The Sweeter Things
By Taylor Brown
What is normal, anyway? For me, it used to be staying up into the early hours of the morning and sleeping past noon. Going to Walmart at 3 a.m. because I just really needed a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream.
Wearing yoga pants five out of seven days a week because jeans are just too uncomfortable. Making a double batch of cookie dough and sitting on my living room floor watching "Family Feud" with my roommate. Working every Friday and Saturday from 4 p.m. until 2 a.m. without a break, missing a social life that I never really had.
I would have dinners every Sunday and my mom would always make my favorite -- mashed potatoes. I would spend countless minutes sitting on my couch hounding my dad to turn off the air conditioning because my feet were always freezing, even though he never actually did. That was my old normal. My new one is just a little bit different.
Last January when I started drinking water by the gallon, I didn’t really pay much attention to it. I would continually drive to Walmart to replace the 36-count pack of water that I had just bought a few days before without thinking twice about why my body was so thirsty. When I started going to the bathroom once every 10 minutes, I told myself I had a bladder infection and made an appointment with my doctor. When I was at work and started shaking in the middle of dinner rush, I chugged a can of Mountain Dew and went on with my night like nothing was wrong.
When my legs started tingling from the waist down, I asked one of my co-workers who is also a physical therapist what it could be and she told me it was probably a pinched nerve. That made sense, so I made another doctor's appointment. All of these minuscule things happening all at once and still, to me, they were no big deal. Still, I grabbed my laptop and searched my symptoms on WebMd.
The next day I was sitting on my couch, looking up something on the Internet when my mom walked into the living room and sat down next to me. She turned on the Food Network I looked at her and said, “Mom, I think I am a diabetic.” She stopped, looked at me and laughed. She told me that I was crazy, that I was perfectly healthy and that when I went to the doctor in two weeks, she would tell me the same thing. For the first time in my adult life, my mother turned out to be wrong.
My doctor did not have any appointments available for one month. I figured whatever was wrong couldn’t have been that urgent, so I made an appointment and decided to wait, that is until I couldn’t take it anymore. About one week later, I was sitting in the bathroom of the University Health Center holding a little plastic cup. If I peed in this little cup, it would make the sixth time I had to pee in the last hour, five of which were alongside I-70 West on the way back from the Monroeville Mall to my apartment.
I was expecting to be prescribed antibiotics. I thought I had a bladder infection. For about 24 hours, I thought that I was pregnant, which even though it was virtually impossible, I considered that maybe I was a modern-day version of the Virgin Mary. I was giggling at that thought when the nurse stepped back into the room and told me that I was testing normal for almost everything.
“Everything seems to be coming back normal,” she said, looking at me, almost puzzled. “Although there are signs of glucose in your urine. Are you a diabetic?”
I looked at my roommate, who was sitting across from me, her eyes wide, her nose crinkled, her hand covering her mouth.
I almost felt the urge to laugh because it was something that she and I had joked about on a semi-regular basis because of our eating habits.
“I’m surprised we don’t have the beetus,” she had said to me months ago, laughing, even though we both knew it didn’t work that way; even though it wasn’t something really to laugh about. But that was three months ago and it didn’t seem all that funny to me anymore.
I glared at the nurse and said in a growl, “No, I’m not.”
I explained to her that aside from spending the majority of my days in the bathroom and going through three cases of water every week, that I felt perfectly fine, that I was perfectly fine. Still, she turned over my palm, which was already sweating, and proceeded to wipe my finger with an alcohol swab. I had seen my grandfather do this at least 1,000 times and he never even flinched, but I was afraid. Afraid of needles. Afraid of what it was going to feel like. Afraid of what would happen if the number on the little screen wasn’t what it was supposed to be. But the choices I had in the matter had started and stopped the second I had peed in the little plastic cup.
She told me to look away. I did. Then it felt like a bee stung my finger.
That was the first time that anyone had checked my blood sugar. The glucometer read 786.
A “normal” person's blood sugar will sit around 120 to 140, depending on the time of day, what food the person ate, when he or she ate or how active the person has been. After looking at the screen, I realized that I was no longer one of those people. Within 20 minutes, an ambulance was outside of Carter Hall, and I was in a wheelchair, not allowed to walk. Then I was lying on stretcher, staring at a very large needle that was about to be shoved into my arm. That’s the first time that I remember crying.
