On the morning of June 18, 1991, I informed my mother that I would not be going to school that day, an unprecedented declaration; I lived for school. My mother hauled me, her nauseous co-pilot, along with her to run errands, but found it difficult to buy groceries with a green-faced, vomity 11-year-old in tow, so back home we went. The next day, she took me to urgent care.

My body had been poisoning me with ketones for months. As I experienced that day and have many times since, your brain is the first organ to fail you when you suffer ketoacidosis. You get stupid; you lose the ability to be self-aware and understand things complexly. My body began to shut down. I was tired all the time. When I got home from school I slept. I asked the school nurses if I could nap during recess, which they allowed. Evidently, my teachers assumed I was depressed. At their behest, my mom brought me to a psychiatrist, much to my confusion. I couldn't eat much, resulting in a 30-pound loss from my scraggly frame. I woke up at night so frequently to drink water and urinate, I would fill up the water bottle for my bike and hide it under my pillow so I could quench my thirst throughout the night. I've never been trapped in the Sahara or marooned on a life raft or deserted island, but this undying thirst felt like the droughtier version of all those scenarios combined.

The 43rd Baby-Sitters Club text, Stacey's Emergency, was published two months before my diagnosis. Stacey McGill suffers protracted sadness, which she copes with by covertly eating sugary garbage, ultimately sending her to the ER. Preceding her hospitalization, she too has unquenchable thirst, and is inexplicably ever-tired. Because my brain had dissolved into a cranium-encased bowl of useless ooze, I never put together that we were experiencing the same symptoms. Also, I thought I was doing something illicit, being awake at night and unbelievably thirsty, and kept this new nocturnal routine secret. Physically and intellectually, I had become a wisp of myself until I was diagnosed.

When I overheard the doctor saying that I might be diabetic, I didn't even think about mortality. I just finally realized what Stacey McGill and I had in common.

I woke up in the hospital alone. Then a doctor came to my bedside, joined by my mom, to deliver his oration regarding my new disease. He gravely explained that from now on, I would have to plan and monitor everything I ate and any bit of exercise I performed, and synchronize it with my synthetic insulin shots. I would administer two kinds of insulin injections multiple times every day, and I would need to test my blood-sugar levels more than that. There is a narrow, capricious aperture where every person's blood sugar must reside to stay alive; I was told how to recognize low-blood-sugar attack symptoms and prepare for them (though, holy shit can you not emotionally brace for them) and be able to identify the hallmarks of high blood sugar. Most importantly, if I fucked this up, I should expect blindness, kidney failure, amputation, death, et fucking cetera.

After the doctor delivered this speech, he and my mom left. I went back to sleep. An affable nurse woke me to demonstrate how to give myself injections. The staff nutritionist stopped by to explain meal plans, and how to choose food based on my prescribed insulin doses. Had my brain been firing on all cylinders, and had I not been a Baby-Sitters Club devotee, this grim and significant life change would have been infinitely scarier. It was impossible to concentrate on the diabetes symposium being held at my bedside, after being zonked out for so many hours, following months of debilitating sickness, while still being a fanciful kid.

Thankfully, the BSC had already burrowed a foundational knowledge of the disease into my brain, undoubtedly mitigating the confusion and freaked-out-ness of being confronted with my own mortality for the first time. Being bookish, I was somewhat equipped for my definitive coming-of-age event.