A Question of Fate

07/15/08 General

I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in November of ’91. The summer and fall before my diagnosis I was afflicted with a different disorder: germ phobia. I washed my hands incessantly and would not touch food unless I believed my hands were clean. Even then, I’d have to use a utensil or napkin as a buffer between my mouth and the supposed germs crawling about the skin on my hands.

I do not know what precipitated this odd behavior, but looking back on it makes me wonder if it is related to my diabetes. Was I somehow, unconsciously preparing my body for the lifetime of food issues to come? Or worse, did my neuroses and subsequent actions alter my immunity, thus igniting the response that destroyed my pancreas? In short, was I somehow fated to this life?

I know I cannot definitively answer the question, but considering the possible answer is intriguing. Why would a normal adolescent male refuse to touch food? My sole purpose was to stay away from germs, and by virtue, stay healthy. I felt as if my hands were not only dirty on the skin but also on the cellular level. In my mind, something was wrong with them and they would never be clean enough. Therefore, I scrubbed like a surgeon, but still refused to touch anything that was to enter my mouth, because somehow I felt to do so would bring about tragedy.

The summer passed, turned to fall, and with the dying flora, I became sick. My diligence fell away, seemingly overnight. I distinctly recall going to the bathroom to wash up for the thousandth time, only to feel the heaviness to my body, to look up and see the washed out pallor to my face. I knew then that I was ill and that my ridiculous obsessive-compulsiveness had failed. Little did I realize to what extent.

After I accepted my diabetes I started asking questions about it. However, the response to “Why?” shook me: It’s an autoimmune disorder. For some reason, when you got a cold, your body went to fight it and saw your pancreas as foreign, and attacked it as well. I then considered two explanations of my own: I had known something was coming, so I tried to prepare, tried to stay healthy, but failed. Or, I was fine all along, until I started with the germ phobia, and that altered my immunity because I made everything too clean, too sterile, too unnatural. Either way I addressed it, this was my fate.

And so it is. Today, I don’t know if my theories are even remotely plausible, but they obviously still linger in my mind. I cannot escape the question of fate.

Eric Devine, 30, has lived with type 1 diabetes since he was 12. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two daughters where he works as a high school English teacher. Devine is an avid writer and is currently seeking publication of two Young Adult novel manuscripts.