On March 12, 2013, I found out that I was a statistic. I found out that like 28 million other Americans, I am diabetic. But I am part of the smaller percentile; the Type 1 diabetics, who make up less than 5 percent of the larger number. I guess that makes us different. Different because we can’t just take a pill and make everything better, different because we are almost always under 20 years old, different because we were born this way and for some genetic reason, one day, any random day, our pancreas just will stop producing insulin, just because. How is that for a medical diagnosis?
Our body is betraying us at 20 years old or less “just because.” And this is how it started for me.
“What are you doing with that?” I said, looking at the paramedic with the needle. Eyeliner and mascara ran down my cheeks, staining the sheets I was lying on and my new shirt.
“I’m putting in an IV. It’s just a saline drip. We need to get your glucose levels down. Our meters can’t even read your numbers because they are so high.”
He talked as if he knew what he was doing. I talked as if I knew more than he. It didn’t really hurt but when he asked me, I looked at him and said, “I haven’t ever been stabbed with a needle by a stranger before, so I wouldn’t know if that’s how it was supposed to feel or not.”
That day and the days to come turned out to be a lot of firsts for me. The first time my blood sugar was ever checked, the first time I was ever given an IV, the first that that I had ever ridden in an ambulance, the firs time that I had ever gotten blood work, the first time that I had ever stayed over night in a hospital, the first time I had ever been given insulin, the first time that I had ever been in the ICU, the first time that I had ever resented my body, the first time in my entire life that I was dealt a hand I wasn’t sure that I could handle.
***
It has been almost a year since I was diagnosed and I would be lying if I said it hasn’t been one of the hardest years of my life.
It’s the little things that bother me now, though, more than checking my blood sugar, more than counting carbs, more than giving myself four shots of insulin every single day. Those things are easy for me to deal with because I have to. I don’t have a choice. It is for me a very real life-or-death decision and I have come to terms with that part, the part in which I control my own destiny. My wellbeing resides in a little clear glass jar that sits in my fridge.
If my sugar is too high, I could die. If my sugar drops too low, I could die. If I don’t take care of myself and get a blister on my foot, I may have to have my foot amputated. I’m at a high risk if I would ever choose to have children. It’s a very real disease and it puts a lot of things into perspective for me. I am the only person who can keep my disease under control. No one else can do it for me; not my mom nor my doctor, only me. But that, again, is the easy part. The hard part is dealing with the rest of the world who aren’t diabetics, who don’t understand about being diabetic, who think it isn’t that big of a deal, who think that I became this way because I ate too much candy, which is not true at all.
The hard part is sitting in a restaurant staring directly at a little boy, who is eating an oversized gob, his mouth covered in chocolate crumbs, globs of fluffy white icing smudged into his dimples. I hate him for no other reason than he can eat that dessert without thinking twice and I can’t.
The hard part is sitting in the middle of night class, when the person next to me twists open a bottle of regular pop that I haven’t had one sip of in almost an entire year and having to listen to it fizz. Knowing that this person doesn’t care that there are 64 carbs in a bottle of Mountain Dew, which is over the equivalent of how may carbs I am supposed to have for an entire meal.
The hard part is not being able to carry around the cute Coach purse that my mom bought me for my birthday because all of my diabetic supplies will not fit inside, or not being able to eat the piece of cake with extra icing on my birthday, or not being able to drink a Long Island iced tea when they are on special at my favorite bar.
It’s hard not being able to sleep at night because my blood sugar is too high, or maybe it is too low, and being afraid that I might not wake up. So I just don’t sleep. I take my medicine and prick my finger every hour just to make sure that I don’t have to go to the ER. It’s hard having to continuously stop in the middle of sex to drink a glass of orange juice because my blood sugar has dropped, which completely kills the mood every single time.
But more than all of those little annoyances, the hardest part is having an invisible disease that really isn’t all that invisible. It’s the shaking. A constant quiver, my body stuttering as it is trying to tell me that I need to eat. It’s my legs tingling as if they were asleep, telling me that I have eaten too much. It’s trying to balance a tray of drinks at work when my blood sugar is low and spilling beer on someone because I’m shaking so badly. But I just have to smile, knowing that there is nothing that I can do about it besides apologize for the way my body behaves now.
