Diabetes Boundaries

Most of the time, I try to be very discreet when I check my blood sugar in public. It might upset someone to see blood, so I try to keep it discreet. It has come down to me that I should check my blood sugar outside of the mental health organization meeting room. Never mind people picking on me for my height, they pick on me for my disability as well. My diabetes wasn’t caught in time when I was a child. It defied a diagnosis, or somebody simply ignored it. Give or take, I was traumatized by a diabetic coma at ten.

These days, I’m trying to be better friends with the Beast. In order to tame the diabetes dragon, I’m trying to figure out what works. I have been close to sleeping the whole night. I was severely sleep deprived when my pediatric-onset schizophrenia hit at around 12. I was doing caffeine to stay awake, which, may I point out to other sleep-deprived folks, is a bad idea. Inundating yourself with caffeine can make it worse. Adrenal fatigue is another symptom of being under constant stress from dealing with constant conflict. In college, it got pretty bad, because I still wasn’t stable.

Taking care of myself can be hard. I need to make sure my blood sugar stays stable my whole life—daily. I don’t get a vacation from this ever. This is why I’m a writer who works from home, because while I master sleeping the whole night, I need to make sure that I can tolerate working out of the house. Checking my blood sugar is a necessary evil, and I have quite a few calluses on my fingers. Added to that, my healing talent means I can heal a bruise quite quickly. I can heal a bruise in short order.

I can also heal my finger sticks, although antibiotics help that endeavor a lot. My hard site area that went bad is now totally healed and it’s only been a few days. I witness fast healing sometimes that I wish I had a time lapse camera for. I try to be really discreet and the insulin pump helps with this quite a bit. as it is very low profile. I had to inject at the bus stop because I was 379 mg/dl and I freaked out at air bubbles in my tubing because I was fiddling all OCD-like with my reservoir, which is the device the insulin goes into.

I once was scolded by a student at the Mountain View YMCA for treating my low. I was 49 mg/dl after yoga, so I chugged glucose tablets during the yoga pose, shavasana. My yoga teacher did tell me I was discreet and nobody else was bothered by me treating the low, so why did this person want me to die if I didn’t treat the low right then? My only emergency at the YMCA was my kneecap popping out of joint and my fractured tibia. I did not let my diabetes ever become an emergency.

Don’t be mean to disabled people, because they have to take care of themselves. I try to make sure I eat something when I need to eat, and take insulin when I need to take insulin. If I go back on shots, sometimes I use too much discretion and I don’t take a shot when I eat because I worry about frightening people. Today I have decided to stay home in order to get writing done since it will be raining all day without a break. Saturday I can go pick up my prescriptions and go to the library.