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Hi,
I've had a lot of friends with type one diabetes from youth because my dad when I lived in Houston, Texas sent me to San Antonio for the summer to a diabetes camp. After that I gained a lot of friends with diabetes. But I never shared the fact I had diabetes with people in school to avoid persecution and limitation they would set on me. Not even teachers would I tell, to my demise to say the least. But people with diabetes, I did have friends.
There are some still living, and a lot of my diabetes type one friends are gone, dead. I knew a neighbor when I lived in Lake Charles, Louisiana whe had his legs amputated, then finally he died from a heart attack helped on by diabetes type one. He willed all his diabetes equipment, meter and junk to me. Shocked the living "hell" out of me to say the least when he died. He was the first to die on me as a friend. Then others later thru life.
At a dialysis center in Lillington, NC I had some good friends there with diabetes. One lady was from korea, she had a leg amputated, then her daughter had her put on a feeding tube when she really got ill, then she died. I remember loaning her my blanket one time it got so cold in that place. I was doing hemodialysis at the time. Now I do PD dialysis.
Another good friend I had when I moved to a unit in Saint Pauls, NC for dialysis was a pharmacist. He invited me to eat a steak dinner with him at his house. He had fought in WW II and served as a pharmacist on an aircraft carrier during Midway and all that stuff. He was a wonderful guy, smart, but I never got a chance to eat dinner with him because he died. When he passed they took his dog he loved to the funeral as well. I still will hold him up on that steak dinner deal because I don't think I have a lot longer left, and where ever we go when we die, I'm going to let him know I want that dinner he promised! LOL! He was nice man and I have to honor his memory, he was a good friend, a real friend.
Another there at the same unit was a dialysis patient who had diabetes type one for fifty years. He had lived in New York and Washington D.C. and told me a tremendous amount of stuff about those areas when he grew up there. Places he had been, things that had changed, people he met, and the changes in the way politics work in Washington D.C. and more. The first night he came I remember loaning him a pillow because we was doing night dialysis, hemo on the machines and sleeping thru the treatment for eight hours on a machine for better cleaning of our blood, the "Vampire" shift as we joked about it.
I've had a lot of friends with diabetes, and I've seen a lot of them die. That guy above died as well, heart attack in the night at his home they rented here in N.C. Tragic losses of impressive humans with minds I'd like to have learned more about. Each with unique perspectives and outlooks on life and diabetes itself. I still count them as friends, the living and the dead. But my list of friends has a bigger list of dead ones than living now, and I'm sure it will grow because diabetes itself is "growing" as well. Wish it wasn't.
I hate diabetes. Diabetes the disease is not my friend, but I've had a lot of real friends who have lived with the disease diabetes.
I think knowing the results of diabetes may be a reason your subconscience probably made you avoid making friends with people with the disease. People with diabetes in my case die a lot. It isn't fun, but they were worth making friends with despite the fact now a lot of them are dead. Miss them, but am better for having known them for what they are. Humans!
Glad you are learning how to make friends with people that have diabetes. It is good I think to do the friend thing!
Later...
DJ wrote, "I think knowing the results of diabetes may be a reason your subconscience probably made you avoid making friends with people with the disease. People with diabetes in my case die a lot. It isn't fun, but they were worth making friends with despite the fact now a lot of them are dead. Miss them, but am better for having known them for what they are. Humans!"
I think you are probably right. When I was a kid, my parents had a friend whose wife was blind due to diabetes. My father loved to tell me that Mrs. Drake was blind from her diabetes and it prevented me from finding anything mutual to talk with her. She would try and I recoiled. In school and in all my other activities, I never ran into someone else who had diabetes. It just never happened, so my first experience was turned into a poor reason to know someone and I think I just avoided being in a room with other PWD.
But this experience, which includes you 
, has let me see just the talent and expressions of people, the catalyst was having diabetes, but not the reason for the friendship.
Did you catch George Simmons' post yesterday on No D Day? Great blog about having friends who have diabetes, but sometimes we just want to do without the D part, and be just friends!
I actually gained weight after I was treated for diabetes, thank God. I was a walking skeleton because diabetes will burn you up if you make no insulin, unless you are lucky enough to have a doctor prescribe insulin.
My blood sugar was so high that .... you don't want those details. As I think about my survival from those days of my youth, I related to the movie Saving Private Ryan. One of the soldiers had a bullet go through his helmet but missed his head. One of his comrades said you lucky ..... (person). That is how I feel about my own survival when my blood sugars were over 1,000. Most people would have just fallen over dead.
