D-Blog Week Day 3 - What Brings Me Down

Today's D-Blog Week challenge is in honour of Mental Health Month. We are tasked with writing about the emotional side of diabetes and how we cope with it all.

I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I have felt sad about diabetes. I can probably use the other five fingers to count the number of times I have felt depressed by it. 

Those are not emotions that resonate with me when it comes to my diabetes. 

The emotions that I struggle with when I'm having a hard moment, a hard afternoon or, heaven forbid, a hard day are: 

frustration

and 

anger

"How dare you! How DARE you! HOW DARE YOU!!" 

"How dare you keep me up half the night with ridiculously high blood sugars for no apparent reason when you know full well I wanted to get up early to go swimming. Go swimming to help keep YOU happy so that my blood sugars will be better behaved. Instead, I skip my swim, stay in bed for another 90 minutes and still head to work looking like death and feeling like hell" 

Asshole. 

"How dare you ruin my run. How dare you behave predictably week after week, long run after long run and then, for no apparent reason, decide to send my blood sugars skyrocketing on one random Saturday morning run. You make me take insulin on a run even though it scares me to bolus during exercise. You make me drink all of my water when I'm still 10k from home and it's not enough to handle the dehydration. In fact, I am so dehydrated that I have to go into a stranger's yard and beg them for water so that I can make it home in one piece. Because that's not embarrassing. Because that's not frustrating. Because if I had known you were in such a pissy mood I would have stayed in bed instead of heading out to run 20k and having to walk half of it."

Asshole.

"How dare you force me to eat hundreds of useless calories because you decided that I was going to be low all day no matter what I did. How dare you do it on a day when I am outside, away from home and grocery stores so that I am forced to consume bag after bag of fruit chews. Which have zero nutritional value, empty calories AND make me feel like dirt after having eaten 8 bags of them in one afternoon? Why was I so low? No logical reason that I could figure out." 

Asshole. 

"How dare you rear your ugly head during intimate moments. How dare you make me afraid to walk down the aisle and stand next to my sister at her wedding because I don't want to have a low, embarrass myself and distract from her moment. How dare you frighten my parents by giving me a terrible low the one time, THE ONE TIME, I ever left the house without any form of sugar on me, forcing my father to sprint to the nearest store for juice while my mother sat beside me and watched helplessly."

Asshole. 

Living with diabetes is kinda like working with a colleague who, if you let them, will drive you to hurl yourself off the roof of the building or come in one day carrying a loaded weapon with a mad look in your eye. 

The only way to survive diabetes is to find a way to work together. 

Most days, I can do that quite well thank you very much. I'm good at ignoring things that annoy me and tuning out the noises I don't want to hear. I'm good at feeding the lion so that he stays quiet in his cage. 

Sometimes though I lose my shit for a few minutes. I cry at the kitchen counter out of sheer frustration. I rail against the gods because sometimes I try so hard and it doesn't seem to matter one whit. These moments usually happen in the evening when I'm tired and they usually end with me curling up in bed wrapped up in warm, loving arms and falling asleep with tears still hanging on my eyelashes. 

I wake up in the morning to a pair of slightly worried but lovely blue eyes looking at me. 

"How do you feel this morning baby?"

And I don't even have to pretend. 

"Better, thanks" I say with a smile. 

Ready to take on the world again.

(The links to other writers' D-Blog posts for today can be found here)