What's this?

On Wednesday, July 14^th, 2004, we went into the city for an appointment at the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Clinic. My blood sugars had been ridiculously high for the past few weeks. Usually 200-400 mg/dl, while the noram lrange is 80-120. Like you, most likely, I didn’t know much about diabetes. I knew it as “that sugar thing” and I knew that some people took insulin and that hypoglycemia was bad. That was it.

So we went in, not expecting much. I figured I’d just have to eat less sugar, to diet or some such. I wouldn’t love it, but hey, it’d be healthier anyways.

I sat in the waiting room with my mom and dad, absorbing my surroundings. I figured that, one way or another, I’d be seeing that room a lot. I wasn’t nervous or pessimistic or upset, though. I had no reason to be. I read on in America: The Book, nicely satisfied.

Dr. Gallagher came out and brought us into her office. I searched through all the cabinets, idly bored, as she left the room for a moment. I was looking at everything, wide-eyed and curious. I think I knew what was coming. Not consciously, but I knew. I was preemptively reverting into defensive mode. And not a moment too soon.

Dr. Gallagher came back into the room. She talked for a little while about something I don’t remember, and then she said something that she must have thought we expected: “It’s most likely that you have Type I.”

I didn’t know what that meant, not really.

She told me what it meant. It meant that my pancreas wasn’t making enough insulin anymore. It meant that I was going to have to check my blood sugar- a little prick on the arm, nothing, I told myself- 3+ times a day. It meant that I was going to have to inject myself with insulin- stab myself in the stomach- 4+ times a day. It meant I was going to have to count every single carb I ate. It meant that every time I ate, I would have to look up the food, and calculate. It meant I would have to lug around a bad of medicine, just to function. It meant that I had to carry around a little red box with a huge needle in it, so in case I went into diabetic shock, someone could stab me and try to save my life. It meant that there was one more thing, one thing that was a million little things, a million little things that added up to more than I could comprehend. It meant that, Christ, someone up there must have wanted me dead, right? And it meant that I was totally fucking overwhelmed.

This was new, even for me. It wasn’t some tough fight that I could pull through and look back on. It’s the rest of my life. This is an unending, unforgiving, unrelenting responsibility. It was an unassailable assault on the few freedoms that I valued so much.

I walked out of the room, shocked, utterly shocked, but not admitting it, even to myself. I smiled and laughed it all of. Hey, so what?

I was led from room to room, familiarizing myself with the daily routines that would be my new, lifelong companions. I was in denial, but I couldn’t deny that the bad news was adding up, that it was worse than I thought, than I could’ve imagined. But I didn’t cry. Maybe I should have, I don’t know.

I think the first night was the worst. By the time we got home, I was, literally, in a daze. Everything seemed cloudy and indistinct, my home seemed foreign. Everything was in disarray, bags of new medicine littered every room, physical manifestations of the new psychological burden that cluttered my mind. }

I remember giving myself my first dose of Lantus, my nightly insulin, drawing back the syringe and wincing at the pain that would end up like an old friend. The bright red sharps container loomed large on the table, empty. As the days went on, it fill up, fill up with my pain, my struggle, my annoyance, and my simple acceptance. I was still in that daze, though, and I wasn’t thinking straight, and when I re-capped the needle I drove it straight into my finger. It went deep, and it bled, and it stung, but I’ll tell you one thing: I never did that again.

And so it went; as the days passed, I made more mistakes, and I learned more from them. Every day, it got easier. I stopped having to look up carbs, calculating stopped being such a chore, injecting insulin became second nature.

Even more so, it gave me things I needed. It gave me organization, routine, and self-control. The stripping of my freedoms actually ended up empowering me, giving me confidence in my own self-reliance. If I hadn’t been diagnosed, I don’t think I would have had the self-discipline to write 50,000 words in 30 days for National Novel Writing Month.

That’s what life is, really. Life is stabbing yourself in the hand and figuring out what you can take away from it. Life is realizing that there’s always good in the bad. Life is about always evolving, about never ending your growth. Life is turning diabetes into a blessing.

Life is taking a step back and saying, “Holy shit, this isn’t that bad.” Life is noticing that all the little blessings add up to a hell of a lot more than all the curses, and then laughing when you realize that you haven’t even started looking at the big blessings. Life is discovering that a smile is never too far away, and that a smile is always worth it.