It was Saturday afternoon. My boyfriend was on a mission to make banana bread with the ripened bananas that he had been collecting. I had finished a 27 mile charity bike ride a couple hours earlier and really just felt like lying on the couch relaxing, but I agreed to be in charge of mashing the bananas. It felt like a job I could handle.

I sat down at the table with my bowl of bananas. Suddenly something didn’t feel right. I got up from the table and sat down in the reclining chair. I checked my CGM, it still said 80 but I knew that couldn’t be right. I tested my finger: 63. Hm yea that made more sense.

I ate a pack of fruit snacks, assuming all would be fine soon.

But I was wrong.

Rather than starting to feel better, I felt myself plummeting downward. The walls started to feel like they were closing in on me. My body felt heavy, my brain foggy.

“Are you okay?” my boyfriend asked from the kitchen.

“I need to lay on the floor.” I figured I should probably give him a heads up so he wouldn’t look over and see me on the floor and think that I had passed out.

I tested my blood sugar again. This time it said 42.

I got down on the floor, laying flat on the carpet. I know it’s weird, but with really bad lows, there’s something comforting about laying on the ground. I closed my eyes, willing this low to go away and my body to start feeling better.

My boyfriend got down on the floor next to me, putting his arm around me.

“This is a bad one.” I could hear the concern in his voice.

When I answered, my tongue was heavy and my words slurred together.

“Sometimes I forget that you’re diabetic.”

I was confused by this statement. “What? How? I talk about it all the time.” I managed to mumble back.

“Yea, but it’s just become so normal.”

It was an interesting and thought-provoking statement. A year ago, my boyfriend knew virtually nothing about type 1 diabetes. Today, my “normal” life has become part of his “normal” life, so much so that it took such a drastic and out of the ordinary low to remind him that I still do have a chronic disease that at times can be dangerous.

After about 15 minutes I started to feel better, my blood sugar hovering around 70. I got up off the floor.

“That was scary. I don’t like seeing you like that.”

“Yea. Me either.”

I’m glad that such a low is out of the ordinary, that fortunately I don’t experience many that are quite that bad. But lows like that are jarring shake back to reality, a reality where scary situations like that are not entirely outside of the realm of my “normal”. Even if sometimes I, and those close to me, forget that they are.

I went back to mashing bananas for the banana bread, doing my best to return to “normal”.