Recently someone – alex_72 – asked me how long I’ve been a diabetic. And I said, out of habit, 15 years. But then it occasioned me to think about it. I’m 35. I got juvenile diabetes when I was 15. So no, no, I’ve been a diabetic for 20 years. I’ve been a diabetic longer than I haven’t been. Some math: 7 needles a day. That’s more than 50,000 needles. Nice.

Somebody should have known something was wrong. By the middle of December I had lost about 20 lbs. And I wasn’t that big to start with, perhaps about 135 or 140 lbs. Also, I was tired and pale. And I was peeing too much. It was grade 10. And I thought maybe I was stressed about school. And I thought, I guess, I would feel better once I had a holiday. But I was wrong. I kept pissing and it burned more than it should. And I was still tired. I had no energy. I remember I played Atari 2600 in my pyjamas and never really felt awake. I got sicker.

That was also about the time that my parents liked each other the least. They had, by then, forgotten even how to pretend to be civil. On Boxing Day, my father went to work before I was out of bed. It was my mother’s parents, I think, that had convinced her to take me to the hospital. I suppose they must have been understaffed. I went to the Emergency Room by about 11 am on Boxing Day. I remember that I didn’t get home until about 11 pm. I also remember that I was in the Emergency Room alone for most of the day. Mom had to do something.

It was cold and snowing. I didn’t talk to anybody. I tried to read but I couldn’t. It hurt too much. So mostly I just sat there in a daze, not quite sleeping and not quite awake. Perhaps I thought about running away, perhaps I thought about bundling up and walking home – it was about a 20 minute walk. But I was too tired to walk home.

Late that night, I was still there, I was still tired and still sick. When the doctor told me that I had dangerously high blood sugars and that I was a diabetic, my mom was with me. Dad wasn’t there. But I didn’t stay at the hospital. They were really understaffed, I guess. They sent me home for about a week. They told me to drink lots of water and not eat anything sweet.

Besides getting diabetes, I don’t remember anything else I got that year. I was in the hospital for two weeks. A girl I had a crush on was a candy striper who rented TVs to the patients. She was nice to me but not too nice to me. I was embarrassed to be seen. You look sick just by being in a bed. You look sick just by being in a hospital gown. And I had occasion to notice that she treated me exactly as a kindly as she treated the old women with bedsores and exactly as kindly as the 10 year old kid, who also had diabetes, with whom I shared my room, and not quite as kindly as the 19 or 20 year old guy who had lost control of his diabetes because he drank and smoked too much.

By February I was feeling more like myself. But that was a particularly nasty Christmas.

SS