My Other Life

07/01/08 Type I Diabetes or Juvenile Diabetes

I realize that I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking and writing about diabetes. Most with this disease do not pause and reflect on the details that make up our daily life. Does this remove me from the rest of the “diabetes” community, or add to my uniqueness within it? Either way, I’m different, and I believe that is largely due to having known a different life.

I remember being a carefree child and adolescent, eating ice cream sundaes in the summer, endless desserts at the holidays, and candy in all its bountiful forms whenever I felt the urge. I also remember the stark difference when such food selection became off limits. This double life has caused a fair amount of self-loathing, guilt, and shame. It is not as if at 12 years old, I suddenly stopped eating such decadent treats altogether. No, I just wasn’t supposed to, or want to. Yet I distinctly remember eating a giant-sized Reese’s peanut butter cup a year into my diagnosis, reasoning that the carbohydrate exchange was the same for the healthy snack I was supposed to eat. The resulting glucose reading revealed a different story. I have also swiped a few slices of pie over the holidays and some ice cream during the swelter of summer, but the delicacies have never tasted as sweet as when there wasn’t a price tag attached. I have paid for the choices with anger and shame at broken willpower and, ultimately, resentment at my undeserved situation.

Simple matters, like sleeping in or skipping a meal or a late night snack became impossible maneuvers. Before I began pump therapy, I was up every morning at 7 a.m., weekday, weekend, 365 days a year. Waking up on Christmas morning because you need your medication is far less alluring than rising from the anticipation. Before diabetes, my parents used to have dinner on the table by 6 p.m., or so. Once I acquired the illness, dinner was served at promptly 5:30, every day, so that I didn’t end up in a clammy heap waiting for the meal my insulin was tied to. There was no deviation to the schedule and no fun additives like the late night pizza to accompany a family movie.

In the end, handling diabetes boils down to a generalized level of discomfort. It is much like looking at pictures and yearning for a time that is forever gone. The life I was forced into, and by extension, my family had to support, was not awful, or horrific or tragic, like so many other childhood diseases create. Diabetes just made it difficulty and laborious at times, forcing me to live in a separate life to the one I had previously known.

I continue to exist in this unique perspective with my memories and my condition. There is no complaint, because it could always be worse. There’s only a steadfast reverence for how it used to be, what it became, how it is now, and how the mixture makes me who I am.

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.