This entry is not going to be a happy one. I apologize in
advance for its depressive tone, and I don’t expect anything in terms of comments or sympathy.

Yesterday,
at 4.31 central time, my phone rang while I was in an informal critique with my friend and professor, Ron. Being that
it was a number I didn’t recognize, coming from New Hampshire, I took the call. It was my mom, and I knew something
terrible was happening. It turns out that the terrible thing that was happening was that my sister is in the hospital.
She’s been battling insulin dependant diabetes as an insulin resistant diabetic for about 9ish years now, (she’s almost
21) and early yesterday morning she went into a diabetic coma. Luckily, one of her friends found her, called 911 when
she was unresponsive and she was airlifted to the hospital at Dartmouth. Last night things were really scary. We
weren’t sure she would make it through the night. Today, they know she has the use of all 4 of her limbs, although she
is heavily sedated because she is fighting the ventilator, trying to breathe on her own. This is good that she wants
to breathe on her own, but bad because she has a lot of fluid around her lungs, making it imperative she breathe a
certain amount of oxygen at a certain rate, hence the ventilator. They are optomistic of a slow (1-2 weeks) but full
recovery. Her heartbeat is strong and her CTScan came back showing that there was no swelling in her brain at all (a
major concern for patients with diabetic ketoacidosis–the thing that causes the diabetic coma).

For those
of you that don’t know, my little sister is my best friend. We lived together in the same room until I stopped living
at home full time, and I love her more than anything in the whole wide world. We’re very close and so this has been
really frustrating for me being so far away and not knowing how to fix anything.

Anyway, we’re optomistic.