Usually when I use expressions like “rear-ended” in posts about diabetes, I mean it metaphorically. Like, for example, I could coin a new term for the phenomenon caused by Symlin (and, for that matter, any food with low glycemic index), meaning “getting hit from behind by an unexpected high blood sugar.” You know, like how if you eat a dessert sweetened with agave you can think you’re fine, you move on with your life, and then BOOM — rear-ended several hours later with a high blood sugar, just when you’re not expecting it.
But unfortunately, tonight I mean it literally. My husband and I are in Albany right now visiting family and his sister kindly offered to lend us her car so that we could take a day trip someplace, like Saratoga. We took her up on it and set out this morning at the precise moment that it began to snow. I checked the weather on the blackberry and indeed, we were being hit by what weather.com referred to as a “squall.” Being quite paranoid about driving in the snow, I suggested we pick another destination instead, one that would not require returning on what might at that point be ice-covered, snowy streets.
Right after we’d abandoned our Saratoga plans, we pulled up at a stop light. And then, several seconds after we’d pulled to a stop, there was a sudden crash, and we both were thrown forward. Obscenities were uttered as we tried to figure out what the fuck, as I believe I phrased it in the moment, had just happened.
It wasn’t too much of a mystery: when I looked to the backseat, I noticed it was covered in shards of glass. And when my gaze continued out the back window, I realized that, well, there wasn’t any window. We’d been rear-ended by a guy in a white SUV pickup truck, and in addition to denting the hell out of the back door, he had completely and totally broken the rear windshield. This is not the best thing to do on a Wednesday regardless of your situation, but if it’s December 23rd and it’s 8 degrees and snowing out — not to mention if you are borrowing the only car of a woman who is 7 months pregnant with her third child and about to have about 15 people descend on her for Christmas — it is really not a good choice. Trust me on this.
Luckily — very, very luckily — neither of us were at all hurt, we didn’t have a kid in the car, the guy in the other car was nice, and we managed to both drop it off at a collision shop and get a free rental car all in time for dinner. (Not to mention have an excellent grilled cheese.) But nonetheless. In this particular situation, I would have preferred the metaphorical meaning of the term.