My disease is not invisible and neither are the looks that people give me when I give myself insulin at a restaurant, or when the page of the book I am holding is shaking in the middle of class when I am trying to read. It isn’t invisible when I take off my shirt and both of my arms are covered in dime-sized bruises because of the shots I give myself every single day. People see me. They see me doing all of these things and they judge me and make assumptions and that hurts more than any shot ever will.
As much as these things annoy me, as frustrating as it is to live they way that I do now, I am grateful above everything else. Being a diabetic has made me humble. It has woken me up and made me realize that it is really the smaller things that matter the most, even when everything else seems to be so important.
I am not the only person living in a world of needles and shots and calloused fingers, and that’s reassuring. I am going to have bad days, the kind of days where I throw my hands up in the air and pretend that my pancreas is working for a day. There have been some days where I don’t check my blood sugar as much as I should and eat whatever I want, even though I know the gravity of that choice.
There are still going to be days when I spend hours and hours looking online at the most recent advancements in medicine: pancreas transplants, contacts that will monitor blood glucose levels, a man-made pancreas that will do what my own won’t anymore. I have days that give me hope that diabetes won’t always be a struggle and that maybe normal isn’t so far away.
For the rest of my life, it will always be the smaller things that matter to me. Since learning I am diabetic, I have come to realize how good the taste of a regular pop is after not drinking one in months and how delicious a Snickers bar is after it is left in the freezer for a few days, or how refreshing an ice cream cone is on one of the hottest days of summer.
I savor the taste of my mom’s homemade noodles on Thanksgiving and her cranberry salad at Christmastime and my Aunt Sandy’s celebratory black and gold cupcakes after the Steelers win a game. I embrace the moments when my sugar drops just low enough that I can indulge in a little bit of who I used to be, of who most of you are, and I enjoy the sweeter side of life for just a little while, when being diabetic is normal. When my new normal really isn’ t so bad.
Taylor Brown is a junior English major with a concentration in journalism at California University of Pennsylvania. Read more about Taylor on her personal blog.
What is normal, anyway? For me, it used to be staying up into the early hours of the morning and sleeping past noon. Going to Walmart at 3 a.m. because I just really needed a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream.
Wearing yoga pants five out of seven days a week because jeans are just too uncomfortable. Making a double batch of cookie dough and sitting on my living room floor watching "Family Feud" with my roommate. Working every Friday and Saturday from 4 p.m. until 2 a.m. without a break, missing a social life that I never really had.
I would have dinners every Sunday and my mom would always make my favorite -- mashed potatoes. I would spend countless minutes sitting on my couch hounding my dad to turn off the air conditioning because my feet were always freezing, even though he never actually did. That was my old normal. My new one is just a little bit different.
Last January when I started drinking water by the gallon, I didn’t really pay much attention to it. I would continually drive to Walmart to replace the 36-count pack of water that I had just bought a few days before without thinking twice about why my body was so thirsty. When I started going to the bathroom once every 10 minutes, I told myself I had a bladder infection and made an appointment with my doctor. When I was at work and started shaking in the middle of dinner rush, I chugged a can of Mountain Dew and went on with my night like nothing was wrong.
When my legs started tingling from the waist down, I asked one of my co-workers who is also a physical therapist what it could be and she told me it was probably a pinched nerve. That made sense, so I made another doctor's appointment. All of these minuscule things happening all at once and still, to me, they were no big deal. Still, I grabbed my laptop and searched my symptoms on WebMd.
The next day I was sitting on my couch, looking up something on the Internet when my mom walked into the living room and sat down next to me. She turned on the Food Network I looked at her and said, “Mom, I think I am a diabetic.” She stopped, looked at me and laughed. She told me that I was crazy, that I was perfectly healthy and that when I went to the doctor in two weeks, she would tell me the same thing. For the first time in my adult life, my mother turned out to be wrong.
My doctor did not have any appointments available for one month. I figured whatever was wrong couldn’t have been that urgent, so I made an appointment and decided to wait, that is until I couldn’t take it anymore. About one week later, I was sitting in the bathroom of the University Health Center holding a little plastic cup. If I peed in this little cup, it would make the sixth time I had to pee in the last hour, five of which were alongside I-70 West on the way back from the Monroeville Mall to my apartment.
