Confronting the unknown

Responding to my grandmas near death experience.

I remember being asleep in my room with my grandma in the room next door. Mind you, I'm a heavy sleeper, I would never wake up during an earthquake, someone talking, nothing. That day was an exception, I woke up hearing my family members freaking out and everyone going all over the place, some were in a state of shock and some were panicking. I got up to see what was going on, I see my grandmother laying in her bed, dozing in and out of consciousness. Unlike Juliana Koepcke from the book "Deep survival," where the author of "The habits of the creative mind," says that "Her mind was not filled with shrieking terror," I started shaking, not knowing what to do, I was 12 years old, not sure what was happening but I was old enough to know that her life was hanging by a thread. 

Let me give you a backstory on my grandmother to help you understand better on what was happening and why it was happening to her. My grandmother has Type 2 diabetes. She takes insulin shots everyday like she is told to. But also, she does not listen to what she's been instructed in order to ensure her safety, in other words, she's very stubborn. That day, she had taken her insulin without eating before nor after. This caused her blood sugar to insanely decrease and caused her to doze off. My sister and mother were trying to wake her up, giving her anything in the house that was sweet such as honey and soda. While that was happening, my breathing started getting heavier and my eyes were watering. I didn't know what to do to help. I just hear my dad on the phone with ambulance in the background, I felt nauseous. I was extremely frightened, thinking that her life was coming to an end. I didn't even want to imagine what life would've been without her.

After 5 minutes, the ambulance arrived, they came up the stairs and they had the firefighters help them to get my 300+ pound grandmother down the stairs and into the stretcher. I was hoping that everything was going to be fine, even though everyone told me it was, but I wasn't naive enough to not know that they were just trying to ease my mind so I wouldn't worry. I was still freaked out of what I just witnessed, seeing her body go lifeless and then come back for a few seconds and seeing it repeatedly happen. Although, I calmed down a bit after I knew she was in the hands of professionals that were going to try and save her. That whole experience had me shaken and was differently not how I expected my night to turn out, but if I can go back to that day, I wish I would've not been so shocked and scared but rather helped her by giving her multiple tests after 3 minutes of being given sugar to see if her blood sugar was rising or falling.