© Brandon Keim

For the next month I’m planning to immerse myself in my YA (young adult, to the uninitiated) novel with the view to getting it ready to start venturing out into the world again in September.

Part of this involved getting to know the competition, which meant joining my local library. Shocking, I know, that it’s taken this long to do it, but when you get sent books to review, given books by friends and family for every birthday and Christmas, the idea of borrowing other people’s books seems a waste when there’s always a crammed bookshelf waiting to be raided at home.

But when it comes to research, a library can’t be beaten, so I skipped down there with my hubla on a sunny afternoon, relishing the sense of purpose and armed with evidence of my abode.

However, as I waited my turn at the members desk I gradually became aware I was losing my own certainty of my abode. Tremors were running through me, ever so slightly, and my brain was beginning to feel squishy.

Being diabetic, I’m well acquainted with my body’s messages, and this one said: Eat Sugar. NOW!

At that moment I found myself at the front of the queue, being invited to fill in a form and read the library’s membership literature.

It may sound weird, if you’ve never experienced it, but sometimes when I go low I find myself prioritising the need to hide what’s happening over actually dealing with the hypoglycaemic attack. So rather than ripping into my tube of fruit pastilles and blatantly disobeying the No Eating sign, I sweated my way through the qestions, tried to get the literature in focus, and politiely (if slightly slurredly) asked where the kids sections was.

Clearly certain she was dealing with a ’special case’, she pointed me in the right direction, which, thank god, was right next to the cafe - a legitimate place to scoff something sweet and get my levels back up.

I know it’s daft - I know that no person in their right mind would forbid a diabetic from eating food anymore than they would confiscate an asthmatic’s inhaler just as they begin to wheeze, but I also know my ability to clarify the situation reduces as my blood sugar drops.

And I did once have a polite but lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful argument with an employee at the Guggenheim Museum in London who was adamant that no food or drink is allowed in the building and therefore I had to leave my hypo supplies in their lockers.

Is it really that hard to grasp that to a type 1 diabetic, candy can be a medicine just as crucial as insulin? The Guggenheim Museum has a lot of stairs, each of which lowers a person’s blood sugar just a little bit, and for a diabetic there’s no knowing just how many stairs will result in blurred vision, shaking limbs and a squishy confused brain.

On the plus side, I do seem to get younger, mentally at least, when my blood sugar drops, which may well help me regain the innocence of my early teenage years and really get inside the head of my protagonist.

As a writer I’ve been warned against making too much use of coincidence as a plot device. Early drafts of my stories and novels quite often have characters fortuitously coming across the one piece of information or meeting the one person they needed to move things forward.

I think it’s partly because I see my own life as a series of coincidences. I always have to make sure that in the next draft I make the main character more active, less wafty so that they choose events rather than events choosing them.

But in real life, coincidences often crop up in ways that would never work in a piece of fiction.

Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday afternoon I had the excitement of going to the diabetic clinic to be fitted with a blood testing monitor that will take continuous readings for three days and then, hopefully, present me with a graph to let me know what my body gets up to when I’m not paying attention. Could be interesting!

The weird thing was that while I was waiting for the diabetic specialist nurse to see me I could hear a baby crying and I thought to myself, How funny, all babies sound just like my nephew. I suppose all babies sound the same.

Then when I went into my appointment, the nurse said, “Did you know your sister’s here seeing the other nurse?”

So it was my nephew!

I managed to get linked up to the monitor in time to catch my sis before she left and we went for a coffee afterwards, which was nice as we hadn’t caught up since Christmas. I suppose there are some curious advantages to both of us having diabetes.

The nurse seemed surprised that I hadn’t known she’d be there, but we don’t often discuss such boring things as diabetic appointments, so even if I’d seen her yesterday we probably wouldn’t have known we’d be at the hospital at the same time today.

My plot-lines may have a propensity for swinging from one coincidence to another, but one thing I do know is dialogue, and we have much more interesting things to talk about than that, at least, most of the time.

The bump

My sister’s baby is officially due in mid-July. Chances are he’s coming out a lot sooner.

Like me, my sis is diabetic, and one of the many issues regarding pregnancy and diabetes is that at this point the baby begins to grow. Enormously. Like something out of a sci-fi film.

In fact, in the past three weeks, Badger Bulldog has achieved an alarming seven-week’s-worth of expansion.

Having sailed through the first trimester with only tiredness and the occasional hint of nausea, Sis now has the issue of sporting a near nine-month belly with more than a month still to go.

The major issue is that though Badger is accelerating his growth, he’s not speeding up his development. This means his lungs, heart and other sort of important things are still at the stage of any other 7.5-month-old foetus.

Sis has been told that the optimum scenario is that Badger’ll make it to three weeks before the birth date, when he’ll officially be ‘cooked’.

Fingers crossed he’ll make it that long, and that my sis doesn’t burst at the seams in the meantime…