BRIDGET MCNULTY
My Diabetes Story
I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes on the 12th of October 2007, three weeks (almost to the day) after the book launch for my first novel.
Quite an eventful month, that.
In retrospect, it’s amazing to me that the diagnosis took so long. The months before that day are a little blurry (one of the symptoms of undiagnosed diabetes is mental confusion), but a few distinct memories stick out. I remember going out for dinner and eating a massive hamburger, and then coming home and needing to eat more. I remember a constant, gnawing hunger that never seemed to leave me, even at night. I remember being thirsty all the time, even, it seemed, as the water was in my mouth, and waking up in the middle of the night with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I remember being thin. Ugly thin, painful, bone-jutting thin. And I remember a feeling of bewilderment and fear, as the body that I had trusted implicitly for 25 years seemed to stop doing what it was supposed to, presenting me with a myriad of unexplainable symptoms.
Of course, there was an explanation for them, and a pretty straightforward one at that: diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is genetic, but not hereditary (one cousin out of twenty has it, my parents both have a perfectly functioning pancreas). Doctors aren’t quite sure what causes it, but they think it’s a combination of two or more immunological insults (also known as viruses). And although it usually presents itself in children (around the age of nine to twelve), it can show up any time before you’re 30. I was 25 when I was diagnosed.
At first, of course, the diagnosis seemed like a death sentence. This could have had something to do with the dramatic circumstances surrounding it – I was rushed home from Cape Town to Durban, and checked into ICU before I had a chance to take a breath of Durban air. My doctor, the least dramatic person I know, told me that had I waited another day or two I would have been in a diabetic coma. And I spent the next 5 days in hospital, trying to come to grips with this lifelong condition that was now mine. Diabetes, in my mind, did not happen to people like me. It happened to thin, pale, sickly kids, or overweight older people, not to someone like me. I was a baker! I held tea parties! How was I going to have a sugar-free tea party?
Once I returned home from hospital, I started reading up on diabetes. Warning after warning echoed in my mind – uncontrolled sugar leads to heart failure, kidney failure, blindness and amputation. If your sugar is high it will mess up your circulation, your cholesterol and your life. The message was pretty clear: Be In Control.
Luckily, I’ve always been a bit of a control freak (in a positive way, of course!) Once I’d jumped the first major hurdle of finding a dietician who could tell me what to eat, things started falling into place, piece by piece. I was put on an amazing carbohydrate-counting diet, which meant that as long as I counted everything I ate and took the right amount of insulin for it, I could eat pretty much anything (in moderation, of course). I had the advantage of already eating healthily – wholegrains, fresh fruit, and vegetables have always been a part of my life, so it wasn’t too dramatic an adjustment. And then, slowly, bit by bit, I learnt how to be diabetic. I learnt that injecting Apidra insulin before meals and Lantus insulin at night before bed is essential. I learnt to check my blood sugar two hours after eating, or any time I felt funny. I learnt about highs, and lows. I learnt to always carry something sugary on me in case of a low. I learnt how to balance exercise with food, and how to maintain a steady release of sugar into my system. Slowly, slowly, I started coming back to life.
And now? Now I joke that I’m the world’s best diabetic. Most days, diabetes doesn’t infringe on my life at all. I eat well, I go for long walks every day, I’m vigilant about insulin and testing, and I feel really well, most of the time. I’m extraordinarily lucky in a number of ways: I think it’s a lot easier to stick to an eating plan when you’re old enough to understand why it’s important. Medicine has advanced so much over the past few years, and my insulin is as close to human insulin as possible, which has gone a long way towards helping me adjust so easily. And I have a wonderful partner whose brother is diabetic, so he understands the ins and outs, ups and downs, and constant vigilance of the condition.
Of course, I still have bad days. I have days of unexplained highs or lows, when I have to chalk it up to that mysterious thing called ‘hormones’. I have days when having to be anal about when I eat, or carry juice with me wherever I go is pretty awkward. I have days when I don’t feel 100% well. And, to be honest, I have days when the thought of having a lifelong condition feels like a long time… when the constant monitoring and injecting and correcting feels like trying to stay afloat on a barrel in the sea.
But these days pass. And when they do, I am left with a feeling of profound gratitude – that I have this vibrant, healthy body (that just so happens to have a non-functioning pancreas) and that I have all the tools in the world to ensure it stays that way.
