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Thread: Remembering 9/11.

  1. #1
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    Default Remembering 9/11.

    Today is a solemn day of remembrance for America. Most Americans living today have memories of that day seared in their memory. Days of great disasters and catastrophes generally get imprinted on our memories in an indelible manner. Most people my age in America also remember where they were and what they were doing when they learned about the assassination of JFK. My parents and grand parents had similar memories upon learning of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

    I woke up at 2:30 AM thinking about the events of 9/11. I remember it as the most terrifying time in my seven decades of life. I woke up sweating with a headache and upset stomach and remembered thinking that those memories must really be impacting me. But after a few minutes I had the presence of mind to check my CGM (continuous glucose monitoring system) and it was reading in the red zone of 61 and heading down.

    I thought "oh crap, i got to get up and eat something even though I am not hungry and I better hurry or it will be real serious soon". I got to my kitchen and grabbed a couple cookies and glass of juice from the fridge that I gulped down. One gram of carbs usually raises my blood glucose level about one point. Low blood glucose levels or hypoglycemic episodes are common for many people with diabetes and often happen when taking high dosages of pred meds. So I took about 75 grams right away and then another 25 cause I still felt famished.

    This brings back memories for me of when I was in the in the nursing home six years ago and I would often go from 400 in the afternoon to 40 a few hours later in the middle of the night. And staff would try find something i could eat without getting nauseous.

    Eating lot of carbs, usually sweets, when you aren't hungry is not really much fun when you have to do it to try stave off a bad BG low. It is also a great way to gain a lot of unwanted weight. Too low of BG and you can pass out and have a seizure and even die. Before this level some common symptoms often are sweating, shaking, being confused, anxious, upset, and or irritated and others. Each person may be different:

    Hypoglycemia - Low Blood Glucose (Blood Sugar): American Diabetes Association®

    Being extremely hungry and feeling like a famished person who hasn't eaten for weeks makes it hard to not over eat at these times. It takes a while for the glucose or carbs to get back into your blood stream and raise your BG levels back to normal levels and one tends to eat until this happens so then you go back to having super high BG levels and needing to take more insulin to get it back down to a safer level again. So to try avoid over eating right now I am blogging here while i wait for my BG levels to come up to a safer level.

    This episode lasted about an hour of being super low with BG readings that got down to 40's. Now they are 168 and heading straight up so they will be too high for awhile until I take some more insulin later on.

    This is typical for me. My symptoms this time from the list above for hypoglycemia were:anxiety, headache, weakness, sweating, sadness, confusion, light headed, shaking with poor coordination, rapid heart beat, and maybe I was having a nightmare when I woke up.

    These episode leave me feeling weak with a headache much like having a bad hangover. Years ago when I first started having them I used to be wiped out for a day or more and spend most of the time in bed feeling weak with a head ache. After having hundreds of them and feeling fatigued most of the time anyway from Wegs and diabetes, it is harder to define the after effects. I do know I will not be getting up early and going to church though but hope i might feel well enough by afternoon to watch the football games on TV.

    So I guess it might be good news that I was not having a serious physical reaction to my memories of 9/11 but I do want to share them anyway in the next post.
    Last edited by drz; 12-19-2018 at 01:45 AM.
    Knowledge is power! Wisdom is using it to make good decisions!

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    I remember 9/11 with extreme conflicting emotions and the rapid gauntlet from one extreme to the other. I remember talking to my daughter on 9/10 as they were taking my grandson who only 9 months old to a Yankee baseball night game. I am not sure how much of the game he understood at his age but I remember hearing that he really enjoyed the crowd doing the wave which was big back then. The game went into extra innings. I don't remember who they played or who won the game but I remember being very thankful that the game lasted a long time so they got home late.

    They lived on Union Square which became the Memorial site for 9/11 filled with flowers and pictures of victims who were lost or missing. Union Square was the closet limit to WTC site that people could approach after 9/11. My daughter and her husband had worked at the World Trade Center as traders and she planned to go in early the next day when he went to work to pick up some pictures at her office that she had order to be developed (this was before photography went digital) and to then take my grandson out to buy some new shoes he needed due to his rapid growth at the age of 9 months. Her husband would work his usual day trading.

