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.