I leave my sterile needle covers around the school. I like to imagine I make people think the student body has a drug problem. Maybe you’ve seen them. They’re purple pieces of paper, with white Helvetica letters: BD. Sterile Needle. It’s the least I can do, really. You don’t have to jab the actual needle into yourself. I figure I’ve done it almost 10,000 times in my life, and I’ll have 100s of thousands of more shots to complain about before it’s over.
Before I knew it was diabetes, I thought that whatever was wasting my body away was pretty awesome. I lost my all consuming, pre-teen hunger that had been nauseating to keep up with. I was only ever hungry for water, losing an appetite for all things—including cookies. I thought, maybe, hopefully, briefly, that I was becoming an adult—that part of growing up was learning that you didn’t need to eat everything. But that wasn’t the case. My body began to dissolve away, and along with it, hopes of reaching adulthood. My parents noticed first, as baby fat, then everything else melted from my face. They made me weigh myself everyday for two weeks—within that time I went from a healthy 120 pounds to an anorexic 99. I wasn’t even old enough to enjoy that side effect (I was too young to make the connection, like so many women make incorrectly, that the less of me there was, the more attractive I’d seem).
I got to stay home from school, lying in bed, almost perpetually. I’d wobble, with my long, now stick like, legs, to the bathroom frequently. These trips were the most exercise I could get in, because everything that I ate or drank would find itself, shortly thereafter, in the vomit bucket that had been installed in my room. My mom demanded I go to the hospital. I begged that I stay in bed and rest; it was the only thing I had energy for. My body had never felt so weak, so ethereal. It was like I was slowly floating to heaven.
But my parents wouldn’t let me go—not in a house of two surgeons was I going to die of a mysterious ailment. I couldn’t walk, but my dad scooped me out of bed and laid me down in the passenger seat of my mom’s car. It was the last time he’d be able to carry me.
I didn’t know what Diabetes was when the doctors first suggested that’s what I had been fighting. I could hardly think anymore, and I heard very little, a result of my brain shutting down. But in my peripheral vision I could see my parents standing over me, like two worried saints. My mom rubbed my bony shoulder. “Gary Hall has diabetes, honey, and he’s an Olympic swimmer.” I must’ve smiled. She was crying. My dad looked overly-thoughtful, his dark face somewhere else—probably trying to recall all the information on autoimmune diseases he’d picked up in med school so many years ago.
Diabetes sounds much more pleasant than it actually is. The ending, be-tees, sounds so funny, when pronounced. I call it Diabetus, and get funny looks. But no one understands. The disease is a wary opponent—I address it with respect, with its Latin name, praying that it will spare me. I’ve tried to explain diabetus mellitus to many people, but few understand it, so I will simplify it here. My blood is toxic. If your veins form the highway on which you get the nutrients and oxygen you need, my blood is slowly strangling me with its own, iron drenched hands.
I now have to figure out how much synthetic insulin I need to inject after eating on a daily basis. But my brain didn’t evolve to be able to calculate such a thing. It’s like attempting to solve quantum mechanics with an abacus. It’s not going to happen. The consequences of this are wide ranging. In the short term, the hell I put up with isn’t so bad. Headaches and the sudden inability to understand where I am or what I’m doing because my brain is no longer getting sugar aren’t too bad. If that were all diabetes was, it would just be an annoyance—no worse than having asthma, or allergies, or any one of the trite diseases that so many of us manage to put up with.
But the things I have to look forward to in life seem grotesque and awful—it is an unjust series of ever-worsening fates that result in diabetics dying six to nine years earlier than their contemporaries. First you go blind, losing the ability to see with any clarity because the blood vessels in your eyes overcompensate for poor circulation and choke vision from you. In much the same way, you will lose your toes and fingers, then your legs and arms. You will become a blind torso that was once a human being.
Well, you won’t. I will. In the future, you cradle your great-grandchild in your tangential, albeit wrinkled, arms. Meanwhile, I’m dead. Gone, lifeless, unconscious, decomposing in a lonely, dark grave. I feel like this gives me the right to litter.
No comments:
Post a Comment