I shouldn’t ever drink coffee in the evening again. It gives me weird dreams. Dreams about being miraculously cured. Dreams about losing my weird identity.
http://carbohydrated2.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/a-nightmare-trip-into-a-nondiabetic-world/
http://carbohydrated2.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/a-nightmare-trip-into-a-nondiabetic-world/
I got to work with the NTSB investigation and one of their investigators used a curious phrase in an ironic way, observing how (at work) we work around chronic systemic failures. He used the phrase “accustomed to the task”.
I think he had a very good point, and I think it applies to you and me as diabetics. We grow so used working around the failures of the system, that we feel that something is missing or taken away, when the failure is there no more. We think our job is to work around these failures continuously and resent it? or miss it? when we just think about the possibility that the failure won’t be there to work around anymore.
Closest way I could describe it to a non-diabetic: suppose your neighbor worked on your car, gave you some magic carbeurator that didn’t need any gas to ever be added to your car again, and the fuel gauge always read “Full”. Wouldn’t you be worried that something was wrong? That there was something unnatural? That maybe you did actually have to put gas in but you could no longer tell when you’ll need it because you never ran low on gas again? That’s the closest I can think of.
Certainly for me (diagnosed as a kid, now 30 years post diagnosis) having T1 diabetes and all the chores and worries that go along with it, is almost the only “normal” I’ve ever known, the one fact that has followed me around to every school and job and meal and family and friend and activity. It’s never left me, and I can’t imagine it ever will.