Waffles.
From the moment I spied the oversized white cardboard box on my doorstep, I knew exactly what was waiting for me. How appropriate, I thought,…
It’s been just over a year since my Celiac disease sentence was handed down. And while I’m more adjusted than I was last January, I’m still feeling…
From the outside, it’s easy to assume that diabetes is a numbers thing. Eat this much food, give this much insulin, exercise this many minutes, aim…
When you live with diabetes for a given amount of time, your mind is always on the lookout for those secret clues – the signals from other people that remind you you’re not alone in the world. Even when you don’t realize it.
And while my options for eating out at restaurants are more limited, my tendency for self-pity is not. All it takes is a stroll past a person enjoying a sandwich or a normal beer, and I spiral into an irrational mixture of despair, rage and hunger.
I once heard the mother of a child with diabetes express her disgust with the word “bolus.” As it turns out, a bolus is “a small rounded mass of a substance, especially of chewed food at the moment of swallowing.” A mouthful of chewed-up pizza at the back of your throat, basically.
If you use an insulin pump or multiple daily injections to treat your diabetes, you’ve probably heard of (or performed) basal rate testing. It’s…
During my senior year in high school, I once made the tragic mistake of leaving my purse on my car while I drove out of the campus parking lot. Whoever found that purse and turned it into lost and found (thank you, former classmate!) uncovered a satchel filled with loose insulin syringes and half-full tubes of cake icing, my preferred low treatment at the time.
People who don’t know much about diabetes (and who like to get all up in other people’s business) might express their concern about the effects of sugary foods on your health. Little do they know that pizza has always been the real enemy. There’s something about that magical combination of grease, protein, carb-y crust, lactose and tomato sauce that can destroy your blood sugar for hours.
“But you’re not fat.” Thank you so much for the keen evaluation of my overall well-being based on modern society’s perceptions of weight and health issues! Two things, though: a) One’s weight is not a sole determining factor in the development of any sort of diabetes. There are genetic and other environmental factors to consider, and there are roughly a bajillion people who have diabetes and do not look like what you think people with diabetes look like.