I was expecting to be prescribed antibiotics. I thought I had a bladder infection. For about 24 hours, I thought that I was pregnant, which even though it was virtually impossible, I considered that maybe I was a modern-day version of the Virgin Mary. I was giggling at that thought when the nurse stepped back into the room and told me that I was testing normal for almost everything.
“Everything seems to be coming back normal,” she said, looking at me, almost puzzled. “Although there are signs of glucose in your urine. Are you a diabetic?”
I looked at my roommate, who was sitting across from me, her eyes wide, her nose crinkled, her hand covering her mouth.
I almost felt the urge to laugh because it was something that she and I had joked about on a semi-regular basis because of our eating habits.
“I’m surprised we don’t have the beetus,” she had said to me months ago, laughing, even though we both knew it didn’t work that way; even though it wasn’t something really to laugh about. But that was three months ago and it didn’t seem all that funny to me anymore.
I glared at the nurse and said in a growl, “No, I’m not.”
I explained to her that aside from spending the majority of my days in the bathroom and going through three cases of water every week, that I felt perfectly fine, that I was perfectly fine. Still, she turned over my palm, which was already sweating, and proceeded to wipe my finger with an alcohol swab. I had seen my grandfather do this at least 1,000 times and he never even flinched, but I was afraid. Afraid of needles. Afraid of what it was going to feel like. Afraid of what would happen if the number on the little screen wasn’t what it was supposed to be. But the choices I had in the matter had started and stopped the second I had peed in the little plastic cup.
She told me to look away. I did. Then it felt like a bee stung my finger.
That was the first time that anyone had checked my blood sugar. The glucometer read 786.
A “normal” person's blood sugar will sit around 120 to 140, depending on the time of day, what food the person ate, when he or she ate or how active the person has been. After looking at the screen, I realized that I was no longer one of those people. Within 20 minutes, an ambulance was outside of Carter Hall, and I was in a wheelchair, not allowed to walk. Then I was lying on stretcher, staring at a very large needle that was about to be shoved into my arm. That’s the first time that I remember crying.
On March 12, 2013, I found out that I was a statistic. I found out that like 28 million other Americans, I am diabetic. But I am part of the smaller percentile; the Type 1 diabetics, who make up less than 5 percent of the larger number. I guess that makes us different. Different because we can’t just take a pill and make everything better, different because we are almost always under 20 years old, different because we were born this way and for some genetic reason, one day, any random day, our pancreas just will stop producing insulin, just because. How is that for a medical diagnosis?
Our body is betraying us at 20 years old or less “just because.” And this is how it started for me.
“What are you doing with that?” I said, looking at the paramedic with the needle. Eyeliner and mascara ran down my cheeks, staining the sheets I was lying on and my new shirt.
“I’m putting in an IV. It’s just a saline drip. We need to get your glucose levels down. Our meters can’t even read your numbers because they are so high.”
He talked as if he knew what he was doing. I talked as if I knew more than he. It didn’t really hurt but when he asked me, I looked at him and said, “I haven’t ever been stabbed with a needle by a stranger before, so I wouldn’t know if that’s how it was supposed to feel or not.”
That day and the days to come turned out to be a lot of firsts for me. The first time my blood sugar was ever checked, the first time I was ever given an IV, the first that that I had ever ridden in an ambulance, the firs time that I had ever gotten blood work, the first time that I had ever stayed over night in a hospital, the first time I had ever been given insulin, the first time that I had ever been in the ICU, the first time that I had ever resented my body, the first time in my entire life that I was dealt a hand I wasn’t sure that I could handle.
***
It has been almost a year since I was diagnosed and I would be lying if I said it hasn’t been one of the hardest years of my life.
It’s the little things that bother me now, though, more than checking my blood sugar, more than counting carbs, more than giving myself four shots of insulin every single day. Those things are easy for me to deal with because I have to. I don’t have a choice. It is for me a very real life-or-death decision and I have come to terms with that part, the part in which I control my own destiny. My wellbeing resides in a little clear glass jar that sits in my fridge.