As far as friends who are diabetic, I have none. You see most think I am a lunatic because I refuse suggestions from the medical community. I research this disease daily and I know some certain facts. Injecting short acting insulin every two hours mimics my pancreas. When we eat, food gets stored in the liver for a steady release of energy and to metabolize the glucose being created by the liver's release requires insulin more than just after a meal. Simply, you need adequate insulin 24-7 to maintain a healthy liver. The second fact: lots of aerobic exercise makes a huge difference. Anytime a diabetic has elevated glucose, especially due to too little insulin, the liver will release excess fatty acids and creates even more glucose in your blood stream. So for the first 30 minutes of exercise, you only consume glucose in the blood stream the second thirty minutes you start burning up those excess fatty acids. About two times per week, I exercise for three hours without a break. Two times per week I exercise 90 minutes without a break. Of course you have to be careful not to take too much insulin before the workout or you will end up with an excessive low blood sugar. Because my insulin peaks in two hours, I can time my workouts on the down side of that curve and actually make my insulin last 4 hours. The third factor: test the blood sugar about 12 times per day otherwise you will not recognize cause and effect. Unless you have perfect control, you will not notice elevated blood sugars usually until it hits 180 to 200. Without insulin for about five hours and no exercise, my blood sugar, even if I don't eat, will easily hit 450 to 500. That is the life of a diabetic who makes no insulin.
Last, I do not have any negative thoughts about being diabetic. I actually praise God for giving me diabetes. I actually use my own body as an experimentally model, compare my own results to experiments conducted on rats and mice. Everything from eating foods containing the branch chained amino acids, brain function, immune system, sense of joy and happiness match that of animal studies. I have confirmed my personal experiments with experiments on rats and mice. Almost every time, I get an exact match. Therefore those who state rats are not human, should consider my personal experiments as validation of the experiments done on rats. In fact, scientists have been examining the diabetic rat models for most of a century.
My son has been fibbing to me about his diabetes. I first recognized he had diabetes at age 8. He told me it hurt going to bathroom. Growing up with diabetes, I knew all the signs and though of my God he is diabetic. I check his blood sugar and it hit 429 that day. I gained approval from my doctor and gave him an injection of humalog and got his blood sugar back to 85 within two hours. After that we used exercise and only occasionally had to give him an injection. He kept saying he felt fine. Last night, my wife said he was being difficult, acting irritated. I know those signs too. Too high of blood sugar and too little insulin effects the prefrontal cortex, which is one primary reason diabetics have behavioral issues. Even growing up with my mother with out of control blood sugars, I remember it was a holy terror for us as she expressed anger. I know that all had to do with her diabetes, which she finally died from.
This morning more bad new, my son's blood sugar is at 238 and with exercise we only got it down to 180. We are telling him to cut calories but for a kid this is hard to monitor because they can eat junk food away from home and at school. If we can't get this normalized he will end up on insulin for sure because blood sugars over 140 damage the beta cells.
My son is lucky though because I am a diabetic researcher who knows exactly what needs to be done, and growing up with me, also knows. But he is a kid and kids like the ice cream, the candy the pizza and the list goes on.
This really concerns me because he is not athletic like I was and still am. About 65 percent of my blood relatives are diabetic, which I blame on the America diet. Too much corn syrup and too much vegetable oil in pre-prepared foods. Diabetes is a common problem with anyone with anyone with even traces of Native American genetics. If we were chasing deer and antelope, hiking for 20 miles per day just to go fishing, collecting seeds and digging up roots, just the exercise alone helps, and well, no high fructose corn syrup or oils were readily available for the Natives to North America until the Europeans arrived. So the Europeans brought many good things and the industrial revolution, but also brought some bad diets for the health of many with the undesirable genetics to metabolize the foods now produced and marketed.
So here we go back to the doctor.
Society has lots of stereotypes about diabetes
Only fat people are diabetic
The first flu bug comes around diabetics will drop dead
Diabetics are ill and dying people
Diabetics are irresponsible gluttons
Diabetics caused their own problem by their diet
Every diabetic could cure their disease by changing their life style
(Doctors) I just can't get any diabetic to take any action.
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Ann - oh how I love this post!
It continues to surprise me when I think about this friend I have (YOU!) who I've only ever spent time with face-to-face twice, and yet you and I know each other just as well as the friends I hang out with every weekend.
I really don't have any super close friends with diabetes besides YOU. There is no one else I could easily call up and talk to about a blood sugar bullsh*t day or a scary low blood sugar. You are my diabetic soulmate, baby!
Diabetes is hardly what makes us friends, as there are many people in the world with diabetes I have nothing in common with besides a faulty pancreas, but diabetes is the ONLY reason we would have ever met! For that, I know there are awesome positives to every situation, and knowing you is one of the awesome positives to having diabetes!
Thanks for always being a phone-call or email or text-message away! :)
Ginger
I still have a really hard time wrapping my head about the fact that you can bench press more than my body weight! There is comedy in that!?
Have a great weekend Gin!