My diabetic story

I have type one diabetes. It sucks. It’s constant upkeep and it’s never going away. There’s no cure, only a treatment that I have to use all the time. The shitiest part is that I don’t give myself credit. I always say that it ‘could be worse’ or that ‘I should be thankful it’s this and not something else’. But fuck that. I have a shitty disease, I have it worse than what a lot of people go through, and I deserve credit for the work I have to put into it.

I remember that it used to always be a comfort to me that I was unlikely to get some bad disease. Whenever I heard that someone had cancer or MS or any other disease, even if it wasn’t life-threatening I was grateful that I didn’t have it and when I would worry about me getting a disease like that I would say that the odds are that I wouldn’t. I even told myself this after my diagnosis.

One night I was lying in bed worrying about what if I got sick with something that could affect me for the rest of my life. Then I thought the line that I always think when I worry about what might happen, ‘the odds of you getting a disease like that are very low.’ and I realized that I had gotten a disease like that. I realized how much I have to do just to maintain what others do naturally. Anger swelled up inside of me and I was so mad that my parents acted like it was no big deal. Like we're all equal like we all have the same amount of stress and work to do. All I could think was about the times I got tired of testing my blood or wearing my pump and my parents said they understand. How could they Understand? I was a child with a disease and they made me think that this amount of stress and worry was normal!

Whenever someone said how hard that must have been one me or that they were sorry I would act like it was a good thing. Like I ge perks from it or that I was a part of some special club but having diabetes is a major stressor in my life.

I can’t do some things that others can. I can’t join the military, I can’t be too far from a hospital and when I was a kid I couldn’t go to an overnight camp that didn’t have a medical staff or my parents. The only camp I could go to was camp Leo and for the first few years, I loved it.

In my school, I was the only type one diabetic. In over 1000 kids I was the only one. The kids at the camp complained about being the only one in their grade while the first summer I went there it was the first time I had met anyone my age with type one diabetes.

Having diabetes was a very lonely thing for me. Not one of my friends could relate or even try to understand really and every time I wanted to talk about it I would feel terrible because they also had some shitty stuff going on and it felt wrong for me to burden them with my problems.

Being at that camp made me feel so happy that it made me sad. I realized that I didn’t really like the people around, in fact, I had better friends in a different cabin, ones I didn’t talk too much, it was the feeling of understanding that I loved. It was all of us having this disease that I could talk about and ask questions. I was diagnosed later than most and I was never in any group therapy sessions like most kids when they get this disease so something about this gave me happiness but it also made me realize how isolated I was back at home. How I never talked to anyone about this and how that it wasn’t going to be like a quick fix that I could have every year at this camp. No, It would be something that if I keep feeling like this would only make me feel lonelier when I went back home. and I didn’t want to go to therapy. It wasn’t because I felt like it was weak or shameful to go to therapy, It was because I would have to ask my mom to set it up and I didn’t want her to know how lonely and depressed I fell almost constantly. So I didn’t go back the next year and I not sure about his year.