If my sugar is too high, I could die. If my sugar drops too low, I could die. If I don’t take care of myself and get a blister on my foot, I may have to have my foot amputated. I’m at a high risk if I would ever choose to have children. It’s a very real disease and it puts a lot of things into perspective for me. I am the only person who can keep my disease under control. No one else can do it for me; not my mom nor my doctor, only me. But that, again, is the easy part. The hard part is dealing with the rest of the world who aren’t diabetics, who don’t understand about being diabetic, who think it isn’t that big of a deal, who think that I became this way because I ate too much candy, which is not true at all.
The hard part is sitting in a restaurant staring directly at a little boy, who is eating an oversized gob, his mouth covered in chocolate crumbs, globs of fluffy white icing smudged into his dimples. I hate him for no other reason than he can eat that dessert without thinking twice and I can’t.
The hard part is sitting in the middle of night class, when the person next to me twists open a bottle of regular pop that I haven’t had one sip of in almost an entire year and having to listen to it fizz. Knowing that this person doesn’t care that there are 64 carbs in a bottle of Mountain Dew, which is over the equivalent of how may carbs I am supposed to have for an entire meal.
The hard part is not being able to carry around the cute Coach purse that my mom bought me for my birthday because all of my diabetic supplies will not fit inside, or not being able to eat the piece of cake with extra icing on my birthday, or not being able to drink a Long Island iced tea when they are on special at my favorite bar.
It’s hard not being able to sleep at night because my blood sugar is too high, or maybe it is too low, and being afraid that I might not wake up. So I just don’t sleep. I take my medicine and prick my finger every hour just to make sure that I don’t have to go to the ER. It’s hard having to continuously stop in the middle of sex to drink a glass of orange juice because my blood sugar has dropped, which completely kills the mood every single time.
But more than all of those little annoyances, the hardest part is having an invisible disease that really isn’t all that invisible. It’s the shaking. A constant quiver, my body stuttering as it is trying to tell me that I need to eat. It’s my legs tingling as if they were asleep, telling me that I have eaten too much. It’s trying to balance a tray of drinks at work when my blood sugar is low and spilling beer on someone because I’m shaking so badly. But I just have to smile, knowing that there is nothing that I can do about it besides apologize for the way my body behaves now.
My disease is not invisible and neither are the looks that people give me when I give myself insulin at a restaurant, or when the page of the book I am holding is shaking in the middle of class when I am trying to read. It isn’t invisible when I take off my shirt and both of my arms are covered in dime-sized bruises because of the shots I give myself every single day. People see me. They see me doing all of these things and they judge me and make assumptions and that hurts more than any shot ever will.
As much as these things annoy me, as frustrating as it is to live they way that I do now, I am grateful above everything else. Being a diabetic has made me humble. It has woken me up and made me realize that it is really the smaller things that matter the most, even when everything else seems to be so important.
I am not the only person living in a world of needles and shots and calloused fingers, and that’s reassuring. I am going to have bad days, the kind of days where I throw my hands up in the air and pretend that my pancreas is working for a day. There have been some days where I don’t check my blood sugar as much as I should and eat whatever I want, even though I know the gravity of that choice.
There are still going to be days when I spend hours and hours looking online at the most recent advancements in medicine: pancreas transplants, contacts that will monitor blood glucose levels, a man-made pancreas that will do what my own won’t anymore. I have days that give me hope that diabetes won’t always be a struggle and that maybe normal isn’t so far away.
For the rest of my life, it will always be the smaller things that matter to me. Since learning I am diabetic, I have come to realize how good the taste of a regular pop is after not drinking one in months and how delicious a Snickers bar is after it is left in the freezer for a few days, or how refreshing an ice cream cone is on one of the hottest days of summer.
I savor the taste of my mom’s homemade noodles on Thanksgiving and her cranberry salad at Christmastime and my Aunt Sandy’s celebratory black and gold cupcakes after the Steelers win a game. I embrace the moments when my sugar drops just low enough that I can indulge in a little bit of who I used to be, of who most of you are, and I enjoy the sweeter side of life for just a little while, when being diabetic is normal. When my new normal really isn’ t so bad.
Taylor Brown is a junior English major with a concentration in journalism at California University of Pennsylvania. Read more about Taylor on her personal blog.