I'm packing for our move on the 15th and I always go through this period of time where I get really nostalgic because I start packing the books and then I get to the old memorabilia and journals...next thing I know it's been an hour and I'm still on the floor reading and I have been totally oblivious to what has gone on in the past hour. Well, that's me today. I just finished reading my old journals from before my big move to Atlanta and wiping a few tears and feeling a large amount of gratitude for where I am now and where I've come from. I have several journals; I'm a big fan of writing and it's always been how I've vented over the years. I have one from early 2008 to 2009, followed by my longest kept one - 2009 through 2015, chronicling a great deal of my teenage years, from my first big crush, relationship, family issues, a short period of living with my best friend in high school, and the ups and downs of my life through those years. A lot of it I shake my head at and think, "I was a typical shallow/silly teenager" but some of it really hits my heart hard. Reading about the ups and downs is hard - seeing all the ways in which you could have avoided those by recognizing the signs of something bad is hard too. I read through years worth of praying out my frustrations, being naive enough to think I was being supportive of someone who just took advantage of me, being depressed when things were going bad, and being overly hopeful and giddy when things were going good. A roller coaster. I read an entry from early 2014 today - shortly before my life fell apart and spiraled into one of the top 2 hardest years of my life. It was an earnest letter to the person I had loved for years - practice for the conversation where I had to buck up and finally admit that things weren't working and weren't ever going to work. They weren't going to get better by covering them up with fresh apologies and temporary best behavior. They called out the glaring lack of effort, the skewed priorities, the taking advantage of me, despite multiple opportunities to do the opposite - one of the big times in my life where I was truly honest with myself. And while it always hurts to admit things like that to yourself, it's good for growth, isn't it? I think so. A lot of things in my past still haunt me. I don't think they ever go away. Spoiler: I'm even going to counseling to try and talk a lot of it out. It's been apparent to me this year just how much my past has effected the way I handle stressful situations and how I could handle them so much better. It's become apparent how I run and ditch hard things when I sense any "danger". How I lock away my feelings and push everyone away and try and bear burdens on my own. These are hard realizations to make. I want so badly to be the best version of myself I can be, and for years, I've drowned myself in work and more work and told myself that staying busy is the answer to the hard and hurtful things in my life, whether that's relationships, or dad issues, or hurt and frustration over my chronic illness or the feeling of fighting battles alone. That it's the only way to truly feel like I've done something fulfilling and meaningful, even though I know that isn't true. It's resulted in me putting unreasonable and very stressful standards on myself and those around me. It's all part of life to recognize (and hopefully try to fix) these things I suppose...
Anyways, that's all an incredibly long intro to say, I left my Diabetes educator's office on Friday crying big a** alligator tears and almost had to call out of work due to what I think was the closest thing I've ever had to an anxiety attack on Friday. I felt legitimately upset and unstable that day, and the weight of the world felt like a goddamn wrecking ball that someone had just dropped on my head. I don't get like that very often - I'm usually a pretty calm, easy going person. I describe myself as
"the most Type B Type A you'll ever meet" simply because I am very particular about the key things in my life - work, financial stability, my home, and my relationships - but everything else, as far as hobbies, day to day life, traveling, adventure, actually doing things - is usually pretty laid back. I like to mix spontaneity with organization and "wing it" a little more than I should mostly because I get tired and try to juggle too many things at once. One of those things I'm really Type A about is my Diabetes though. For those of you that don't know, I had started working for a company in August who ended up having the building I was working out of bought out by another rehab company. I switched health insurance in a relative rush, and I did the little online survey that recommends a plan based on your health conditions, doctors, and medications. And... I chose that plan. Which seemed totally fine; I had no issues, until I went to the pharmacy last week to buy my insulin and expected the $0 or $25 copay I had been paying.
And heard a sentence I have come to dread so much over the years. "It's $330 for the one insulin, $400 for the other, and $130 for the test strips... do you have a new insurance card?" And found out that all of my insulin will be full price until I meet my pretty high deductible. You can imagine how that felt after spending... let's count... 7 years now stressing about where my insulin is going to come from, and then graduating, feeling like I had made it to the promise land, paying NO copay for my insulin later last year, and then announcing to the whole world that I was going to make the switch to an insulin pump a week ago.
