Death, Already

I have some notes about what I’m going to talk about the next few times I post. Sex, death, society, doctors, a few other things. Death was actually low on the priority list, what with it being a downer, but it popped back up this week (and it’s been in my life a lot in the last six months), urging me to address it.

A woman I have known and been friends with since ninth grade died yesterday. M. was a passionate person, an artist, musician, writer and filmmaker. She had been working on a film of her most recent screenplay, as well as pursuing other endeavors. Then, on Sunday, she experienced an adverse reaction while taking cough syrup with prescribed Adderol. The cough syrup may or may not have been recreational, but the boyfriend who was with her apparently didn’t call paramedics in a timely manner, and by the time they got there, her pulse, brain activity and breathing had stopped. The paramedics managed to get her heart started again, though she needed a breathing tube and other life support measures to survive for the two days that she hung on. An experimental treatment didn’t work, and she died yesterday morning.

She was three months older than I, born in June to my October. We lost touch here and there, but I always knew what she was up to through other friends, even when I had run away from home and only spoke to a couple of people here on a regular basis. The miracle of Myspace and Facebook brought us back together on a direct basis, and a few years ago I visited her at the restaurant where she worked, rekindling our friendship. M. was a vivacious, unique personality who was well-known around our small city, and so the reach of her influence was wide. On Monday, it was Facebook that made it possible for me to find out what was happening to her.

Part of me always assumes it’ll be me before it’s any of the rest of my friends from our high school class. D. smokes, and has a bleeding disorder, and is having surgery next month, and that scares the shit out of me. T. has, through no fault of her own, come close to the ultimate disaster a couple of times, getting a very high degree of disaster out of it, but she lives a pretty clean and healthy life. A. is settled in with a husband and two kids, and is pretty insulated. B. is a physician herself now and that seems to insulate her, too, somehow. M. was never a heavy drug user; she was a vegetarian who didn’t drink, and whose open heart often resulted in less-than-stellar taste in men, including a randomly violent one, and the one who didn’t call 911 in time, presumably because he himself was high and/or feared getting into trouble.

But diabetes isn’t the only disaster out in the world; in fact, as tragedy goes, it tends to be a very slow burn. Overdose, suicide, accident, violence, and the like are so much splashier, and several terminal or potentially terminal diseases even yank the spotlight away from chronic diseases and their sufferers. I said last time that there are no diseases left for which there are romantic notions, but on second thought I think cancer may have some cachet with a certain type of drama queen (never the people who actually have cancer or those who love them most and see what they really go through, though). The four horsemen I listed first (suicide, violence, accident, overdose) all have that element, though. There’s a reason we call it staring at a car crash. All those times I ever have or ever will bitch about not being seen for who I am and the parts of me that my disease has formed, I’ll know somewhere in the back of my mind that what’s worse, at least for the survivors, is the death that comes so much faster, so much more suddenly, and draws such scrutiny from the vultures.

The Sweetest Bitch Ever: In which a cranky chick with diabetes sounds off.

I’ve had this blog kicking around in my head for a couple years now, and its subject has been kicking around in my head and in my body for 22 years. I’m 32 now, and I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of ten, on the day after April Fools’ Day, I guess because fate needed at least 24 extra hours to work up the craziest prank possible. My twenty-second anniversary was a few days ago. The anniversary never is romantic, and the connotations of the disease itself don’t have nearly the cachet that tuberculosis had about 250 years ago, but I guess in the age of science we’re past the romance of any disease, and we now just know our broken bodies for what they are, diabetic or not.

Juvenile diabetes sure does live up to its name—it just seems like something I ought to be able to get over with the appropriate maturity, but here I keep waking up every morning for 22 years now wondering what my blood sugar is. If you don’t have diabetes, I can tell you that you wake up at about eighty milligrams per deciliter. (Go look it up. That’s not what I’m here for.) If you do have diabetes, I don’t need to tell you that waking up often has nasty surprises in store for you, but it’s better than the alternative, which is also a small but distinct possibility.

For the first five years, I don’t think I really understood what the hell was going on. I was doing my own shots and glucose tests from the beginning, for which I am eternally grateful, but I didn’t know to be in denial, get angry, get scared, get offended by my doctors’ or the general public’s misconceptions about what I was actually going through, or anything else. So much has changed since then, and I know I’ll have plenty to talk about at least once a week here, trying to hit all the highlights and many of the lowlights.

And just so you know, I curse. A lot. You’re probably reading the longest streak of not-cursing I’ve been on in a while. OK, the title contains the word “bitch” and I dropped an H-E-double-hockey-sticks earlier, but believe me, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And my cursing condition is bound to flare up when I get started on the longest, most frustrating relationship I’ve had in my life—aside from my parents and my beloved younger brother, all of whom can give diabetes a bit of a run for its money on those fronts, but unlike diabetes, I wouldn’t give them up even if I could. They’re all likely to feature prominently in this blog, though. My grammar and spelling tend to be generally accurate, but if I get in a hurry or on a tear, I can’t make any promises on that front. I’ll also likely quote studies, research, other diabetes blogs, and the like to demonstrate what might be on my mind, and I’ll do my best to cite everything appropriately, but I’m not a real resource for real information about diabetes, just a ranting platform that I hope might help you out, but like most people, I mostly do what I do to help me out.

Oh, and there’s apparently another diabetic bitch on Blogspot with a similar URL. I’m more interested in the diabetes side of things, and she’s more interested in the bitch side, but she’s been inactive for three years now, yet continues to hog a shorter, more desirable URL. Oh fuckin’ well, I guess that’s what I get for not getting on this sooner.

Just know that everything you get here will be from the heart. Because my pancreas is unlikely to make any sudden moves.