What Do You Call Your Diabetes?

As my friends know, I am a huge dork — especially when it comes to language. Thanks to some excellent middle and high school Latin teachers (and subsequent stints as a Latin teacher myself), I have an obsessive need to break down words into their roots. Did you know, for example, that spiro is Latin for “breathe” — and is the root for words like inspire (to breathe into), expire (to breathe out), conspire (to breathe together) and perspire (to breathe through)? Did you know that limin is Latin for threshold, and so a subliminal message is a message that slips under the threshold? Did you know that cras means “tomorrow,” and thus “procrastinate” literally means to make for tomorrow? I could go on. Point being, I love language, and I spend way too much time thinking about words.

I bring this up because of a response I got for my essay last week about living with Type 1. A reader commented that she did not refer to herself as having diabetes because she thinks it contributes to people’s confusion between Type 1 and Type 2. As she explained, “Since most people hear diabetes and automatically think of Type 2 diabetes (a true metabolic disease of insulin resistance), by mentioning diabetes, you are in fact causing some of the confusion.” Instead, she prefers not to mention that she has diabetes, or to call it by a different name — she suggests autoimmune insulin deficiency.

I’m interested to hear what people think about this. I’m very open with the fact that I have diabetes, and I’m also very aggressive in explaining to people the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 (and I don’t hold people’s confusion against them — why would you know the difference if you didn’t have diabetes?). I agree that it’d be nice if the diseases had more descriptive names, given that their causes are quite different — but at the end of the day, the results and complications of the two diseases are pretty much the same.  That makes it hard to come up with a good name — especially since most Americans don’t know what insulin is to begin with. (By the way, the word insulin comes from the Latin insula, meaning islands, in reference to the clusters of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.)

So while I understand the reader’s concern, I feel like creating a different name for my disease might actually add to the public’s confusion about diabetes (also, if you shorten “autoimmune insulin deficiency syndrome,” you get AIDS — not really the direction I’d be going for).

Besides, I kind of like the name diabetes. Its full name is diabetes mellitus, which is made from the Greek words for  “sweet” and “siphon” (the mellitus part is the same root as mellifluous, or the French word for honey, miel). You know, like you’ve got lots of sugar in your blood so you start peeing all the time to try to siphon it out? This may sound weird, but I think that’s kind of nice.

On a separate note, I was looking at my cottage cheese container this morning — my new breakfast of choice, which happens to be much easier to deal with than plain Greek yogurt — and noticed that its label said that it was “made from the milk of human kindness.” I don’t even know what to think about this. Is it a mixed metaphor? A Shakespeare reference? Or just weird ad copy? Regardless, it kind of grossed me out.

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