The Quiet Between the Words

Someone shaking me too hard. Someone not doing anything. I see myself brain damaged. In a chair. Not moving. Not talking. My whole life changed because of this one moment. The fear is a sharp, cold knot in my gut.

And I am terrified. Alone in the middle of a room full of people.

“What should we do?”
“Should we call?”

“Does anybody here know what to do?”
“No, no—don’t touch him.”
“I think it has something to do with sugar.”
“No! Don’t give him sugar. He’s diabetic. You’ll kill him.”
“Mark? Mark, can you hear us?”

These people remember who hit a home run in the sixth inning of a game played in the rain in 1967. They know what episode of Get Smart had the exploding pen. But they don’t remember that I have T1DM or what to do when I go low.

My body is screaming the answer they can’t hear.

I don’t remember how long I sat there—seconds, maybe, or years. Time doesn’t pass normally in that kind of fear. It bends. It warps. It circles in on itself until all that’s left is need.

And then—thank God—one of my aunt’s friends, a nurse, saw what was happening. She didn’t wait. She didn’t ask. She got me sugar. She saved my life.

That was the moment I realized: if I don’t teach people what to do, I might not get another chance. Survival isn’t just managing my body—it’s making sure that knowledge lives outside me too.

Sometimes staying alive means moving fast when others freeze. It means remembering what they forget. A vital folklife of chronic illness.

Sugar can be the difference between a life interrupted—and a life ended.

This event stayed in my bones. It shaped how I speak, how I teach, how I walk into rooms. It’s why I became a founding member of the youth division of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in Canada.

Later, I trained others to recognize these moments—before the systems were formalized, before there were manuals. I didn’t wait for permission. I taught because someone had to know what I knew.

Today, I serve on lived-experience panels with the American Diabetes Association and Breakthrough T1D. I speak not just as a patient, but as someone whose body carries a history most textbooks still don’t know how to read.

I call it sensory timekeeping—the quiet, constant calibration of a body listening to its own data stream. A subtle shift in breath. A twitch in the wrist. A whisper of dizziness. These are my numbers. My monitors. My language.

That night in 1969 wasn’t just a medical event. It was a remembering. A return to something older than protocol. Older than words. It was the moment I learned that survival is sometimes an act of translation—from the body's signals to the world's understanding.