Like many of you, I too become frustrated when a non-diabetical tells me how I should regulate my diabetes or when they get me confused for a type II diabetic. When this happens, I like to take my time and educate my unknowing (and yet opinionated) fellow man. Today I had a positive experience that I want to share with you.
As I’ve stated in previous blogs, I am currently in college with the goal of becoming a nurse, so of course this means I have to take a Human Anatomy and Physiology class. This semester one of our assignments was to write and do a presentation on a disease that affected one of the body systems. Naturally my initial thought was so do my project on diabetes but then I thought maybe that would be considered cheating since I have the disease. Then on second thought, who better to do a presentation on diabetes then a diabetic? As I went to go sign up to do my project on diabetes another girl at the same time was writing diabetes down too. I wanted to be fair and since this was supposed to be a learning experience I let here take diabetes and I decided to do Celiac Disease, which my brother has (in addition to being a type I diabetic).
So I ended up writing this beautiful paper on Celiac disease, but the whole diabetes thing really bothered me. It didn’t help that my teacher later pulled me aside and asked why I wasn’t doing my project on diabetes. She felt that I really had a lot to bring to the subject and it was a shame I wasn’t going to be presenting. So that’s when I came up with another idea. What if one if the other girl did a presentation on type II diabetes and I did a presentation on type I diabetes? That way we could really show the differences between the two. This compromise ended up working great because it turns out that the girl didn’t even know there were different types of diabetes and most of her research that she had already done was on type II diabetes.
I suspect that I didn’t have to do as much research as my fellow students but I did decide to read up a bit on the subject. I found that when it came to the fancy medical terminology I already knew what most of it was and could explain it proficiently. However I did find out some interesting facts:
Did you know that diabetes has been dated back as far as ancient roman times? Yeah, the ancient Romans diagnosed it by tasting each other’s urine (apparently diabetic urine tastes sweeter then non diabetic urine… and no I did not test this theory.)
When the day of presentations arrived I was a little nervous. Everyone (but me) had a power point presentation (if I have the choice… I don’t do one) but I brought a lot of different supplies to show the class and whatnot. Now diabetes has been a part of my life for almost ten years now so it’s not very difficult for me to talk about and explain diabetes. But even I was surprised with the amount of ease I was able to talk about diabetes in front of a room of people!
