When we chose our house I was thrilled to get one on a cul-de-sac so the kids could run around without having to call off their game of football with a resounding, "CAR!!". The panoramic ocean view from both kids' rooms was a great selling point as was the community pool and jacuzzi to finally teach the kids to swim. The one thing I overlooked was the fact that a diabetic should never live in a two-story house.
When 2 a.m. calls and my blood sugars have plummeted to 38, pausing for a moment just before falling off the cliff that some do not come back from, and I have to locate some sugar in the house, I spring from my bed in a panic and begin the sprint to the kitchen before my eyes are even open.My brain is still asleep and my body has been robbed of the sugar it needs for my muscles to move in any sort of coordinated way. While it's still dark and the stairs seem to be swaying in the wind, I attempt to hobble down those stairs without spraining my knee or falling flat on my face.
Most of the time I make it to the kitchen and force the chocolate milk sludge into my gullet, but I have certainly had some close calls. I have learned to count the seven stairs until the landing halfway down and the other seven to the bottom just so I don't step where there is no step, or forget to step when there is one.
When I finally make my way upstairs later that night with hardly the energy to climb those stairs, I often realize I have left my blood glucose testing kit downstairs on the coffee table. So I have to extricate myself from those warm covers I have just settled myself under to wander back down the stairs.
I climb seven and seven back up and get settled again under the covers to test my sugars before turning in for the night. Hoping to make the correct adjustments to avoid yet another nighttime low, I find that I am still low and am 10 feet too high to reach the fridge from my bed. So back down I go, pounding some choco-sludge and the back up seven and then seven more.
By the time I am upstairs again, Tony is still sound asleep. I shut off the light and hope for a low-less night avoiding a season-ending, blown ACL from only counting to six before turning.
So my advice to the diabetic world out there, go for a single story, maybe a ranch style or a sprawling mansion, but whatever the land-use gurus are promoting and the highly paid real estate agent is pushing, avoid the two story, and by all means, run screaming from a tri-level home. Believe me your knees will thank you for it.