Ghastly Green Jelly Babies

My favourite treatment for when my blood sugar levels drop low is two or three jelly babies – they’re tasty, quick to act and a welcome compensation for the hypo sweats and shakes. However, there comes a time in the life of every box of Jelly Babies when you realise that, with racing heart and blurring sight, you’ve eaten every colour except the green ones! From that point on it is a battle between your rational mind knowing that they still contain the same amount of precious sugar as all the other colours, and will do just as good a job, and that nagging voice in your subconscious telling you that they are evil transdimensional denizens of some dark nether-universe, here to wreak anguish and madness on all who bring them to their lips…

It cannot be so far away,
When dawns that dreadful, fateful day
As, reaching to treat my hypo shocks,
I find just green ones in the box!

Oh, tell me Mr Basset please
Why waste your time producing these?
Tart on tongue, and jealous hue,
An aberration! Shame on you!

For lusty red, beguiling black
I could consume those by the sack!
Bright orange, sunny yellow too –
I’d even accept a baleful blue!

But green brings foaming at the mouth,
One eye looks North, the other South,
Gripped by a kind of emerald rabies,
The Dark Lord of the Jelly Babies!

I'm low, I'm low...

Hypoglycaemia is one of the perils of diabetes, most commonly in those on insulin and trying to keep tight control. Erm, that would be me then! A hypo occurs when the level of glucose in the blood drops too low, usually below 3.5 mmol/l. As glucose is the only form of energy the brain can use, it quite rightly becomes rather distressed when it can’t get enough to function properly and sends out all sorts of signals to let the unfortunate diabetic know that something is wrong.

The odd thing is that, even though I know precisely what is happening, I feel somewhat reluctant to remedy the situation by eating some fast-acting sugar, like jelly babies or a sugary drink. I feel like it’s something really annoying and fight against the feeling, as though I can somehow overcome it through willpower alone, that it is something I must defeat mentally, even though it is a physical condition that needs handling in a physical way. As the person having the hypo I can’t rally say how I might appear to others, but there is much evidence that people become irrational, or appear drunk, sometimes aggressive, and often completely illogical. Not surprising, really, as it is the hypoing brain that is compromised and therefore not best placed to behave in a rational manner.

I know what I need to do to make the feeling go away – eat some sugar! But knowing this does not seem to be enough to make me act immediately, and I’ll sometimes spend quite some time deciding whether I should eat a green jelly baby, which I don’t really like, or a red one, which would be a nice treat and at least I would get some pleasure as a reward for suffering the hypo. But if I always leave the green ones, then there’ll only be green ones left at some indeterminate time in the future when I’m having another hypo and would really like a red one! And I’m arguing out this stupid dilemma whilst all the time I’m trembling and sweating and my heart is racing, and there are hundreds of little black blobs swimming in and out and across my vision.

Just eat the stupid jelly babies!!!!!
I’m low, I’m low and I know that it’s so,
And I wish and I wish that this feeling would go,
For I’m sweaty and shaky from my head to my toes,
From the back of my head to the tip of my nose!

So why don’t I act? Oh, why hesitate?
It’s so inconvenient, I’d rather just wait,
I’ll leave it a minute, it won’t be too late,
Though it seems to be worse now, I’m in quite a state!

I’ve got jelly babies by the side of my chair,
A green one? A red one? I really don’t care,
This darned diabetes is really unfair,
I'm living the dream - or a waking nightmare!

Oh, I can’t write my letters with eyesight like this,
All swimming and jumbled and all gone amiss,
So at last I feel tempted by the sugary kiss
Of a sweet jelly baby, and some sugar rush bliss!

The Diabetes Fairy

There has always been a lot of superstition connected to strange, unaccountable events, and diabetes is a condition that lends itself particularly well to this – our nemesis is the Diabetes Fairy! Not necessarily a malevolent force, but mischievous certainly, and always ready to throw some utterly unexpected and unexplainable blood sugar reading at you just when you think you’ve got everything worked out. You may have been eating the same food for breakfast for six months, with highly predictable consequences for your blood sugar, then suddenly one day you find you have shot up into the teens or twenties! Or conversely, you might have taken into account the carbohydrate content of your food, the time of day, the insulin taken, activity levels, the temperature, and all the other myriad factors that you have learned through long months of trial and error – but suddenly your blood sugar takes a downward dive towards zero that no amount of sugar, it seems, will raise! These, then, are the spells of the Diabetes Fairy. We don’t want to upset her, but she sometimes gets bored with our perfect control and plays a little trick for her amusement, and our bemusement…

There’s nothing so contrary as the Diabetes Fairy,
She’s as fickle as a cloud up in the sky.
You’d be warned to be quite wary, for her magic can be scary,
And you can’t escape, however hard you try!

There’s one special spell she’ll cast that makes your levels fall so fast
That no jelly baby feast can overcome,
When you think you’ve breathed your last, and your time on Earth is past,
Then she’ll spike you like a bear just bit your bum!

You may think she’ll pass you by if your food is low GI,
But she likes to cause confusion when she can.
Insidious and sly, with no earthly reason why,
She’ll confound the plans of diabetic Man!

You'll usually find she is courteous and kind,
But be careful when she spreads her magic dust –
It may catch you from behind and play ping pong with your mind,
Just at the point you think you’ve got it sussed!