"Do I Fear Sleep? Yeah..." | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

"Do I Fear Sleep? Yeah..."

Photo credit: 

Sprogz, Creative Commons.

In “Midnight Three & Six,” a New York Times Op/Doc short film, Joe Callander brings us an intimate look at a family’s 24/7 struggle to keep a pre-teen with volatile Type 1 diabetes alive. Grace has already lost four friends her age to this rare and deadly variant of diabetes. 

Grace’s blood sugar is so unstable that her parents sometimes have to measure it every hour, or even every fifteen minutes. If her sugar drops too low, she will go into convulsions and possibly a coma. Typically, Grace’s mom and dad take turns checking her blood sugar through the night, at midnight, three, and six am. Hence the title of the documentary. Her mom lives in fear that her daughter will die in her sleep if she sleeps through her alarm.