6. My Story

I suppose it's time to tell my story, the one that led me to this place, to this part of my life. It occurred to me recently that no one really knows how it all happened... How this chaos factor entered my existence....

19 years old and in my very own first apartment. The first space that was all my own! It was thrilling. It was exhilarating.... it really wasn't that great of a place. It was a large bachelor apartment in a rundown brick building. My specific unit was relatively well kept and clean, but the building itself was... less than ideal. Horrific yelling in the halls was common and occasionally a drunk that hadn't quite made it into his apartment was found lying outside it asleep. There was no buzzer, no security. But it was mine! For the first time in my life I was doing it on my own. That more then made up for the less than stellar conditions. I wore my rose colored glasses and just thought... no, knew everything was going to be fine. Great, even.

The difficulty is that I cannot cook. I don't want to cook.... I do not enjoy cooking. So after 19 years of beautiful, tasty and cleverly disguised healthy cooking from my mother.... I began a diet of Kraft Dinner, instant-anything, and McDonalds (which was a decent hike down the road... and therefore my excuse for eating it: the "healthy" walk on the way to and from). Yum. The pounds slowly crept up and up and up. I also began working in a breakfast restaurant mistakenly believing that the running around all day would somehow counteract the greasy food I would eat there. I knew my body was young and resilient and could withstand this moderate abuse. I mean... I didn't smoke.... I didn't do drugs... I didn't even drink very often. And I reasoned with myself that I did see vegetables... in my burgers or in the teeny side salads I would get with my tuna melt after work.

It's funny that I didn't see what was happening before I could stop it.

Suddenly I was sick all the time. I always had the flu. I always had a head cold or some weird illness that made me miss work. I figured my immune system was dragging a bit. I started taking one-a-day vitamins.

I still ate fried chicken and Taco Bell (my all time favorite) all the time. I was taking vitamins now! I had my health covered (right?).

I do admit that I found the weight gain frustrating (what young woman wouldn't?) but even that was no deterrent for my lifestyle. Then it was like I got hit by a bus: I contracted Mono. What a doozy! It is nothing like being sick with the flu! My neck swelled in weird places and I couldn't eat anything for weeks at a time except Ginger ale and freezies (I recommend those if you are ever in a similar position... It was the only thing I could keep down!). I waited it out... bed ridden and miserable.

My clearest conclusion of that time is that I had weakened my immune system enough with the lack of nutrients that my body just couldn't stand up well to being sick anymore.

Gradually I recovered from my sick-induced haze. I will spare you anymore details, but in short: I got better. It was so startling and thrilling to be able to just choke down a sandwich again! Yesssss!

It was on the road to recovery that it happened: lightning struck.

I was sick again! But why? It was so strange. I was weak and confused. I couldn't stop drinking water. I would finish a liter and fill up the bottle again, drink it and immediately fill it and drink it all again. It scared me. Other people who knew no better were encouraging me that being able to drink lots of water was a good thing. I tried to believe them but it just did not seem natural. Drinking and peeing was all I could do. And I was ravenously hungry. I ate enough for three sumo-wrestlers every meal (or so it felt like at the time). Food food food water water water. And instead of gaining more weight... I was losing weight. It just dropped off. That part seemed too good to be true! (I bet this stuff is starting to sound oh-so-familiar... isn't it?) But I couldn't gain strength... and was struggling for breath all the time... panting like a dog. I was getting frightened... But I didn't know the signs. I had never heard of the signs of diabetes before. How could I know?

It all grew to a climax when I woke up one morning and did not have the strength and energy to roll over in my bed. I felt chained to the one spot... I knew then that I was really sick. Something was so very wrong. I reached for my phone and called my dad. I was whisked to my family doctor.... He seemed to poke and prod at my tummy for a bit. Then he uttered the words I don't think I will ever forget: “You are much sicker than you think you are"

I was rushed to emergency. Slapped into a wheel chair... tags on my wrists... the nurses were checking my blood sugar for the first time... that was an interesting experience...especially since I had no idea what they were doing... Yelling numbers to each other that meant nothing to me 17.9???? What??? Nobody seemed to have the ability to slow down enough to explain anything.

