
© 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.

