Viewing Diabetes the Same Way We View COVID-19

Imagine feeling great one day and waking up the next day feeling off. You do not think anything of it and go about your day as normal while in the back of your mind, hoping the feeling will just dissolve. While you’ve dealt with these symptoms before, it doesn’t go away this time. The feeling progresses to the point that you take a trip to the hospital where you’re tested by doctors for anything and everything. You are treated as if the way your body feels is unquestionably contagious, making you feel far from those you viewed as close the day before. After long, stressful hours of waiting, you receive a diagnosis that will change your daily routine and you feel as though it is a death sentence given without your consent. All you can think about is that people die from this every day if it is not managed well and there are underlying health conditions complicating it. Just like that, you are forever changed.

Am I talking about diabetes? Am I talking about coronavirus?

Interchange the focus from diabetes to coronavirus, or the technical name, COVID-19, and the story is the same. Diabetes and the coronavirus are different and yet they are the same.

Hi there. My name is Christina and with the extended time many of us understandably have right now in the world, I have decided to write a blog! I live every day with type one diabetes which means, when I was 13 years old, my genetics decided that my pancreas would no longer produce the daily life saving insulin that our bodies are designed to make throughout each entire 24 hour day. There is no cure and when I was diagnosed, every detail of my experience was the story I shared above. Just to clarify, having type two diabetes, the more common type, means that the body makes insulin but does not use it efficiently. Both require care, focus, and attention and there isn’t a medically proven “worse type”.

Without warning and literally overnight, my life felt as though it were being strangled with its own diabetes culture shock.

My teen life filled with up to ten blood sugar pricks throughout the day at school, in dance class, and randomly in the middle of the night, giving insulin injections before I could eat anything, learning how to control my blood sugars, and somehow not feeling as though mistakes and diabetes were who I was as a person at the end of each emotional day. I felt embarrassed of a disease I did not decide to have and it continued for years until I realized that I could challenge my way of thinking. Insert coronavirus here.

You and I both know that these diseases are very different in what they are and the way they look, feel, and last on a human being. But where they are the same is the perspective we choose to own around people that are diagnosed as well as ourselves. While diabetes, type two specifically, and coronavirus appear to be diseases diagnosed in part because of behavioral choices, nobody chooses to have either one. Just as we are not deciding to live with the corona virus, we are not deciding that diabetes is for us. They are proven to be potentially deadly. And all of this is where they are the same.

I was home in front of the TV with my family where we watched a clip of a celebrity talking to the world about the fact that she had the coronavirus. My little sister reacted by saying that if she were famous and had caught the virus, she would not tell anyone because she would be ashamed and people would treat her differently. At first, I agreed with her perspective. But then I thought about what it means to spend a lot of time sulking in negative emotions about something that you did not decide to live with.

You and I are allowed to feel all of the diverse feelings that make us who we are in this world. But we choose whether we are going to be defined by those feelings, or acknowledge them and use them to help others.

We also choose how we will view people that are battling diseases such as diabetes.

If you do not have diabetes, when you talk to someone who is (we are a more common alien species than you might think), remembering this emotional connection between diabetes and the coronavirus will help to spark a conversation that is filled with facts and compassion all at once. And for all of us diabetics out here, staying embarrassed, or not fully healing a bruised pride, means there is missed opportunity to share your experiences with someone who may really need to hear it. You never know who is listening or reading.

P.S. Not to stir up another conversation, but what if we took the current diabetes epidemic as seriously as we are taking coronavirus?

Cited:

https://www.diabetes.org/diabetes

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html