Twelve years ago...

Late Friday night, after coming home from services, I sat in what used to be my younger brothers' bedroom reading. There are still toys of theirs and boxes of their stuff in the room. I read there for a while and then got up to find a more comfortable place to read. When I stood up, I felt something clamp around my foot, so I reached down and plucked off from my foot the top of a broken toy truck, the bed of which I'd stepped in.

I flopped down in the hallway outside the room and resumed reading. About a chapter later, absent mindedly running my hand over my foot, I felt with my hand a flap of skin hanging. I felt nothing on my foot.

Upon closer examination, I had a small cut on my heel, about a centimeter long, that had apparently bled quite a bit, with some swelling. I washed it and was relieved to feel some sting as I ran it under the hot water of the sink.

As I thought about it, I realized that:

Twelve years ago, when I was ten, I would have felt proud to not really feel the cut. My high tolerance from pain was a point of pride, particularly as the two brothers closest to my age both shrieked at the littlest things. Yes, my ten year old self would have strutted with pride.

Six years ago, when I was sixteen and had only recently gotten out of occupational therapy, I would have chalked up the lack of pain to sensory integration dysfunction. I was a mixture of proud and jealous of my sensory differences then, sometimes feeling secure in the knowledge that I was harder to hurt at one level, and other times afraid of all the things I was aware that my toddler brother could react to that I could not.

Now I am twenty two, over four years past diabetes diagnosis, and over a year past a neuropathy diagnosis. A wound on my foot that I cannot feel is a scary thing, although in a real sense it feels abstract. I see it- but I so much can't feel it that when I looked for it to describe when typing this, I looked first at the wrong foot. I don't know whether to chalk up my lack of feeling for the injury to neuropathy or not, to diabetes or not. I do know that I need to take care of it to prevent infection.

I've had an awful blood sugar day- bounce bounce bounce. I woke up to a graph that looked like I'd just fallen from 140 to LOW in the space of half an hour. It took about 50 minutes to come up and then I went up up up. And then down down down for an hour in the 40s. Unfortunately my brother's babysitter didn't show up so I ended up taking him out for the walk he'd anticipated having with her and I didn't wear the best foot gear and got my feet wet (oops).
I always figure that when you're bouncing up and down repeatedly the best thing to do is take it easy on corrections. Let the highs drop a little slower while you figure out what the heck is going on. So when I bounced up in the 200s about four hours ago I took only two units. And then waited and waited. And took two more units. And now I'm in the 300s.