I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes one week after my thirteenth birthday. On one hand, it was a relief to know what was behind the previous ten or so months of lost weight, missed periods, excessive eating, insatiable thirst, and extreme fatigue. On the other hand was the daunting label of diabetes I thought I’d have to carry for the rest of my life.
My teenage years came with a bang. And if I’m to take the word of family, I had mood swings that were comparable to a storm. Whether that was because of ‘the teen years’ or because of the very volatile mood swings that come with the highs and lows of diabetes, I can’t say. What I can say is that when my blood sugar was low, I felt delirious and giddy. But not the cute kind, the kind that scared the people around me. It took some time, but I learned how to manage hypoglycaemia and whilst I will admit to having a handful of concerning events, I’m also very aware that it affected my parents more as they woke up regularly around 2am to make sure I was still alive.
The tempest showed up more when my blood glucose levels were high. It was a perpetual cycle of being so moody that people walked on eggshells around me or tried to avoid me while I tried to understand why I felt like no one liked me or understood that the moods weren’t my fault. I was alone and no one understood! The psychological impact of diabetes in this life stage was not fun, and I recall rare moments of constant when I was around other diabetics when I attended youth camps for such connection. My teenage mind outside of those moments felt like riding a rollercoaster I could barely hold onto.
And then I became an adult. I quickly realised the difficulties of teenage life were akin to a preparation stage for the stresses and experiences of the world of adults. My parents did their jobs in raising me well, they did their best with the unprecedented addition of navigating the ins and outs of managing diabetes. But it was all on me at this point. Looking back, those years felt like a whirlwind of learning, adapting, surviving, and then finally finding my feet and having to do it all over again in a different aspect of life. It was (and still is!) a constant cycle of adapting and reframing what I thought I knew. And in this stage of life, diabetes became one of the few constants.
Every day looked like pricking my finger four times daily at similar times, injecting before eating, fixing hypoglycaemic events with sugary treats, fixing hyperglycaemic events with insulin, and eating relatively healthy. If the diabetes was under control, I was under control, as was everything else in my life. That’s just something I told myself because there were many seasons of stress in this stage of life that saw me changing my eating patterns in extreme ways which ultimately affected how I managed (or failed to manage) diabetes, which resulted in very negative consequences at times. And yet, diabetes became like a friend that was with me through it all.
My experience with diabetes is one of many, and I count myself simultaneously challenged and blessed with the life I’ve led learning to live with diabetes over the past decade and a half. Diabetes across my adolescence was simply another change happening at a metamorphic point of life. Diabetes across my teenage years was a balancing act of swinging moods, eating sort of healthy but mostly what I shouldn’t have and simply taking insulin to match my intakes, whilst unknowingly relying on a naturally fast metabolism to not gain weight. Diabetes across my early adulthood looked like my constant in a chaotic life resulting in a cycle of stress eating, healthy eating, or no eating; and convincing myself that if I ‘looked healthy’, I was healthy.
Now, entering my thirties, diabetes feels like a friend who’s been with me through many changes and one for which I’m grateful to have walked with for many reasons, yet it’s also a friend I’m ready to say goodbye to – and with the advances in technologies since 2009 – perhaps I can.