    But because of the late night they decided to let him sleep in a bit and to go in to work later. I got to work around 8 AM and the first thing I heard from a patient was "Doc, they blew up the World Trade Center." The TV was blaring out the news of the devastation and my heart either stopped or fell to my stomach. My hands were shaking as I dialed home to wake up my wife who sleeping in since she worked a later shift. She wondered why I was waking her up as I urgently told her to call our daughter and find out if she was OK. Fortunately she was able to connect with her before the lines became clogged up and calls were impossible for a long while due to over use after the tragedy. Our daughter wondered why we were calling so early. Her reply then was something about hearing a strange loud noise and they then went up on their roof top just in time to watch the second plane hit the towers. Later they could heard the screaming as people ran by and and they saw the heavy dust from the towers falling.

    When I heard my daughter and her family were still home and OK, I felt enormous sense of relief. I was still anxious since they were trapped in Manhattan and no one knew what was happening next. The plane attack on the Pentagon news and the heroic efforts of flight 93 were yet unknown. Phone calls in and out of Manhattan then became impossible due to over loaded lines. Maybe some towers were also knocked off line by damage to the WTC or shut down as a safety measure. It was many hours later before we got another update about her family and a couple days more until they could leave the island for a safer location.

    I flew in a couple weeks later to visit and went with her to view the devastation. In a time of crisis one often has strange thoughts and reactions. my daughter was upset about losing her pictures that she wanted to see. My son-in-law was worried about being able to get pizza to eat so he went to nearest shop and ordered a couple right away. It was probably some days later when the loss of many of their friends and co-workers who were trapped on upper floors really hit them along with guilt and gratitude for being lucky to survive. The juxtaposition of two such strong feelings was shared by many including myself.

    I also had such feelings later when I learned the terrorists had trained in Afghanistan. I spent two years there in the Peace Corps teaching students and was very sad about what happen to that country after i left. Then the Shah was trying hard to bring his country into the 20th century and to make it a better place for its citizens. I was also very upset about what happened to that country afterward and the role our country played in creating the haven for Taliban that contributed to creating the terrorist training camps for the fanatics who attacked us on 9/11. But that gets into a political discussion so I won't go there.

    The events of 9/11 were not the first attack by Muslim fanatics upon America. Several years earlier they had tried to blow up the World Trade Center when my son-in-law was there but the explosion only destroyed a lower level parking area. But 9/11 was the event that crystallized the struggle that Western civilization has with Muslim fanatics that seek to destroy it. It also transformed America's view of this conflict and that impact has transformed the world. Unfortunately terrorist attacks upon the western civilized world have become rather frequent and more widespread along with enormous violence and deaths in the Arab world.

    There is a monument in the Peace Gardens in ND and Canada border that also symbolizes the dissonance of conflicting emotions from 9/11. It is a beautiful peaceful place but there is also the monument constructed with debris from the WTC with this plague:

    “This cairn, composed of steel rescued from the devastation of the World Trade Center in New York , ensures the memory of this tragedy will not be lost and reminds us to cherish tolerance, understanding and freedom.

    Some people feel it is out of place there. There is also navy ship made from the steel of the WTC debris which most think appropriate.

    Anyone else want to share their 9/11 memory?
    Last edited by drz; 09-11-2016 at 09:24 PM.
    Knowledge is power! Wisdom is using it to make good decisions!

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    Chills & tears... what a horror you have being through...
    your grandson saved his parents.... wow...
    Thank you for sharing.
    Alysia
    dx 2008


    Here, in this forum, I have found my sweet eternal love, my beautiful Phil.. :
    https://www.wegeners-granulomatosis.com/forum/threads/4238-pberggren-memorial-thread
    "You are my sunshine", he used to sing to me... "you make me happy, when skies are grey" I still answer him.
    Rest in Peace, my brave Batman and take care of your weggies from heaven, until we meet again.

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    You and your family are so blessed Drz! Thank you for sharing! I'm grateful you found out quickly your daughter and family were ok! The date alone does bring on feelings of stress and anxiety. It felt like a new vulnerability that we are not used to in the US.

    I'm on the east coast and was stopped at a light on my way to work when I heard it on the news. Of course at that moment we didn't know it was terrorist. I thought it was a tragic accident, until the 2nd plane hit.
    God bless us all with peace and love for each other.
    Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
    in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight.
    Proverbs 3: 5-6

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    Thanks for sharing, very impressive.
    Living with WG/GPA since june 2010...

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