Wednesday, July 29, 2009

How Not To Be Diagnosed: Part 1

The five stages of dealing with grief-striking events are generally stated as being denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Common sense and a number of magazine articles I’ve read seem to indicate that being diagnosed diabetic would bring these stages on but I never really went through these. My diagnosis didn’t cause any major distress or anything like that; one minute I wasn’t diabetic, the next I was with no mental problem in between. It’s not the only strange thing about my diagnosis: I’ve yet to hear about another case where the person was a breath away from a coma before being diagnosed, and it’s always made me feel rather annoyed that no one else seems to need to be close to death before someone notices that maybe something’s wrong with them.

A very common symptom of undiagnosed diabetes is dehydration, which leads to thirst, constant bathroom breaks and sometimes wetting the bed, though thankfully I didn’t get that. I ended up with increasingly demanding thirst for around five weeks before my diagnosis and spent all that time drinking cranberry juice and bringing 2 bottles of water to school while blaming my thirst on the new water filter we had bought. I was also waking up at midnight to use the bathroom and leaving in the middle of classes for the same reason but I didn’t catch the change in schedule, probably because cataloguing bathroom visits was, and is, never the first thing on my mind.
In every account of a diagnosis I've read, the person in question has always had these symptoms, so it's something I try to watch out for in people I know, just in case.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

I was recently asked by a friend of mine, "What exactly is diabetes really, when you get down to it?" When asked this my answer is usually something along the lines of "when your body can't produce the hormone that breaks down food into energy, so you have to take it other ways." This I know isn't much of an answer but diabetes really can't be explained in one sentence, or one blog post for that matter.

I'm no medical student so I won't be running a health blog, or a medical breakthrough blog, or a what's new in diabetes blog or whatever. This will be where I share my thoughts, experiences and opinions on diabetes that I have gained in the best way possible; by living with it while also living with the problems of a regular teenager.


So on a completely unrelated note, here's a cute picture of a kitten:
Some ducks as well.