there were a lot of fucking bugs, but if you’ve read anything I’ve written about riding, you know I value air temperature above almost everything else. And when it’s perfect, it’s fucking perfect. I don’t want the ride to end.

But when I arrived at the hotel, I knew it HAD to end.

I needed to deal with this shit before it became a call-9-1-1 emergency. It takes longer to get there when I’m running high, but that’s one of the wonderful things about diabetes: extremes in either direction eventually end at the fucking ER if you don’t get them under control.

So I did my thing. Changed everything out, something I’ve done literally thousands of times. Took insulin.

And waited.

I fucked around online for a while, went through social media, and eventually drifted off to sleep.

When I woke up a few hours later, my sugar was actually pretty fucking reasonable.

But Dawna wasn’t back yet.

And that worried the fuck out of me.

So I reached out by text.

“I’m OK,” she responded.

Then she called me.

She’d had a couple of drinks and was concerned about her ability to drive safely back to the hotel. So she did the responsible thing. She stayed put.

And she told me.

That might sound like a small thing, but it didn’t feel small to me.

She trusted me enough to tell me she needed help. She trusted me enough to know that my help wouldn’t come with judgment or disappointment. She trusted me enough to know there weren’t going to be any fucking strings attached.

Look, I know we’re getting married. I know she said yes. I know she cares deeply about me. I know all of this.

But we’re also just starting our lives together, and I could just as easily imagine her worrying about disappointing her new wife. I could imagine her trying to solve the problem herself because she didn’t want me to worry, or because she didn’t want me to think differently about her.

But that’s not what she did.

She told me the truth.

And for some reason, that whole thing warmed my heart even more, because she trusts me intrinsically.

And I trust her intrinsically.

Sometimes I wonder how much our respective trauma has informed the way we interact with each other. We don’t bullshit. We don’t fuck around. We say the thing, even when the thing is uncomfortable, embarrassing, painful, or blunt as fuck. And because of that directness, we always know where the fuck we stand with each other.

More importantly, we always know each other’s heart.

I’m not a psychologist or a sociologist, or any of those other liberal fields of study that try to pawn themselves off as real science, so I’m not going to pretend I understand all the machinery behind it.

I just know that I fucking love her to all ends of this earth.

I know I would stand in front of any danger for her.

I know she owns my fucking heart.

And somehow, despite believing that heart was already completely full, I woke up this morning and discovered there was still room to love her a little more.