You would think all of this would be enough to concern me. But it didn't. I was just tired. I slept through the emergency room. Every half an hour or so they would come in, wake me up and take more blood. And more blood. And more blood. I wasn't scared anymore. Just annoyed as heck. Why wouldn't they just let me sleep? I was in a training hospital. So every so often people I thought were doctors would come in and tell me "looks like diabetes." and then someone else would come "well no we don't know it's diabetes." the constant back and forth information was making my head swim. I mean, they had taken like half the blood in my body to test.... shouldn't they know by now?

After a day or two in hospital (my memories of the time passing were hazy at best. I slept most of the time) the diagnosis was certain. Type 1 diabetes. My "team" (as you always have a “team” in a training hospital) didn't quite know what to do with me. I was 20 years old. None of these young doctors had heard of type 1 popping up in someone so old... they led me to believe that this was rare to the point of "unheard of". I sat in my bed glaring at them all thinking to myself "what a way to use up my "one in a million chances" of something. Couldn't have been 649? Oh no:.... diabetes...." Ha.

The experiences from that first week long hospital visit that stick out the most, first of all was that they never seemed to have time to speak to me during the day. It was always 3 in the morning or some such nonsense when some super-good-looking young doctor would come in wake me out of my groggy slumber and ask me a questionnaire. The questions were always the same, the doctor was always young and attractive, and they never failed to ask me (while I was sleepy and embarrassed as it was) about not only what I considered to be pertinent information such as my family history of diabetes (there is none. I am the first in all immediate AND extended... which is why I refer to it as lightning), but also about things like sexual history. Sexual history... like seriously... what?? I can vaguely remember sitting there thinking: is this a joke? A stupid joke? Or am I deluded? Diabetes is not a sexually transmitted disease... IS IT? Keep in mind I was always barely awake during these sessions.

The second experience that sticks out is the "diabetes education" that I received during this week long life-altering ordeal. I had a nurse I had to go visit and a dietician. My dietician was very informative and attempted to be helpful. My nurse was difficult and I remember feeling like an ignorant idiot most of my time there. I remember those sessions being the only time I wanted to cry. I did learn the basics, like needles and simple insulin information. But I also found out later about some gross misinformation that was given to me there, and some important things that were not included... I learned about keytones of course. But the significance of them was lost on me. Nobody explained until a year or so into my condition that, um yes high enough blood sugars can be just as fatal as low blood sugars at a given time. That was terrifying. And even more so was the realization that I had not known this for a year.

*Just a side note here, I feel very strongly that a government directed standard diabetes education curriculum is absolutely and 100% NEEDED for new diabetics of any age, type 1 or 2. Rather than relying on the resources and discretion of each individual institution. And if I have missed my mark, and there already is such a thing... it needs to be strictly enforced, since according to my own little un-scientific research... this doesn't really exist for the adult age group.

Learning to give myself insulin was tricky. Sticking yourself with a needle just doesn’t feel natural does it? They taught me to inject the syringe into my belly into the skin around my belly button. I remember thinking that the teeny little syringe felt light and very breakable in my clumsy hand. And it took a looong time holding that stupid thing before I could work up the nerve to actually do it. My friend was sitting there waiting for me to do it. It took her finally getting exasperated and spitting out “Just do it already!” before I gulped down a lungful of air (as if it would be my last) and plunged the tiny needle into my stomach. I laughed. I didn’t even feel it! Though it still took me like, half an hour to work up the nerve to do it every single time in my first couple of weeks. My friend was encouraging. She said something to me that day in the hospital that I will always remember: “You just do what you gotta do. You just do it.” (Ha, that sounds like a Nike ad, doesn’t it? Well it’s still true.)

During that week I learned that, while they cannot prove it conclusively, they strongly believe that it was my Mono that triggered my body to attack my pancreas wrongly... causing my diabetes. Apparently it is common (I use the word "common" extremely loosely here) for a virus to trigger this condition. Not everyone knows about this possibility. That is a little scary to me. Because when I trace it back in my head I wonder had the McDonalds, the instant food, the Kraft Dinner... the malnutrition... if I had taken care of myself then... would I have contracted Mono as a result of a poor immune system? And if not, would lightning have struck?