I know I tell this story every year but it's a flashpoint in my life, a reawakening and a retooling whose reverberations are felt still, always, at the fore and aft of my mind.

Short version: active runner and yoga practitioner lost 40 pounds over the course of one hot summer and, while something was off, couldn't figure out what was wrong (and wouldn't allow anything to be) - thought it was heat and flu and such (and general pervasive stress over one of the many summers of the mother) until breath became constant, "firebreath," and standing, never mind walking, was an impossibility; ER, within five minutes or maybe it was five hours, Guess what, you've got Type One – a determination made only through a blood test because their glucometer didn't go up to my number, 877. Two days in ICU – all I was allowed was ice chips (I still fucking hate motherfucking ice) – and slow recovery, a night nurse to whom I owe everything for telling me that I wasn't a monster, for reading me the doctors' reporting so I understood what had happened and that it wasn't my fault; and now, back to the land of the living in this new, completely transformed iteration of life in which, for me, everything changed, but for those around me (see "summers of the mother" though those summers are gone now) nothing changed.

That being said, I think – or at least tell myself – that I've reached, 2,189 omelettes (I've eaten the same breakfast and lunch for the last six years, with some small variations to the latter) later, a begrudging detente with my reality of sameness and discipline and have relaxed – thanks to age, mileage, and therapy in talk and in pill form – many of my own manias and compulsions (the OCD is nil at this point though the depressions come and go) about TFD, This Fucking Disease, as I've come to call it, the knowledge of how close I came to my end (and how close I've come over the years to ending it all myself) without doing anything I consider worthwhile haunts me, day in, day out.

But hey, as they said in THE HOLY GRAIL, I'm not dead yet; omelette 2190 awaits.