Wisdom Teeth

Hey y'all!

This post is probably gonna turn into a bit of a rant.  Sorry not sorry, it's been a rough couple of days and I'm in a fair bit of pain so I'm not gonna censor my thoughts as much as I usually do.  I'll try to keep it friendly because I love y'all, but just a warning that I'm not really gonna sugarcoat this stuff.  Here goes.

As some of you may know (because, let's face it, I always complain about this stuff beforehand), I got my wisdom teeth out on Friday.  Not a fun experience for anyone, obviously, and extra not-fun for someone who hates going to the dentist for any reason whatsoever.  (Sidenote--Don't ask me why I get freaked out about stuff like that--you would think, considering I'm not exactly inexperienced with needles, that I would have no problem going to the dentist.  But there ya go.)

So, yeah, wisdom teeth.  Like I said--not fun.  El (my twin brother) and I got ours out on the same day, which came with its own mess of emotions and nerves.  But it also threw into sharp relief just how different our situations are.

Ya see, for El, the procedure--while quite scary--was pretty routine.  Sit in a chair, get an IV that knocks you out for an hour or so, wake up, go home and sit on the couch for a few days with a bowl of ice cream.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm not that naive--I knew my T1D would make the procedure trickier.  I was labeled "high-risk" from the moment I walked into the examining room.  But I didn't realize just how messy things were gonna be.

The first big hurdle was the anaesthetic.  I had never had general anaesthetic before, and the surgeon had no way of predicting how my body would react to it.  It was pretty scary to be told, flat-out, that if he knocked me out completely, he might not be able to wake me up again afterward.  Rather than taking that risk, he decided not to put me all the way under, opting instead to pump me full of painkillers as well as a smaller dose of anaesthetic and hope that I wouldn't remember much of the procedure afterward.  Sigh.

Sounds pretty scary, right?  Yeah, that wasn't the hardest part--not by a long shot.  When the surgeon was giving us all the information we needed for the week leading up to the surgery, he mentioned--somewhat casually--that we were absolutely not allowed to eat or drink for 10 hours before the procedure.

Yeah.  Not good.  My endo had told me that I should go into the surgery with my blood sugar at roughly 180, so that even if it dropped, I wouldn't be in danger.  But staying at 180 after 10 hours of no food... pretty much impossible.  I tend to drop like crazy overnight even on a normal day--usually I wake up below 80.  Not exactly an option here.

There's nothing scarier than looking at the clock and realizing you've reached a point where you're not allowed to treat a low.  Seriously.  That.... that just really sucked.  I worked super hard to figure out how much to cut my dinner insulin, my long-acting dose, etc, but the nerves and adrenaline meant that I had to eat 2 packs of fruit snacks just before the 10-hour mark.  My blood sugar shot up to 350, but by the next morning, it was down to 130 and I just had to go into the surgeon's office and pray that it wouldn't drop any more.

Fortunately (fortunately?), we were able to go ahead with the procedure.  The surgeon conveniently forgot to mention that the IV with the anaesthetic also contained 5% glucose, so by the time they moved me to the recovery room, I was up to 350 again, and rising fast.  Since then, it's been a battle to get below 200, since my body is essentially in a "crisis response" and my liver is pumping out a whole lot of glucose because it seems to think that'll help the situation.  And did I mention high blood sugar makes the risk of infection go wayyyy up?  Ugh.

I'm grateful that the surgery is done, and I'm grateful that the pain meds are helping at least a little bit.  But it was a bit of an eye-opener for me to see just how much T1D can complicate things.  Obviously I knew that my condition makes my life a bit trickier, but it's normal for me because for much of my life, I haven't known anything else.  So it was interesting to see just how much stress it can add, and how my family and I were sorta on our own to figure it all out.  There's probably a valuable lesson in here somewhere, but I'm not sure what it is, so for now I'm just gonna say: to all my T1D warriors out there, y'all are awesome.  It's not easy to do what we do every day.