Near Death
Studies show 10 out of every 10 people who live will die. May as well go run. I was getting ready - I am always getting ready to run - when everything went to hell.

Words I was editing made less sense than even usual. I fled the newsroom to seek fresh air, returned with a Coke and started to shake, ratlle, roll and shout.

I was so embarrassed I couldn't control myself I yelled louder. I remember pop fizzling down my forearm, fluorescent ceiling lights peering through grids ... then strangers pressing me to the floor and a face looming over me, proffering honey on a stick, saying, "Here, eat this."

I disclosed in this space I am diabetic about two years ago. True Confessions II: I'm a lousy patient. I disappear eagerly into stories and pictures I'm working on, then emerge hours later to realize all I've consumed is coffee, I'm wearing yesterday's clothes, my daughter's been born, it's a new millennium.

To manage day-to-day diabetes, you must be mindful. Most times I don't have a mind at all.

My wig-out, due to low blood sugar, was my third - and most-serious - in a month. Before that, and an insulin increase, I'd not had any.

Insulin saves your life and can kill you. Working out daily to build your strength - to click a computer mouse, peck at keyboards and other modern survival rigors - means more paramedics must restrain you, you bang and hurt yourself even worse.

"This must be what dying is like," I thought, coming to in an ambulance. Through the rear window everything was receding, and, since I'd broken my glasses, abstract. The route I drove to work daily unrolled in reverse, sand between my fingers.

I was strapped to a gurney, my torso poked and pricked and tethered to umpteen tubes spitting jagged heartbeat charts and countless numeric readings.

"No run tonight," I thought miserably. "What about all those words, unedited?

Anxiety, resurrected, meant my recovery was near complete.

"You just turned 50?" said an EMT who'd been fighting me moments earlier.

"Yup," I said. "Today's the first day of the second half-century of my life."

I sat three hours in an E.R. with nothing to do but compose the libretto to an opera based on overheard case studies and staff gossip: "Code Red ... steak knife ... you wore WHAT to Jen's shower? ... Who's the guy with the broken glasses?"

My wife and daughter, Flannery, 5, came to pick me up. Flannery, having witnessed my past reactions, was scared to greet me.

This hurt worst. I did not want my daughter to be afraid. MR