It makes you lose weight. Well, sort of. When you picture Diabetes, it seems almost counter-intuitive to think that. You think of sugar and the obesity epidemic and it doesn't seem like that would mesh with weight loss at all. Would it?
Insulin is so great because prior to it, diabetes - type 1, anyways - was a virtual death sentence. Kids would be ordered on bed rest with 200-400 calorie a day diets, while they wasted away slightly less slowly because they weren't taking in any carbs. The carbs that break down into sugar, unable to get inside of cells to give the body energy, caused the body to burn anything else it had for energy. They would waste away until there was nothing left for their body to burn, skeletons of who they once were.
They called it "starving in the midst of plenty".
I have done a lot of research on Diabetes over the years. They always said to choose research projects and topics that you found interesting, and Diabetes was something I always wanted to know more about. Diabetes was something I could talk about. Educate about. Learn something else about.
That's how I learned about Diabulimia.
(Wait, is that a made up word? No. See the above link). It's not a made up word. It's a new term, not yet recognized as a medical or psychiatric condition. But I found it important as soon as I learned about it. Why? Because diabetes effects a lot of teens. Insulin makes it easy to gain weight. And I know this condition can effect many a person with T1D, especially young women. And the concept of purposely witholding insulin for weight loss seemed crazy to me. But it made so much sense. You see, chronic illness is hard. It's impossibly hard. I probably don't need to tell any of you that.
Invisible chronic illnesses are hard in ways that noninvisible illnesses may not be. Why? Because people brush them off. They don't take you seriously. They don't see the waking up low in night sweats and shakes at night. Crawling to the kitchen for food. Feeling low in the middle of talking to people and having your world just zero in on how awful you feel while you try to find the least obvious way to take care of your low and still let life go on. The cotton mouth from the highs. Trying your hardest to make your blood sugar great but still failing... the bruises... the insulin injections... the pharmacy bills... feeling as though no one understands but yourself and others like you. Feeling, even if just a little bit, isolated from humanity because of an illness you never asked for. Feeling cheated out of something you should have had (such as a healthy pancreas). Diabetes is hard too, because of the stigma. Did they cause it themselves? Their A1C is high. They're noncompliant. It's because they're lazy. Clearly they're trying to kill themselves. They just don't try hard enough.
You don't try hard enough.
You.
Aren't.
A.
Good.
Enough.
Pancreas.
Even though you should have had one that worked in the first place. Even though you never get a break... ever. I even did a presentation on diabulimia once. "The eating disorder no one knows about."
What point am I trying to get at here? That... you'll rarely, if ever, see anyone with a chronic illness that doesn't have some kind of underlying mental issues because of it. Myself included.
I would like to say that I would never purposely skip insulin as a coping mechanism or to lose weight or hurt myself in some way. I'd like to say that, as a healthcare professional especially, who sees the result of not caring for your diabetes almost everyday in patients of my own, that I know better.
This would all be a lie though. A couple months back, I wrote a blog post about how, at my lowest, I weighed 93 pounds because I purposely worked out and restricted my diet to 600 calories a day. I'd be lying if I didn't say that things like that - even if you recognize you have a problem - are still disorders, or problems, of some sort, and they stick with you. Forever. In the back of your head. Diabetes wasn't always the hardest transition for me diet-wise because I was already eating healthy in the first place. My past history and love/hate relationship with food has always remained with me.
I fell into a couple of difficult months this past/last year due to life - and I'll admit, part of my coping mechanism was not caring for my diabetes properly. Just not caring. Not giving insulin for this, or not counting it right, or waiting until the next morning to correct, or forgetting to give insulin for hours, or going a day without checking my blood sugar...I just stopped caring. I did it on purpose for 2 weeks. "To lose 5 lbs. Then I'll be done." And then I tried to fix it, but 2 weeks turned into burnout. "I'm tired of this disease anyways... I'm over it." 2 weeks turned into months of burnout... and then I tried to fix my levels. But I just couldn't seem to get them back to normal. It turned into months of horrible control that I never meant to happen... all because I wanted to lose a few pounds.
That's why going to the doctor was important for me last week. I guess I needed that talk. "Those levels are deadly," I remember him saying, holding up my glucometer with the number "436" flashed on it from the night before. I had burst into tears. I knew they were deadly. This disease was deadly. To your body. Your health. Your happiness, sometimes.
Sometimes, you just get tired. Or you get upset. Sometimes you do dumb things to lose 5 pounds. Sometimes you slip up and your best efforts seem like they get you no where...
You're human. It's going to happen. I'm human.
But I knew I needed to change. Not giving insulin is stupid. Not trying is just as stupid. Yes, Diabetes, managing it properly, takes a lot of effort. It sucks some days. But you know what else sucks? Not just being cheated out of a health pancreas, but a healthy rest of your life. And I don't want to be cheated out of that.
Anyways, I guess the purpose of this post is just to say that I've learned a lot about myself in the past few months. It's not easy to share my struggles, but I hope it can be used for a purpose. I've gotten burnout, recovered, and I'm back on the road to trying to manage my Diabetes well again. But for all the people out there, that also struggle with diabetes - or hell, with something - any problem - I write this because... I think it's important to understand that it's never just a matter of "oh well, you've got things under control now though, right?" People always ask me that and I hate that question because diabetes isn't static. And no problems are static. It's always a careful scale, a balance, that you have to create...and work hard to maintain. And no one has it all down perfect. You're going to slip up. Hey, I slip up. It's a constant journey, a give and take, and you're going to burnout and want to give up sometimes, but you need those moments to come along and snap you back into feeling ready to push through again. It's not easy. And you can spend a lot of time feeling upset at yourself for messing up or not doing things right, and dwell on the negatives, sure. But I think if you realize that we all as humans struggle too, with all our own problems... then hey. It's going to be okay. You're going to make it through this. Maybe a little more beat up than before, but you'll have learned something and come back stronger for next time. Keep on pushing on, or waiting for those moments to give you the shove you need to push again. Don't give up. Persevere.
Even when I go through rough times, which I am apt to do... I'll always keep trying to do this. Persevere. I hope it will make me a strong and wise woman when I am older. And, I hope I will be a healthy one, for having learned the hard lessons now that I need to take care of myself, no matter how hard the struggle. We're all learning more, each and every day. Embrace it. Mistakes and all.
Great post Lacy. Thanks for Sharing...
ReplyDelete