Taylor Brorby

On Shame

This time it came on fast. While walking along a glittering stream in Golden, Colorado, with my friend Kali, we talked about our joy at the previous day’s news: Kali had been long-listed for the National Book Award. Months before—before any major literary news—I had planned to visit her today, having not seen her in over a year. We picked up Kali’s brown and black dog, Millie, and took off in the early fall light: cottonwood leaves shimmered in the mid-afternoon sun as families, joggers, and dog-walkers traipsed along the stream.

When we turned around to begin our way back to the car, I missed a step, and then a cascade of jolts hit me before I passed out.

In my twenty-six years of being a type 1 diabetic, I have never had such a quick and violent low blood sugar, one where I couldn’t consciously signal to anyone what was happening. I remember thinking This is not good. I should sit down. But then what came next?

Later, Kali told me, I had reached out to her, that Millie started barking, that a woman on the trail with her family pointed at me and said, That man is having a seizure. Apparently, I said to Kali, I am going to have a seizure. I remember none of this.

During the first class of each semester, I tell my students that I am an insulin-dependent diabetic, that I’ve never had any issues while teaching, but that there is a risk of me having a seizure. As my students stare back at me like goldfish, I tell them the telltale signs for my low blood sugars: slurred speech, clammy skin, irritation—I become short and agitated—my sentences may not make logical sense. I remind them: No matter what—even if I say I’m fine—call 9-1-1.

In second grade, I had my first seizure, sliding onto the shiny floor of Mrs. Fryslie’s classroom. I was taken to the small clinic in our town of six hundred in an ambulance. My parents, as a way of thanking my classmates and teacher, threw a pizza party. I was the only little boy that had to drink diet soda.

In high school, my body went through hormonal changes that, for no discernable reason, predisposed me to low blood sugars. After eating supper in Bozeman, Montana—something that should have raised my blood sugar—I had a seizure in my friend’s hotel room. One morning in March, the day before I was to leave on a jazz band trip to Wyoming for a competition, I rose, sat at a high-back stool in the kitchen, and launched backward from the counter. When I came to, my tongue felt like an inflated balloon, and my mother was crying: I had no recollection of it. My mother, who contracted gestational diabetes while pregnant with me and who, still to this day, is insulin-dependent, couldn’t believe me: after all, she had never (to my knowledge) experienced a seizure.

When I go into a seizure, it is as if I’m asleep. Though, as I’ve been informed, my body short-circuits—my limbs jolt as if shocked by electricity, my eyes roll into my head, and my mouth foams—I have no recollection of any of it. In the minutes before I seize, it is as if I am a remote-controlled car with low battery, my wheels slowing, energy bleeding out from my body.

When I snap out of it, when I come to after being administered liquid glucose—a syrupy, sugary concoction that allows a person to ingest sugar, even if they can’t chew—it is as if I’ve awakened like Sleeping Beauty: the world fades into color, sounds begin to swirl around me, and I wobble, usually light-headed. What’s more: most people are suspicious that I can’t remember anything of what just happened, as if I’m pulling their leg.

Kali and I agreed I should go to the emergency room just in case there was something happening on the inside that we couldn’t detect. Inside the ambulance a kind, butterbean EMT began an IV to stabilize my blood sugar and keep me hydrated; he pricked my left ring finger to get a drop of blood for a glucose reading: sixty-nine, a number technically out of risk for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar).

But for days I had been above seven thousand feet, in Estes Park, for a conference, and now, in Golden, I was over five thousand six hundred feet above sea level—more than five thousand feet higher than my body was used to where I live in Geneva, New York.

Though there is no direct evidence that altitude causes low blood sugar, altitude sickness can trigger other complications for diabetic management. Traveling, in general, causes stress hormones, changes in time zones, and shifts in routines that can cause sugar levels to behave differently. And, like each person, diabetes impacts people differently.

In the emergency room, I was monitored as I had been in the past: periodic blood sugar tests, the recommendation that I give myself less insulin than recommended over a twenty-four-hour period to avoid going low again, and to “take it easy.” But this was my last day in Colorado, and I had to rise at five a.m. to catch an early morning flight back home to New York. The doctor assured me it would be safe to travel.

