I woke up in a panic, gasping for air. I tried to scream out to my dad, but I couldn’t seem to summon the strength to create enough vibration for sound to come out. I couldn’t breathe. I was jerking around for what seemed like an eternity, and I was so scared I just didn’t know what was happening to me.

After the episode, I rolled off of my twin sized bed and began crawling to the door. Things that had always been constant, like the use of my basic muscles, had somehow escaped my grasp. I stumbled and fell and got back on my knees until I finally managed to crawl five feet to the door. I was trying to call out to my dad again but all that was coming out was muffled screams and cries. I reached for the door knob but my motor skills were shot and I couldn’t turn it enough to open it. Again and again I tried while screaming through the sobs. Finally, my dad burst in and found me in a pile on the floor crying. He begged to know what had happened but I couldn’t speak properly. If you’ve ever seen someone that has had a stroke, and although they think they are talking, they are surprised when the words don’t quite come out, that’s what it was like. He rushed me to the hospital.

A day passed and I had been put into a quarantined room for highly contagious patients. I wasn’t contagious; it was the only room available. It didn’t ease the loneliness. My room looked out over a playground that the hospital patients weren’t allowed to use. That was for the healthy kids, the kids that came to visit their sick siblings and friends. We got to watch them from our rooms.

The nurses were kind. I had a favorite. Her name was Erin. She had curly highlighted hair and a welcoming Italian-Irish face. Her brown eyes knew true sorrow, but you wouldn’t know it from her personality. We became friends during my relatively short stay, and I haven’t forgotten her since. At around 2:00 PM, a tall middle aged doctor came in. I forget his name.
“Kelsey, do you know why you’re here?”

“Yes. I had a seizure.”

“Well, yes, but the real reason we are keeping you for a few days is to monitor your blood sugar. Have you heard of something called Diabetes?”

A couple years’ prior I had a classmate who had Diabetes. She said you had to be born with it. I remember once she was kind enough to have a discussion with the class about it to help us learn. I asked her whether it made her feel different and she began to cry. I felt horrible.

The next few days I got a crash course education in Type 2 Diabetes. I learned the difference between hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia. I learned that insulin comes from the pancreas and I wondered if mom’s pancreatitis gave her similar issues. I learned that my body stopped producing insulin the right way and that my blood had become overwhelmed with the level of sugar I was putting into it.

I was put on Glucofage, which not only stabilizes your blood sugar but it teaches your body how to manage it. They made me give myself insulin shots twice a day for about a month and I was told to prick my fingers after a meal to check and make sure it was in the appropriate range. It was a lot of attention, it made me feel special.

Now you’d think that for a disease that occurs in overweight children I would have been made to eat healthy and I would have been put in some kind of exercise regiment. Perhaps if the doctors had taken the time to counsel me or my parents, or if my parents had taken the time to do it themselves, my weight issues may have been nipped in the bud right then and there. They weren’t. I was basically just told to avoid carbs and sugary drinks. My sodas were replaced with Diet Fresca and Sprite Zero. When you see a fat person ordering a large meal with a diet coke, it’s probably because they’ve spent so long drinking diet soda, regular soda no longer tastes good to them. I was allowed to eat 60 grams of carbs per meal. To put it in perspective, a slice of bread is around 15 grams of carbs. I was told I could eat all of the meat, dairy and vegetables that I wanted. So the issue of my extreme over eating was never addressed. I began eating lunch meat burritos and walking to school every day. Not an awful start, but not enough.

Within a half a year, the diabetes had stopped interfering with my blood sugar. They never found out the cause of the seizures. I was still fat.

Three years’ prior in the summer after my 4^th grade year, I became obsessed with a fear death. We lived in an apartment building in a shady part of the city of Bear. There had been a shooting in the neighborhood across the street a year or two before, and I saw the news teams shuffling over to get their shots. One day during this summer, I decided to go to the neighborhood pool. I walked the three flights of stairs down to the parking lot and began to make a path through the buildings and knolls to where the pool was. Before I left the lot of my own building, I had my first panic attack. I can’t quite remember why but something felt wrong, like if I went to that pool I would die. I ran back upstairs crying. In the weeks following I became near agoraphobic. I sat on the computer day in and day out. I could see kids playing outside the window that was next to the computer, I didn’t really care. I longed for meaningful human connection, but I was satiated with my interactions online.

I was born in the age of the internet, but not just into it. The internet grew with me. As a child, I played CD-ROM games and laughed at voice manipulators on AOL. As a tween, I dabbled in chat rooms and virtual reality sites. As I got older, I began to delve into heavier gaming and social media. As I flourished into a young woman, the internet was with me at every step. I would spend hours just surfing the web, playing games and chatting with strangers and friends.

Before that summer, I would love to go up to a little corner shop across the street from our building called Derr’s. I would take my allowance up and just walk through the isles, bewildered at all that my own money could buy me. During this summer when my mom would ask me to run up and grab milk or bread, I became fearful. I was sure on my way across the semi-busy street that I would be struck or that someone would abduct and kill me. I never told her because I knew she’d laugh and say that I was being irrational. I knew myself that I was being irrational, but in a small way I thought I was right.

As a family we used to sing Karaoke. I loved to sing. I still love to sing. I’m a bit tone deaf, but I love it nonetheless. My dad had gotten me a karaoke player for Christmas one year and I brought it to my mom’s so we could sing with the microphone. She would hook up the computer to the TV and we would play the songs through the loud speakers. We would each have a turn singing our song. I almost always chose “If I ain’t got you” by Alicia Keys at least once per night. I had just gotten "The Diary of Alicia Keys" and Usher’s "Confessions" CD. I played them over and over. My stepdad was encouraging and he would say:

“You’ve got to stop singing the background parts Kelsey, you’re the star of this show, sing lead.”

I always had stage fright, but my mom was the exact opposite. She loved to feel like a rock star. She would sing Kodachrome and Delta Dawn at the top of her lungs. One time she was singing and I got to sit in her coveted chair. I was looking up at her, maybe 11-years-old, and I wondered to myself. What if she just died.

To Be Continued...