LIVING with Diabetes Contest Entry: Type I (Holla!)

What’s the best thing about being a person with diabetes? No, that is not a typo. I do mean the best thing. It’s easy to rattle off a list of complaints about diabetes. Too easy. I won’t patronize the educated person with diabetes. Or worse, scare anyone with this illness that already sends alarm bells shrieking. And rightly so. This illness is deadly and hearing about its complications can be frightening. But it’s much more difficult to find the reasons I keep caring for myself day after day and certainly night after night as anyone who has awakened in terror of being unable to move from a middle-of-the-night blood sugar drop can attest. What makes me keep going after experiencing the worst of diabetes, researching the newest technologies to further control a very controllable illness, communicating consistently with my health care providers, testing my blood sugar and raising money to find a cure even when I've been told the odds are slim when the fastest growing chronic illness in America isn’t yet a priority of the wealthiest government in the world (sorry, was that critical?)? What motivates me in the face of a potentially deadly illness that I steamrolled through for twenty years as if it didn’t exist, ignoring every opportunity to be healthy? I have the choice to live today—and that is the best thing about having diabetes. Every day I practice caring for my illness is a day I make the choice to live. So in a world where reality is construed on television by has-been celebrities with problems like who sleeps with who, who’s in rehab and who’s out of rehab and other trivialities, I have received a gift of living a life in which life itself is the ultimate priority. The fragility of life only became clear to me just before I reached death’s precipice, when I decided to turn around and come back. With the determination of a girl hell bent by putting insulin-filled syringes in my legs, stomach, arms and butt to stay alive since I was four, I had to find out if this life is worth staying alive for. I sped towards death, experiencing seizures, immobility due to repeated episodes of hypoglycemia, numb feet and finally kidney pain so debilitating I had trouble sitting and walking. My spirit, in maniacal contempt for what my body was doing to it, started giving out. It was time to take care of myself. But the decision wasn’t cut and dry, there was no happy ending as I galloped on horseback toward a sunset. That’s right, there is no ending to a life that can’t be tucked away finitely, packaged nicely and wrapped with a satin ribbon. Life exists for me as the healthy choices I make to better my life every day. The best thing about living with diabetes is that today, I am alive.