Diabetes and Me

Today I went for a run. I don’t particularly enjoy the act of running, but what I do enjoy is running’s side effects. It drains you physically, but more importantly to me at least it tires your brain, the cog that churns unnecessary, fragmented thoughts that don’t get you anywhere. It’s as though someone were pressing mute on a really loud television program. Instead, I find running channels my energies into something more focused and directional, and so, this morning whilst I was killing myself panting and puffing in front of the school run crowds like a tracksuit-bottom wearing zombie, I happened to start thinking about myself and Diabetes. Me and my greatest foe. Diabetes, the bastard.

I like to trivialize the illness, not because it makes me feel better, but because that’s the sort of mind I have. I don’t think in a calculated, mathematical manner. People ask me all the time ‘What’s the science behind diabetes?’ They are naturally curious, and they naturally assume I’d know the answer because I am well acquainted with Diabetes, five-years-well-acquainted, and I naturally try and give the best explanation I can, because I do feel obligated to educate people on the matter, to a certain extent. But truthfully, I don’t know much about the Science, not much more than the next person. That’s not entirely true. There was that one time in a GCSE exam with a whole set of questions on the Diabetes, questions which to me equated to the easiness level of ‘what’s one add one?’ I had a lot of fun bragging about that once we’d left the exam hall, I can tell you.

No, what I’d really tell someone about myself and Diabetes is this: ‘it’s a game’. Not a pretty game, not at all: filled with injections and blood sugar testing and glucose tablets and visits to hospital. But it is a game nonetheless, and I suppose it’s this element of Diabetes that I am an expert on. I have to be an expert on. And here’s why…

I am sat in a vacant, bare office at Wycombe hospital, newly diagnosed and being taught the ropes. Across from me is this overtly happy Doctor, a plump woman with gleaming wide eyes like slick fried eggs and a worryingly shrill voice, as though she were on the verge of mental breakdown. I only capture fragments of what she’s saying, so dazed and confused as I am. ‘Now, Finley darling, there are just a few consequences to badly controlled diabetes’, she says with so many up-and-down inflections to her voice it’s like she’s recounting a messed-up fairytale. ‘Here are just a few. Blindness. Amputated feet and legs. Oh, and it can lessen your immune system so you could be more likely to attract illness and infection.’ And so on.

This is why I’m an expert on Diabetes. The game aspect of it, as it was.

As I was running this morning, composing part of what you’re reading now, I saw a bespectacled boy cycling on his way to school. My minds eye turned the bicycle into a broomstick for no particular reason at all, and then suddenly I was distracted by thoughts of Harry Potter. I’m telling you, for the main part running filters out the rubbish, but clearly Harry Potter, boy wizard, had slipped the net. Harry Potter and Diabetes, I thought, that’s a really weird combo. I get thinking about what character Diabetes would be, for no particular reason, and I initially think of Voldemort. No, cancer is Voldemort, I argue, taking swathes of lives for no purpose than pure suffering. And then it comes to me: Peeves the poltergeist, who wrecks havoc around Hogwarts, is Diabetes. He teases, manipulates, deceives, annoys. He doesn’t go so far as to kill, like Voldemort, but nonetheless he is an inevitable pain in the wand.

So there it is, people: Peeves is Diabetes.

I’ve never been to a funeral and had the inappropriate urge to laugh, but I almost did when I was first diagnosed. It’s all a bit like a Hollywood movie, in which you get to be the main protagonist for the day. Very odd. I was around thirteen at the time, I think.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Close-up There’s me with a Doctor bent at the knee, telling you The Big News, looking right into my eyes, cue violin music and then, CUT!, a pan of all the empty beds in the ghastly kids ward, and then there’s me, right at the end.

Nurse 1: You’re underweight I’m afraid and in quite a bad state, but no worries, look on the bright side, you were caught fairly early on, most people wind up here in an ambulance unconscious! 

Voiceover- the character Finley’s internal monologue: So when do I get my medal and certificate, eh?! Plus, don’t ever say ‘no worries’ again.

The end

I do complain a lot about the NHS these days but, to be honest, they were great with me back then. The truth is, though, I wanted to get back to normality. I, as I expect most people do, hate hospitals, despise the places, and I just wanted to get back into the realm of normal, whatever that means. So I have to take injections, so what? I’d tell myself.

And so, with that track of thought in mind, I did something the Doctors weren’t really confident about, which was to go on the Boys’ Brigade Summer Camp. The Boys’ Brigade is fairly similar to the Scouts, a group with a Christian emphasis on it which I’d been a part of since forever. The camp was a week down near the coast somewhere, in a muddy, rainy field with activities and things like that. Perhaps not the best environment to get to grips with Diabetes, without parental supervision, I imagine some Doctor bigwig saying. But I had to go, was going to go, in spite of what any professional advice stipulated. I had a great time. It wasn’t the old normal per se, it wasn’t like previous camps because of course, I didn’t even know what Diabetes was back then, but at least it involved playing football, larking about with friends, laughter. In the fields of Swanage that week, I felt far, far detached from white-washed hospital buildings and knowledge and information being stuffed into my head. I was so glad I’d made the decision to go.

Even now people I’ve known for years come up to me and say, ‘I never knew you had diabetes!’ I laugh, because here’s another thing you learn as someone with diabetes: you can inject yourself, out and about, in a café or in the school library or wherever it may be, and nobody ever notices. Diabetes has never, ever been a secret I’ve had to hold from anybody, but I’ve never made a big song or dance over it either. I don’t like seeking out attention, nor does attention like seeking out me, so it’s a win-win of sorts. So anyway, whenever someone puts two and two together, it’s always quiet amusement rather than fear. And so on.

On my run, I recalled quite a particular moment in time. I refer to Diabetes as a game, and what that really infers is the balancing act someone with Diabetes has to perform, all the time, 24/7: the level of sugar in your bloodstream has to constantly be within 4% and 6%. If you go any lower or much higher, then that spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E, but it can still have rather amusing effects. You see, I remember this time for a while after the initial diagnosis, up until the point of Sixth Form, when I hung out with this group of guys at school. Testosterone-riddled adolescents, nobody escaped humiliation and mockery, it was all a part of the fun and games. For instance, they’d see me head off to the medical room one lunchtime and call out, ‘Off to go and take a hit of heroine?’ and I’d change my walk, acting all stoner-like, stumbling about and breathing heavily. That description still doesn’t sound too far off how I was like running this morning. Ha. Anyway, they’d laugh. I’d laugh. I definitely believe in finding the humour in the subjects you wouldn’t assume to be a humour goldmine. Take Joan Rivers, the comedian, a master of black humour, who has only recently passed on. I think, since I’ve known Diabetes, I have definitely learnt not to take matters to seriously, and to sometimes point and laugh at yourself. It’s healthy, try it.

‘That stuff is too good!’ I’d shout out, walking back toward the group.

There’s a pleasant breeze as I write this, and the dogs have given up yapping at some invisible entity they can detect through the front window. I have even recovered from my run, thank goodness. I wonder how the game will evolve later on in life. I feel like currently I have a good grasp of things, but I know fate often takes pleasure in chucking a few curveballs. Some unwanted surprises, here and there. Maybe a wanted surprise will come along; one of these miracle treatments they’re always purporting on the News will actually come to fruition, and call time on our acquaintance, me and Diabetes. That would be pleasant, but for now I feel as though Diabetes has very little precedence on my life and the things I’m able to do.

I hope that continues. And so on.