This post may offend or piss off some of you, but it’s how I feel on the subject.
I stumbled upon the Diabetes TalkFest blog today after reading about it in Lemonade Life .
The question is: If, at the time of diagnosis, you could have chosen, would you have chosen diabetes or not?
I was stunned to read that most of the people with D would have chosen it. Stunned? I was fucking gobsmacked. Why?? Why would you choose that??! It seems so selfish.
Every fibre of my being shrieks in disgust and disbelief. Ask your parents what they would have chosen for you. Ask yourselves if you want your kids to have this fucking disease. Ask yourself if you want to go into your child’s room every fucking morning, wondering if they’re going to be alive. Ask yourself if you want to obsess about where your child is and what her blood sugar is and if she has glucose tablets and if someone is with her because what if she passes out on the two-block walk home from her friend’s house? What if no one finds her for an hour? What if, what if, what if?
Watching my daughter worry that she won’t be accepted by her friends, watching her learn to check her own blood sugar when she was five, learning to give herself an injection when she was eight, not letting her sleep at anyone else’s house until this year, when she was eleven, because no one was willing to get up in the middle of the night and check her.
Years of doctors appointments and new regimens and monitoring and worrying and crying. The crying never stops. The worrying never stops.
Yes, I have made some wonderful friends, in real life and online, because of diabetes. I’d give every last one of them up in a heartbeat if it meant my daughter could have lived her life without this disease. I would give up my own life to let my daughter live her life without diabetes.
I hate this disease with a passion and I bust my ass to make sure that Olivia is as healthy and happy as possible. I also don’t let her see how much I fret about her and how I worry about what diabetes is doing to her body. For the most part, she’s a well-adjusted, funny, happy young lady who doesn’t worry too much about diabetes. But a life without it? Abso-fucking-lutely.