The day after a seizure it is as if you’ve taken too many tequila shots and fallen down a flight of stairs. Throughout the night, I had tried to adjust my sleeping position, but found I could only sleep flat on my back. Turning my head was like unscrewing a stubborn lid from a jar. Bolts of pain shot through the left side of my upper body whenever I attempted to lift my arm. Both arms had scrapes from jerking on the cement, and my palms were splattered with dried blood. My calves felt as if I had done one thousand raises, and my quadriceps burned throughout the night.

I rose before the sun and tried three times to put on my short-sleeved blue Oxford shirt. I couldn’t lift a T-shirt high enough to place atop my head, much less pull it down onto my body. First, I slid my right arm into its sleeve before gripping my collar, hunching over, and sliding the left side of the shirt over my back and shoulder. I began to grunt as I forced my left arm up into my sleeve. Once in, it snapped back down against my side, the muscles in my shoulder and arm as nimble as a two-by-four.

Kali drove my rental car to the airport as her dad followed behind us. I hated to be a burden—two people up by five a.m. just to take me to the airport—but I worried about my inability to turn my head while driving, or about the rigidity in my left arm: how would I turn the steering wheel?

We returned my rental. I loaded into the shuttle and checked a bag at Denver International. While walking to TSA, I glanced at the “restricted access” line, which was labeled for military personnel and disabled travelers. Fuck it, I thought, diabetes is a disability. I took advantage of my chronic illness and pain, avoiding the snaking line of people waiting to move through security.

I took off my belt, backpack, shoes, watch, and jacket with the speed of a sloth. Each movement I made was now a deeper exploration into pain. How far could I push my left side before a cry escaped from me? What if I forgot about the pain in my neck and turned my head too quickly? I focused on deep breaths and steadied myself.

Once through the checkpoint, I sat on a steel bench and slowly regrouped before taking the train to my gate.

When I finally reached the boarding area, the steward asked anyone needing more time for boarding to step up to the gate; I was the youngest person to get in line. I lifted my shirt with my right arm to show the steward that I was a diabetic, that I was disabled, and that today I needed more time. Today of all days I didn’t want to be bumped or jostled while standing in line, trying to get to my seat.

When we took off from Denver to Syracuse, I attempted to recline, but found that United seats recline to, at most, an eighty-five-degree angle. I then tried to rest my head against the window, but since I was sitting on the left side of the plane, my neck jounced with pain. Quietly, tears began to pool in my eyes.

In Syracuse, I had to navigate driving the more-than hour home. I avoided the thruway and chose quiet backcountry roads, figuring that there’d not only be less stress, but that I wouldn’t need to turn my head as often to monitor traffic.

When I got home, I left my luggage in the car, ambled up the stairs of my apartment, slowly stripped naked, and lumbered towards my bed. I fell asleep at three p.m. and woke at eleven a.m. the next morning to the sound of my mother’s voice in my head: You have to be able to take care of yourself.

Good advice, harmless in many ways. But my mother would remind me of this dictum after every seizure I had in childhood, after every low blood sugar where she and my father had to help me. Take care of yourself was a signifier of strength, a way for a dogged person to not be overcome—or worse, defined—by his chronic illness. No one, I was reminded, would be looking out for me in life, so I needed to look out for myself. No one would be there to rescue me. 

Lying there—stiff, sore, my tongue still swollen—I whacked my pillow with my good arm, used it to prop myself up and out of bed so that I could make coffee. I noticed the left portion of my lower lip pushed up and out: my tongue had swollen more overnight, as if I had a sausage in the cavity of my mouth. 

As the water for my coffee began to bubble in the teakettle, I stared out into the gray-clouded day, a faint steam rising across Seneca Lake. The day before it had been nearly ninety—too warm for late September—and now, that morning, it was in the mid-sixties. 

I cursed my mother. I cursed myself. Would people really not be there to help me? 

American individualism is wed to the idea of the singular over the communal. Take as much for yourself as possible. Get ahead at any cost. You first, family second, friends third, community—if it’s even a thought—last.

In high school I was smug when Selective Services called. I really wish I could help, Officer, I’d say in my levelheaded high school voice, but the problem is I’m a diabetic. The polite officer, usually a male, would thank me for my time and quickly hang up. I’d smile as I walked away from the phone, thinking my supposedly easy-to-manage disease saved me from the trenches.

