One thing that cracks me up (and sometimes drives me bonkers) about telling people I have diabetes is the people who react with the ONE thing they associate diabetes with. It goes like this. You say: “I have Type 1 diabetes.” And they say:
“Oh so you have to eat lunch at the same time each day?”
“I know all about that! You have to poke your finger!”
“Right, my cousin has it. So you wear that little pager/walkman thingy that checks your numbers?”
“My nana has it. So you must have to go for a walk every day like she does.”
“Alright so a Diet Coke for you then.”
“You have to carry around little sugar packets huh?”
“Ever seen Steel Magnolias?”
“Oh yes, my father has it. So you have to take an injection every day, right?”
“It’s so good you exercise so it doesn’t get worse.”
I just think it is so funny to hear what the one thing people seem to associate with diabetes is. For whatever reason, from whatever experience they’ve had, it’s always about the pump/finger poke/mealtimes/insert random item here for them. It’s as if there’s nothing else to this disease except that ONE THING that you HAVE to do as a diabetic. Right. It’s just that one thing…plus about a million others, all day, every day. Then you’re in the ballpark of what it takes to really manage this disease. If I don’t laugh at some of these statements, I just get frustrated. So I try to laugh 
I’m curious to know for any of you readers out there who were diagnosed as an adult – was there one thing you assumed with diabetes? One behavior that you associated with this disease? Leave a comment to let us know what it was!
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Sign in nowI honestly didn’t know much about diabetes before my diagnosis. Apart from the awful “Don’t eat to much sugar it’ll give you diabetes” “jokes” people tend to say. (I actually had a friend bite his tongue the other night for saying something like this with me sitting right there.) I used to substitute teach and there was a student in a class I was often in who had diabetes. The first time the teacher told me I was pretty nervous about it, not knowing much about diabetes. This was a fourth grader. He had it under control though and always had a snack waiting just in case he needed it.
I assumed I’d never be allowed to eat sugar again. I remember eating my first candy bar after the diagnosis and wondering if I would die. Sounds ridiculous now but that was many years ago and I was woefully uninformed.
Three and a half years before I was diagnosed, I watched a classmate go into DKA over the course of a class trip. He literally looked like he was dying, so I was convinced that I couldn’t be diabetic because I was not NEARLY as sick as he had been, despite having all the symptoms. That was pretty much all I knew about the ‘betes.
These comments are so interesting. Johanna – I remember the first time I ate piece of candy after being diagnosed too. It was a Jolly Rancher, and I started to enjoy it, and then spit it out, wondering if that was off limits for life and like you, if I’d just harmed myself. Posting about this also makes me wonder if I ever make casual assumptions about people/diseases that I shouldn’t. Certainly interesting to think about.
Having grown up with a grandmother with diabetes who lived with us, all I knew was really horrible things. She’d wake up at night crying out with insulin reactions. That was her response to them and it scared me to death. There was no such thing as blood-sugar-testing in the 50s so she has to drop urine into a test-tube, add a tablet of some kind, then boil the test-tube for about 5 minutes to get a number of some kind. Nothing like bad info from old urine to base your treatment on. The whole thing seemed nightmarish.
Years later, when I was 21 and got the bad news myself, I had a lot to learn. Things had changed a great deal by then but it was nothing compared to what we now know, not to mention the devices we have to to control the situation with. Retrospectively, when my grandmother was ill they knew absolutely nothing about diabetes.
Deven that’s such a wild experience to have had! Thanks for sharing that, and yes, we have truly come such a long way from those times.
My grandmother was an insulin-dependent diabetic when I was born, so my memory is of her injecting insulin with this monster shiny stainless steel syringe. Looked like a vet-needle. Lunches from her were french fries or (brace yourself) ‘Jimmy sandwiches’ – 2 slices of white bread heavily buttered and filled with chocolate sprinkles. It’s a Belgian thing. Go figure – I grew up obese and T2 at age 46. She died of septicemia secondary to a diabetic leg ulcer she got bumping her shin on a chair. That was my knowledge of diabetes and still lives in my fear of the future.
When my BROTHER was diagnosed (in 1971), they didn’t have home blood sugar testing using BLOOD.(“That apple juice sure tasted weird!”) That image came to me unbidden when I was diagnosed in 2009, though I knew it wasn’t true today. Plus, I feared I would be doomed to calling it (like Wilford Brimley) diabeatus, instead of diabeateeze. With all the complications my brother has, I got educated quickly (though I didn’t have a lot to unlearn in the way of bad habits).
I knew there was shots (because a girl that I knew as a kid had type 1 and had to take shots) and I thought I wouldn’t be able to eat any sugar. In fact, the first week after my diagnosis, we went through the pantry and tossed out anything with the word “sugar” in it. (They didn’t explain the whole “carb” thing until a couple of weeks after diagnosis.)
Like many others who commented, I believed diabetics couldn’t eat sugar and that they could “get rid” of it if they ate better. I also believed type 1 was only diagnosed in children. And then in 2010 I was diagnosed with type 1, as an adult. I’m not surprised at my previous lack of knowledge. One doesn’t usually know a lot about a disease until they have to deal with it in their lives. That’s why I dont get upset with people that assume things incorrectly. I’m sure I make wrong assumptions about diseases I don’t have, too.
Agreed on the “if you eat sugar you’ll die”…I also was in DKA for awhile (lost 50lbs in 3 months etc) but was convinced that I didn’t have diabetes because I was losing weight not gaining. A week in the ICU will put things in perspective. That I couldn’t wear heels again, that if I had a baby it would become diabetic, but mostly that I did it to myself. People still love to make ignorant comments (can’t eat sugar, if you’re low you need insulin) and I too have to laugh to fight off the annoyance. But it just shows you how little the world is actually educated on the betes, especially type 1! Oh the joys
When my daughter was diagnosed at the age of 7 in 2004. I feared that she would eventually have a limb amputated in the future. I also thought that maybe I did something that caused her diabetes. Sometimes, I find it hard to find the strength to listen to ignorant comments. The one comment that makes me go completely crazy is…
“Oh, you must of fed her too much sugar as a baby” Yup, that’s right, I used to force mulitiple spoon fulls of sugar in her mouth. Yugh!
I was diagnosed at age 34. I was told I had Type II and took pills for 5 years before getting re-diagnosed as LADA- slow onset Type 1 when I started insulin.
Diabetes was not on my radar at all until I got diagnosed. My grandmother developed Type II in life (over 70) and never even talked about it. No one had Type I that I can recall and for years I was an outlier. Then a 2nd cousin’s son got diagnosed as Type I at 6 and then my nephew got diagnosed with Type I at 13 (my sister said all my efforts to educate my parents and sisters through the years helped her recognize that Andrew probably had diabetes….).
I remember thinking I caused the diabetes because I love chocolate and had eaten a lot of Easter candy. I remember going to an Easter brunch and looking at the table: ham coated with brown sugar glaze, mashed potatoes, fruit salad with marshmallows and sweet tea, puffy dinner rolls and thinking, “There’s nothing here that I can eat.”
And I recall sitting at a lunch where someone kept going on and on about how “diabetes is a killer. You die really young…” She had no idea about me, but I moved to another seat pretty quickly.