Facing My Fears

For a very, very long time, I have been terrified of what people think when I inject in public, when I test my levels, and I figure up my carb ratio.  I think people are judge mental assholes but that isn’t why I fear these things, really.

Growing up, no body really understood that there were different types of diabetics or what caused any of them.  People still don’t understand that type 2 isn’t always a lifestyle and food problem.  They tend to not even know that type 1 exists (though why there would be a type 2 without a type 1 baffles me).  However, growing up where and how I did people thought that diabetic always equals fat, and I have almost always been fat.  So there was no way people believed that my diabetes wasn’t because of my size, although it kind of was, because I only weighed 2lbs and 15oz when I was born and my pancreas never developed or produced insulin correctly.  This caused a fear for me that people would see me injecting or testing and believe that I deserved it, because I ate the wrong things or too much or didn’t exercise enough.

It has only been in the past few months that I have been facing my fears and doing these things wherever I need to do them.  I have had horrible things said to me and jokes made at my expense.  I have had my picture taken by rude people.  Thinking about that today I decided, no more.  I had my husband take this picture of me today at brunch because I get to decide who sees me take my insulin and how I feel about it.  I am taking ownership of my diabetes and how I monitor and manage it.  It is my life and I get to decide how I live it:  I am not ashamed of being diabetic because it isn’t shameful.  I am not afraid of what people think anymore.  If they want to think I am a fatass who ate her way into insulin shots and fingerpricks, they can go for it because their opinion is none of my business. It isn’t my job to police their feelings and it isn’t my job to educate them. (Although I am writing this blog as a way of educating others, I do it for me not for the general judgey public).  It isn’t my responsibility to make other people comfortable with my disease, because their comfort does nothing for my health, mental or otherwise.

I am also facing another fear:  that my mismanagement of my diabetes has caused me to miscarry 6 times now.  Thanks to doctors not wanting to test or try to find another reason, I have carried that weight on my shoulders for a long time now.  I have beat myself up and blamed myself for losing my babies to the point of feeling suicidal at times.  How could I live knowing that I had killed my babies by not doing something right that I should have been in control of well before now? Thankfully, my husband and my child have kept my head above water despite losing yet another child on Monday. Anyway, come to find out that that isn’t true.  While my extremely high a1c hasn’t helped anything, I have a clotting disorder and should have been on blood thinners from day one and this causes blood flow issues to the baby.  I get that doctors are going to blame the most obvious things as the reason why so it isn’t surprising that they believed that my diabetes was the culprit until my numbers were all in range and my a1c was coming down and I still miscarried.  This made them reevaluate why I was losing baby after baby and why I was able to carry M full term.  Now that they have stopped blaming my diabetes, I can stop blaming myself and grieve my loss properly.  Everyone deserves to be seen as more than their diabetes, and, in the case of medical decisions, need to be.  I am getting to finally be seen that way and let go of the fear that I am nothing more than a high a1c.