But now I realize how deeply entrenched I am in my need of help from others. My body, its limitations, and my own individual flaws root me in my needs: I must see an endocrinologist to monitor how diabetes impacts the inner landscape of my organs; I have regular appointments with a general physician in an attempt to draw a larger map of my body’s health; my optometrist dilates my pupils, then shines a light off of my cornea, to check for any type of retinopathy; podiatrists test the sensitivity in my toes to make sure I’m not losing circulation. In all of these ways, I am not, as my mother reminded me, able to take care of—or, to be more precise, adequately monitor—myself. 

As a man, American culture pressures me to be tough, to endure, to overcome. Since childhood, my parents, both all-state athletes, reminded me that I wasn’t special, wasn’t any different from other children—even though other children didn’t have to prick their fingers or plunge shiny syringes into their skin. I pushed my body hard and was the fastest in my class, could do the most pull-ups, and pressed my body quickly through the water while swimming laps. I tried to make my body, believing that diabetes was something I could force into submission. If I came in second, my parents would remind me that it wasn’t first.

But my body, on the whole, is a second-place body: it gains weight easier than a normal body, has more difficulty in losing weight, swings wildly when under duress, and, as I age, the wear of diabetes on my system, on my organs, erodes the inner workings of—how else to put this?—me. 

Today, as I write this, it is two days after my seizure in Colorado. My neck can turn right only so far before the stretch of my left side sends pain up my neck; turning it left is not an option. My tongue feels bloated. I am typing with only my right hand while my left sits at my side—my fear of moving it confirmed with every shot of searing pain as I attempt to lift it. The rain-wet bark of the elm tree beyond my window glistens green; the sky is streaked indigo and gray. I’ve sat in this spot the entire afternoon, contemplated the pain I now feel with the slightest movement, knowing that, over the next few days, it will subside. I will, at some future date, forget exactly how this feels, but there will be some lingering residue. I feel shame for seizing on the sidewalk so shortly after Kali’s life-changing news. I feel shame for my inability to sense my body’s downfall before it catapults towards the ground. I feel shame for my inability to know each intricate shuddering of my body, which, in the easy chair of my own self-examination, I convince myself, would have stopped the seizure.

To be in need in American culture is perceived as a sign of weakness. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. March to the beat of your own drum. If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything. The first duty of a man is to think for himself. Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity. Who would you be but who you are? Insist on yourself; never imitate. Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. Man’s life is independent.

My seizure was an individual action of my body, but now, the pain ever-so-dully subsiding, I’m reminded of an ongoing seizure: the biospheric crisis. Topsoil erosion. Winnowing glaciers. The continued logging of the Olympic Peninsula. Death trenches dug in anticipation of summertime heat in Pakistan. Pine beetles with longer lifespans. Retreating hemlocks. Fewer sage grouse. 

When I cry out from my seizure’s pain, I am reminded that the symphony of planetary sound diminishes from the seizure it currently experiences. 

In America, we do not like to think in community, and we certainly do not enjoy thinking about death—but the biological reality the planet teaches, and will continue to as the planet is compromised, is that our health—our seizures, our lives—are dependent not only upon other humans, but other species. If I can now attach my pain to the pain of another animal, the Asian elephant, say—the same species of elephant as Disney’s Dumbo—an animal facing its own extinction, could my thinking around my seizure and the seizing of the planet change? Would I act differently? If politicians understood their bodies as linked to the body of the planet, would their votes change?

Over the time I have worked on this essay, meandered through the rivers of my own pain, I am now able, once again, to type with both hands. My left hand cannot yet rise higher than my chest—but, for now, it is enough to regain its use in writing.

Healing, if it ever comes, is a spectrum.

The body remembers.

Shame is a lingering dream that lurks under the surface, waiting to regain its footing, to humble us in the face of everything that is to come. 

Taylor Brorby is a contributing editor for North American Review and serves on the editorial board of Terrain.org. His work has been supported with grants and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the National Book Critics Circle, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and has appeared in the Huffington Post, High Country News, and Earth Island Journal. He is the author of Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America.