life with type 1 diabetes

Tag: Sad

A Large Dose of Reality

From Wired Magazine’s article on hacking type 1:

“Diabetes was no longer a death sentence, but to this day it still means a life shackled by regular blood-sugar checks, insulin treatment by injection or pump, and the constant threat of overdosing on the very medication that’s keeping you alive.” — this part of the article I identified with, it is a very clear and raw explanation of my reality… but this next part I was not ready for…

“Indeed, one in 20 people with type 1 die from severe low blood sugar, not the high blood sugar that was the problem in the first place. It’s a delicate balance.” — wtf. I’m too shocked even to fact check this… I mean I’ve been scared, but maybe I haven’t been scared enough…

Talking about monitoring his son’s BG… “One night, it was 36. Any lower and Evan could have fallen into a coma. He could have died.” — it’s like I haven’t really heard anything anyone has been saying for the last eighteen months. I’ve been trying to carry on as usual… I went on a fucking business trip three days after being diagnosed… Before they had even confirmed a type 1 diagnosis… I should not have been traveling alone, wtf. How many times have I hit lows in the thirties and occasionally even in the twenties while I’ve been alone in my apartment, honestly I couldn’t even tell you… too many to count… fuck, I can’t believe I’m alive. I’m trying to be grateful and have faith, to help pull myself out of fear… But right now it’s not working.

reborn.

It’s as if my life before never existed. Like I was reborn the day of my diabetes diagnosis — a whole new life with this terrible new addition. It feels like the me before died. I’m so afraid of everything, but every moment, every thought, action, and word is covered in the rubber coating that is the glib “I’ve got this, it is what it is, and I’m doing my best” line. Maybe if I say it enough I’ll believe it. I hear myself sometimes when I’m talking to other people, sometimes they’ll even comment on how well I’m dealing with this and occasionally my real voice in my head gets through and calls “bullshit” — I hear the words coming out of my mouth and in my head I know that it’s all a show…that in reality I’m barely holding my shit together, mostly just through complete and utter fucking denial. And if I’m totally honest, somewhere deep down, I know that that denial could kill me, but that’s a gamble I choose over living in fear every day… I also know this is the wrong choice, but the other is more than I can bare. So here I am in total denial with bursts of awareness that this far have resulted in no action. It occurs to me that I should mention that I am doing the mechanical things, I take my blood sugar, I bolus for meals, I sort of try to eat right, except when I don’t feel like it… I’m not entirely non-compliant, but I am not giving myself my best chance at a full and complication free life, I’m on the “just survive” track, I want to be on the “thrive” track, but I haven’t found a way there yet. Playing with technology solutions has helped, but I still manage to separate the project from myself… I have my numbers in a few programs, but I am yet to take the next step to really analyze them… I know this, fuck, this is what I have done professionally… Data is no use without analysis, but I don’t want to see my analysis… I don’t want anything less than an A+ and I know that that is not what I’m going to get from my data… I’m think that I’m going to see “you are a fucking moron and you are setting yourself up to lose both your legs by the time you’re 35 — oh yeah, and there isn’t any pattern so there is no clear action you can take to try to fix this, so have fun continuing to fuck everything up” — who would want to do any work to see that message, clearly not me…

The thought that keeps coming to mind is that I can’t do this alone… I need to accept help, I have asked for help, that’s a big deal for me, but accepting it is a whole other ball game…