Diabetes Blog Week: What I’d Tell The World

As Jess points out, today’s topic for Diabetes Blog Week is: “What is one thing you would tell someone who doesn’t have diabetes about living with diabetes?”

I’ve written before about the impact that diabetes has had on the way I think about food — and that’s a huge aspect of life with diabetes that people don’t really get and which I’d like to share. But that’s just part of something much larger that few people not directly connected to the disease truly understand: the emotional aspects of diabetes. The constant calculating, and estimating, and judgment, and sense of failure when, inevitably, your blood sugars rebel. In other words, the part of diabetes that is invisible, the part that torments you every time you take a bite of food, or feel a familiar trembling, or tuck your diabetic child into bed, or see an unwanted number on your glucometer’s screen.

So many times people react to the visible parts of diabetes — the shots, the finger pricks, the pump tubing. They try to be empathetic.  “Doesn’t that hurt?” they ask. “How many times a day do you have to prick yourself?” 

Before I had diabetes, that would have been my reaction, too — no one likes injections, and the visible parts of diabetes are, after all, unpleasant. But now that I actually have it myself, I don’t care about those superficial aspects. I don’t care about giving myself shots. I don’t care about finger sticks. What I care about is the uncertainty. The inconsistency.  The discipline. The self-hatred. The frustration of never, ever being able to get things totally right.

That, I think, is what I’d most like to communicate to people. That insulin is not a cure; it is a management technique, and a very imperfect one at that. That injections are nothing compared to emotions.  That I would gladly prick my fingers a dozen more times a day, give myself a hundred more shots, if there were any medication that could relieve the constant mental burden of living with this disease. 

So this is what I wish I could tell the world about diabetes: sticking yourself is not the hard part. It’s the emotional toll that hurts the most. 

Catherine Price

Catherine Price (www.catherine-price.com) was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 22 years old. She has written for publications including The Best American Science Catherine Price is a professional journalist who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 22 years old. Her work has been featured in publications including The Best American Science Writing, The New York Times, Popular Science, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Slate, Men’s Journal, Health Magazine, The Oprah Magazine, and Outside, among others. A graduate of Yale and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism

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Catherine Price

Catherine Price was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 22 years old. She has written for publications including The Best American Science Catherine Price is a professional journalist who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 22 years old. Her work has been featured in publications including The Best American Science Writing, The New York Times, Popular Science, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Slate, Men’s Journal, Health Magazine, The Oprah Magazine, and Outside, among others. A graduate of Yale and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism