I never thought I’d be a blogger. I have some experience with WordPress but not a lot. All the options around formatting give me brain-freeze. So that’s why I don’t do anything fancy with my layout. I guess that’s the journalist in me — let the words do the talking.
You know how it’s easier to talk to a stranger about personal stuff than it is your close friends? That’s the benefit of blogging. Friends mean well but they tend to feel they need to jump in with a reality check. Or they want to tell me about their diabetic husband who can eat treats with no ill effect. Or, worse, they just go silent and slowly shake their heads. Kind of makes me want to re-evaluate my friendships.
I have good friends who deftly divert around the message and laud me with praise for my writing ability. Does it mean they didn’t understand what I’m saying? Or maybe they feel they need to provide me with answers about the questions I raise, and come up empty. So go for the praise, instead. I find it annoying.
Look, I know I’m a good writer. It’s one of the few things I do well. Housecleaning isn’t one of those things. Communication is a priority for me, and it may be the result of an early childhood where I had a lot to say but no one listened. Whatever the reason, I had the ability to write clearly from early on. I was fortunate to find a job writing which allowed me to hone my craft over the years.
This tendency to come up with answers is something I’m all too familiar with, having been raised by a family where everyone had answers but few questions. Conversations consisted of statements. “What really is going on is this…” Lots of over-talking. No room for musing or wondering.
So as you might imagine, I’m grateful for you who read my words and don’t jump in with your own answers. Maybe you trust I know my body. Maybe I’ve captured you with my ability to tell a story. However you got here, and whether you feel a “like” is warranted or if you silently creep in and out, I appreciate your presence. I can sense readers being here, even if you don’t make yourself known.
It does take a fair amount of courage to talk about this stuff. I despaired about coming out as a faster, fearing an onslaught of judgment. So I took care to explain why I felt fasting was my only option, and hopefully you got it. I then moved on to talking about the amount of insulin I inject, a subject for which I judge myself fairly harshly. But as it turns out, the sad fact is many diabetic people need much more of the stuff than I do.
Yesterday I got a message from the lab to come in for tests. The endocrinologist wants to check in with me. This is the guy who, in the spring, recommended I return to Lantus in addition to the short-term insulin I use. He waved off my concerns about weight gain and suggested it was just water returning to my cells. I gained a ton. Thanks, bud. Now I’m trying to figure out if I want to talk to him again, since the spring appointment put me into a three-day glucose reaction. I felt I hadn’t been heard. No doctor wants to hear a patient diagnosing themselves, especially with some crazy shit like “emotional diabetes.”
Do I need to do this? He’ll get paid by the government for telling me I’m actually a Type 1 who needs multiple kinds of insulin. He won’t listen to me. My comments will get no response, just his over-talking me with his truth.
It takes me back to a time when I had no voice. And now I know I have a voice, but some people still won’t hear me. It makes sense that I’m having difficulty deciding whether I want to expose myself to an authoritarian doctor. I’ve found that doctors classify patients like me as difficult. In fact, we just know our bodies better than the doctors do.
I was just reading another blogger with diabetes, and she’s in a different world from me. She echoes my early doctors on how to inject the correct amount of insulin and all will be fine. In most people with the disease, food is the only thing that raises glucose. Exercise brings glucose down. I remember being so confused early at how my body didn’t respond to common diabetic situations. I was completely lost and scared.
Now I have great sympathy for my younger self. I understand that I had anxiety and food skewing my glucose levels. Anxiety prevents me from bringing glucose down with exercise. When I suggested to family doctors that I may have an anxiety issue, they referred me to specialists. And specialists don’t want to hear anything other that what they learned about in medical school some forty years ago.
So I’m thinking I’ll put the endo on hold for now. I’m about to move onto a new home-based job. I’ve got a lot on my plate.
Again, thanks for reading.
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