I've had Type 1 Diabetes for seven years, now. Sometimes it has been incredibly difficult and taxing, and at many other times it has been easy even for me to forget that I have the disease at all.
My biggest issues? Here you go...
1) Travel. Changing time zones, constant concerns about keeping insulin cold (especially when you live in humid-as-shit Japan!!!), and always needing to be able to count carbohydrates make shit REALLY fucking taxing. Sometimes it ain't not thang, but most of the time travel fucks me right up the ass. It's damn tough, man. Damn tough.
2) I can't sleep in! Every day, I get up no later than 8:00 am in order to get my breakfast and early morning insulin in. Like dayglo, I also use a mixture of fast-acting and slow-acting insulins--Humalog and Humulin N. As the years have gone on, this has been less and less reliable, and I'm now hoping to switch insulins. It seems my body has built up a bit of a defense, for some reason, to this particular combination. Also, I often find that if I sleep in or take any naps during the day, it causes my blood sugar levels to rise...sometimes exponentially. My HBA1C count is usually in the 5.6-6.0 range, which means I'm good to go. But, still...it's not always in that range, and if I've had a tired few months, that's probably why.
On a related note, I won't get too graphic, but...you know...there are a few other bedtime activities which high blood sugars (or low) make pretty hard to deal with. If I'm looking to get some play and my sugar is high, it's not a good idea for me to get it...and that SUCKS, MAN!!!!! In the long term, that sort of thing can lead to impotence or even loss of sensation, and I'm not willing to role like that. Sometimes it's really fucking hard, though, to have to stop every time and say, "Hey, baby...I'm really sorry, but I need to go stab my finger and bleed all over the place before we get down. I'll be RIGHT back! Don't go nowhere!" Sigh. So sketchy. So. Fucking. Sketchy.
3) A worthless piece of shit like President George Bush telling me that just because his nonexistent God decided I should have to live with this horrible, debilitating, slow-killer of a disease, it means that I shouldn't ever have the chance to be cured via stem cell research. I can't wait to spit right the fuck in the face of the next person who tells me that he/she doesn't believe in advancing the sciences. Worthless fucks, all of them. There's nothing worse than being told, "No, you don't deserve to be cured. You can just hold off death, instead. Oh, but cancer? No, that's different. We should cure cancer."
Fucking ridiculous. It's the one major psychological problem I've had with the disease. The unfortunate truth is that there is no "treatment," as such, for Type 1. It's possible and not too hard (usually) to live a full and satisfying life with the disease, but any treatment only goes so far as to shave off the year you lose. The bottom line is that this disease will fuck me up, over time, no matter what I do. The body is not supposed to live like this, and it will only do so for so long at top condition.
I didn't choose to be like this. I hate that people get to choose for me whether or not I get to live a healthy life. I want to eat whenever I feel like it, again. I just want to have ONE Dr. Pepper at a barbecue without having to excuse myself to go to the bathroom and take insulin. I want not to have to plan every last second of every last day around my meal schedule. I want not to have to turn down jobs because they wouldn't work with my health requirements. I want to be healthy, damn it. THIS is my biggest problem with Diabetes--I'm not allowed to be healthy.
It's fucked up. Sorry for ranting a bit, but it kills me to see somebody else just having been diagnosed who's going to have to start figuring out these questions for him/herself in the next few years. Discrimination does exist. People are just too fucking worthless to realize they're participating in it, and nobody realizes that insulin injections don't cure shit. They just keep you around for a few more years, if you're lucky. It's really sad, and I wish that celebrities with the disease would speak up a bit more about it. Why fight so hard for AIDS and Parkinson's but not for Diabetes? It's jacked up, man.
but I guess many people don't know what they look like or that they even exist.
