Hypoglycemic “incidents” are not funny when they happen. Most often, they are scary and embarrassing, if not downright humiliating. After a while, though, you can usually look back on the event and find some humor. Sometimes it takes a few days, sometimes a few years. The “Celery Incident,” detailed below, festered in my mind for about 9 months before I was able to laugh about it.

About 5 years ago, my wife called me and asked me to pick up some celery from the grocery store on my way home from work. At the time, I was having frequent hypoglycemia because of poor management choices that I was making, so it was no surprise that I walked into the grocery store that afternoon with low blood sugar.

Describing how hypoglycemia makes you think is hard to explain to a non-diabetic, but describing how it makes you ACT is easy: it makes you act dazed, confused, paranoid, upset, lost, stupid, drunk, erratic, and goofy.

That fateful day, I wandered around the grocery store in a confused and erratic state, searching high and low for celery. I checked the bakery, the dairy section, the cereal aisle, the meat counter, the liquor aisle, the deli, and of course, the aisle where they sell the brooms and mops. I searched the store for nearly 30 minutes. What the hell was wrong with this grocery store? They had no celery!

As I wandered the aisles, I came to some sort of muddled realization that I needed food. Fortunately, I was in a food-rich environment, so as I meandered through the store, I munched on some chocolate donuts that I found on the baked goods shelf. The frustration of being trapped in a grocery store that was completely bereft of celery began to eat at me, a