A few personal thoughts.

Yesterday was World Diabetes Day, a fact that totally passed me by. How’s that for an admission? I write a diabetes blog, and I missed our big day. And really, I’m not entirely sure what I was supposed to do, other than promote awareness of the disease. I assume that I’m not actually supposed to be promoting the disease itself, although that might be kind of fun, too. (“Come on, fatty, just have one ice cream sandwich! What’s it going to hurt? Well, you know, besides YOU…”)

I was standing in line yesterday at the university where I work, waiting to get a salad (which before the Beedies, I always referred to as “what food eats”) and a smoothie made with Splenda, and I heard two guys behind me talking.

“Yeah, I think lunch today is going to be a Crunch bar and a Snickers,” one of them said.

“Wow, really?” his friend said. “Does that mean you took too much insulin or something?”

My ears perked up, and I turned to see the two guys, both of whom were young and skinny and healthy looking.

“Maybe,” he said. “My blood sugar levels just get crazy sometimes and I have to have some sugar or I’ll pass out. It just happens.”

I smiled at him. “Type 1?” I asked. He nodded warily.

“Type 2,” I said, and while his friend had no idea what was going on, this guy and I both shared a little chuckle, like we were members of a secret club.

When I got my salad, he laughed. “Type 1’s a lot scarier,” he said, “but at least I get to have candy when I screw up.”

The thing to remember about diabetes is that the mainstream media lazily paints a picture of us all as either fat and irresponsible or sickly and broken, injecting our daily insulin shots with trembling hands. The reality is that we are everywhere, and we are not all the same. We are little kids and we are athletes and we are writers and we are college students. When you (well, not YOU, but the great You of the World) minimize the impact our disease has on society because we somehow “deserve” it or are at the very least responsible for our own sufffering, you are missing the reality of diabetes, as well as how hard most of us work just so we can walk through the world without looking or feeling sick.

When my a1c dropped below 7, I stopped wearing my medic alert tag everywhere I went, instead only wearing it when I travel alone without friends or family with me. Maybe that was irresponsible, but I was sick of telling the world I was sick. When I was told that I was now officially “under control”, I celebrated by putting the Beedies in my pocket.

I am a diabetic. That’s my reallity. But I have to say, I don’t mind surprising people with that fact every so often. And I’m going to continue to lose weight and eat healthy and maybe even exercise every now and then, because when someone says “Oh, wow, you have diabetes? I never would have guessed,” I suppose I ought to be insulted somehow, but instead I just think Sweet…

So much for World Diabetes Day.