Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 21:34:11 2006/07/11
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by Aussie gal
I doubt many non-diabetics read this message board, and from the general nescience about diabetes in the general population I would assume that nothing we say here will change that nearly universal lack of knowledge. Most healthy people I know thing that all diabetes means is that you can't drink Coka Cola, and the most frequent question I am asked is why I don't take the new 'oral insulin' instead of bothering with injections!
My life, if viewed from the outside, would also seem to present an impressive array of achievements, and I have studied in seven countries and worked in three. But what I was mainly talking about was the effect of diabetes on the psyche, which can be devastating. I think diabetics get so used to their disease that they forget what normal life should be, and so progressively lower their standards, without noticing it, of what they have a right to expect as a human being.
Once, only four years into the disease, I had a very vivid dream that my diabetes was cured. This dream was so powerful that I continued to believe it was true for a few minutes after I woke up, but then it gradually dawned on me it was all my imagination. But during that short span of believing I was cured, I was profoundly shaken with many thoughts I had completely hidden from myself about how terrible the disease was, and I shook my head in disbelief that I had been able to endure it so long.
From the fact that you have just recently had a child I suppose you are still in the early phase of diabetes, before you have had time to decline into the modern leprosy which diabetes is, as you watch helplessly as your body rots around with, with feet spontaneously mummifying and self-amputating, with your vitreous filling with blood until all you can see is the inside of your eye, with your arms being needled three times a week for dialysis, etc. For many diabetics life can and often does become a living nightmare, like being as an undead corpse, with your whole body decaying around your mind, and no medicine able to rescue you.
As a student one of my projects was to gather statistics at a dialysis unit where half of the patients were diabetics. I got to know one patient there, Kurt, who was 37 and had been a carpenter and avid amateur auto mechanic. He had lost his vision because of diabetes and was on dialysis for five hours three times a week. Every time he was stuck with the pencil-thick, steel dialysis needles in order to be hooked up to the machine, he screamed like a whipped puppy. His life was further undermined by the sensation of constantly and randomly flashing lights he experienced from his retinopathic nerve damage, so the sightless shell of his eyes had to be completely burned by lasers out to give him some peace from this disturbance. He told me his only connection with the outside world now was the needles coming at him through the darkness three times a week. I have personally witnessed another hundred stories just like this, but I hope you get the idea.
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