Category Archive

It’s Diabetes Blog Week! Thanks to Karen from Bitter~Sweet Diabetes for coming up with and coordinating this exciting annual event. It’s a great chance to discover other diabetes bloggers from around the world. Here’s my third entry for the week!

Last week, as I skimmed through the topics for this year’s #DBlogWeek and saw Wednesday’s prompt, I gasped. It was an involuntary, sharp, sudden intake of breath and, somehow, it felt painful. I knew what I would write about. I knew I needed to write about this. It’s not only about diabetes, but then, it is, because everything when it comes to my health and my body is intrinsically linked to diabetes.

You see, it is time to let go. It is time to somehow acknowledge that I need to say good bye. It is time to release the pain and the hurt and the ache that, although it will to a degree always remain, is suffocating me in many ways. I need to unfurl it from the tight, protected ball that is so deeply placed inside of me and liberate myself from the hold it has.

Even though it is time to say goodbye to the pain, to the loss and the grief, I don’t want to. It’s not that I am bidding goodbye to the baby that, every day, I think about, or to forget about the loss.  But it is time to farewell the dream. 

It has been time for a while now, but I have held on stubbornly, resolutely, fiercely because I feel so sad and like I failed this little person before they could come into the world. By not letting go, I’ve somehow kept them alive and safe – at least in my heart and my mind. By feeling the pain, I have found a connection that was lost. 

And I’ve wanted to hold on to the dream of what could have been, and to spend daydream-y chunks of time each day imagining and wondering of little faces with long eyelashes and tiny heads of hair and miniature fingers wrapped around mine and the deep, even breathing of a sleeping baby. Because the baby was mine – was made from me, of me – and I didn’t get to actually see his face, brush the hair from her eyes, feel his fingers gently squeeze mine, hear and count her beautiful breaths.

I’ve held on for reasons that are confused and confusing and selfish and tied up with my very being. It makes me question everything I know of myself. Is this giving up? Is letting go giving up? Is it dishonouring the memory of my son or daughter? Have I stopped caring? Am I admitting defeat? Or acknowledging my shattered, damaged, broken body has won?

I don’t know and I will work through that over the next few months – with the some professional help.

But it is time. So. I say good bye. And it is time to start to forgive myself.

It’s Diabetes Blog Week! Thanks to Karen from Bitter~Sweet Diabetes for coming up with and coordinating this exciting annual event. It’s a great chance to discover other diabetes bloggers from around the world. Here’s my second entry for the week!

I am an open book. I am an over sharer. I have no filter. I frequently blurt out things that people really don’t need to know. ‘I’m just going to have a pee’, I might exclaim, getting up from the table and rushing to the bathroom when really, a simple, ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ would have sufficed. I find ice-breaker exercises at work meetings excruciatingly difficult because I can rarely think of one thing that no one knows about me or something interesting about me that I haven’t shared.

I wish I could say that I only share stories that paint me in a positive light, where I am all elegance and class, and look like I have it all together. But apart from being a complete and utter lie (seriously, the word ‘klutz’ was invented for me), it would give a really false sense of what diabetes is about. So you get the embarrassing and hopeless and ridiculous. You get the stupid and the nonsensical and the repeated mistakes. All of it. I am sorry.

But, having said that, there are things that I do not write about on my blog, or even speak about with others. There actually are parts of living with diabetes that are difficult to write about because I don’t like how they makes me sound.

There are days that diabetes feels overwhelming. Of course I write about that. (Oh, don’t I write about that?!) But what you probably won’t see me write about – and what I rarely talk about – is that sometimes I think that I have been dealt a really lousy hand when it comes to my health.

I don’t compare conditions – you will never hear me say that I have it worse than you, or, conversely, that we should just get over ourselves because it’s only diabetes and it could be worse. (By the way, don’t ever, ever, ever say to someone with diabetes – or anything else for that matter – ‘It could be worse’. Seriously. Just don’t.)

But you know what? There are days – usually after a bout of nasty, recurring lows; or vulgar, unforgiving highs; or this freaking burnout that seems to have moved in permanently – that I do really want to say ‘Enough! It’s not my turn anymore’.

And the reason I don’t share this is because apart from making me sound pathetic, I can’t allow myself to get into the sort of funk where I just feel sorry for myself. It’s too easy to start to believe it; it’s too easy to start to think that I really do have it tough, that it really is unfair.

The truth is, it’s not unfair. It’s just life. We all have crosses to bear, health issues to manage, shitty things that happen. And I don’t want to be the person who focuses on the crap when there is, somewhere in there, some sort of silver lining – often in the shape of a jar of Nutella.

It’s Diabetes Blog Week! Thanks to Karen from Bitter~Sweet Diabetes for coming up with and coordinating this exciting annual event. It’s a great chance to discover other diabetes bloggers from around the world. Here’s my first entry for the week!

I honestly believe it when I say that diabetes hasn’t stopped me from doing anything. I was diagnosed at 24 years at a really busy time where I was making plans, dreaming of my future and beginning to really think about who I wanted to be in this world.

And those plans I was making all happened. And the dreams came true. And I found my place in the world.

There are, however, some things of which I am particularly proud. The red velvet cake I made for Mother’s Day afternoon tea yesterday should probably get a mention. My book and boot collection make me proud as punch! I can recite pretty much the whole of Marx Bros’ A Night at the Opera. I can whip pretty much anyone at air hockey. But these things were never in question. I was always going to manage to achieve them. Diabetes or not.

But diabetes did make me wonder about some of the things I wanted to achieve. The dream of becoming a mum felt, for some time, as though it were slipping away. With diabetes mixed up in other serious health issues, getting pregnant – and staying that way – was something I thought would never happen . But that dream too came true in the form of a chubby-cheeked little baby girl who I am so privileged and lucky to call my daughter.

Diabetes doesn’t factor into the planning and shaping of my dreams and hopes. I wonder if it just makes me more desperate and determined to achieve. Is it despite or because of diabetes that we make plans – some large, some small – and then go all out to reach them?

I get the power of self talk and I also like to be positive. My diabetes has allowed that to a degree. It has played out in a way that hasn’t stopped me. Saying ‘I can’ has always ended up in ‘I did’ because, as well as being determined, the diabetes barriers have been minimal.

But that may not always be the case. I hope that if –when? – diabetes does throw up more challenges and makes things more difficult, I never stop dreaming and planning and hoping. I hope I never stop saying ‘I can do this’ – or even more so, ‘I did this’.