Spoiler: It felt like failure, and it felt like bitter disappoint, disenchantment with life, and cold, hard worry and exhaustion. It felt like I was reliving the 7 years of my life where I struggled every day just knowing that the next month I might not be able to pick up my prescription. It felt like... almost a kind of PTSD, to be frank. Something about the price of insulin legit flips this switch in me that automatically trigger tears and irrational panic every.single.time. Just thinking about everything I've had to go through to crunch things and make ends meet and just make sure that I could baseline survive all these years while putting myself through school. The past 3.5 years especially. They've been... legitimate hell, you know? I've had to use all of my resources to try and get insulin, and it hasn't been easy. And to be honest with you, sometimes it isn't even the going to great lengths to get insulin that is the hard part... it's just the uncertainty. Of not knowing how you're going to pull it off next. There's no stability and comfort in that. There's nothing that feels good about counting the insulin in your fridge to see how long it's going to last you. The uncertainty wears down on you and it makes you feel like everything in the world is against you and no matter how far you come on top, you're always 2 floors down from everyone else because they're healthy and you're stuck with a pancreas that doesn't work and there are some things you can't do because you're sick or that are harder and you can't do anything at all without a drug that is made ungodly expensive by insurance companies and you have to work for the rest of your life to pay for those... sorry. That was a tangent.
But anyways - it hurt. It hurt really bad. And how did I get into this situation? Quite frankly - poor planning. I shouldn't have trusted a website that recommended insurance and said it covered my meds. I should have read the fine print - that it would come out of my deductible with this new company - I only saw the part where I'd pay 20%. I have never had legit health insurance before last August, so a lot of these things I didn't even know to look for. But now I'm here, and I've begged to change my insurance plan, but the only lifeline I have to even give me a sliver of hope at that happening is the appeal form my company is mailing to see if they'll deign to allow me to change partway through the year outside of the enrollment period. Friday I went to an appointment in regards to the insulin pump only a week ago that was supposed to be exciting and thrilling and hopeful - and instead I ran 30 minutes late because it was early and I stayed up too late, then sat in an office with a very understanding woman who wrote down the one per day readings on my meter because I'm still not out of this rut of hating my diabetes and feeling burned out in ways I can't explain and re-remembering how bad of a diabetic I am right now even though last year I promised I'd get better and then looking at the pumps I liked and beginning to have my eyes fill with tears as I tell her, "I don't think I'm going to be able to get it now... not with this insurance." It felt overwhelming because I legitimately think I need the continual glucose monitor and the pump because I am so unmotivated right now and I really want those things to help me get back on track. I want the constant readings to remind me of my sugar. I want the tighter control.
I was overdramatic, but it was that switch again, you see. The one that just gets triggered with the stress of bad insurance and a world of treatments that I can't afford even with a technically "good paying" job now. I still feel like I ended up on the bottom this year. That I'm not any better off than I was last year. And that's hard. Even if it was my fault - due to bad planning and misinformation and not seeking enough information - it's hard.
So I left the office and got in my car and I cried. I asked what was wrong with me. I cursed the forces that be for giving me a disease that has tested every fiber of my being... from physically, to emotionally. Especially emotionally... a disease that I have come to despise so much that I can hardly bring myself to put in the effort to treat it, but a disease that will kill me if I don't. I don't normally get like this, but Friday - I hated it all so much I could hardly stand it. I pulled into the parking lot at work and grabbed a scrunched up napkin from the side of the door to wipe my face and took a deep breath. "You've got to pull it together," I whispered to myself. "You do it because you have to. Even when you don't want to."
And I did. I wiped off my face a final time, put some makeup on my nose that was red from the tears, I swallowed my tears, and I got my ass out of the car and pasted a smile on my face and I drowned myself in the problems of others for 9 hours and then I went home and I didn't cry again.
Because this is the ugly life of having a chronic illness. And the stakes of just a little bad planning are big ones.
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