Bec, I love your attitude, when we cant change things there is no use fighting them, we need to accept and own what ever comes up in our lives in order to be able to live fully this you have done, good for you for being so mature at a young age! amy
I certainly don't mean to come in here and dump on your thread, so please don't take any of this the wrong way.
There is a lot of positivity here and I'm truly glad that people have found ways to not only live with this terrible disease, but also make some sense of it, and find ways to see the positive. I do appreciate this community for everything it is and the wonderful people here, and in a real sense, I can feel better about my condition because of the what people post here.
The most positive thing about diabetes, though, is that I have learned to accomodate it on a daily basis to the best of my ability. I can't look at a disease that basically says, "In return for not killing you in a relatively fast, yet painful and horrible way, I will kill you slowly over many years if only you will accomodate my every need 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for life. You can hope for better if you dare."
I lead a good life full of satisfaction and contentment, but it is not the life I envisioned for myself before I got diabetes. I do not dwell on what could have been if I didn't have diabetes. I embrace my life as it is. But I also do not credit diabetes for giving me anything that I didn't have the potential to achieve for myself already.
Maybe it's living with it for over 25 years that has given me this perspective. I've come to terms with what I have to do and what it means for me if I don't. I don't need to make anymore sense of it than that.
I was *very* wild when I was younger but probably would have been quite a bit wilder had I not had diabetes acting as a motive to be sort of responsible.
I'm with you, I am living a healthier life thanks to diabetes. I used to not care about my health, and now that I have diabetes, I am constantly reminded that I have to keep on track. Even when I get lazy and slack off for a while, I always have that constant reminder and I bring myself back to a healthier me. Now I exercise regularly, watch what I eat and eat a more balanced meal most of the time. I live to bake, so now I bake for others not myself. I am connecting with a lot of my clients now that I have diabetes and know that they have it also. I keep literature about diabetes on my desk to raise awareness. I talk to others about having a healthier lifestyle and hope that they will listen. I now live a fuller life than I did before being diagnosed. It's like a switch was turned on that made me realize that I was wasting my life and now I enjoy life and hardly ever have a bad day, even if everything around me is going wrong. I try to put everyone around me in a good mood whenever possible. Just a few of the things that have changed within me, and it's all thanks to being diagnosed with diabetes. So I am thankful for that wake up call and am now living my life.
>> and wake up on the 'right' side of the dirt...
Awesome. Stealing that.
/\/\
I've said this before, but I honestly do not think diabetes has improved my life at all. It has done nothing but limit me. Sure, I can fight through it and try to live a normal life. But when I do succeed, and have a day without any diabetes disasters, The only reward I get is getting to be "average" for a day... woohoo?
The only useful skill it has taught me is carb SWAGing... but that skill is ONLY useful to someone with diabetes! In a normal person, this would be useless information.
maybe I feel this way because I don't have a previous life to compare to my Dlife. But as far as I can tell, this sucks. It sucks financially, emotionally, and even vampirically; those stupid little strips are sucking the life out of me, 5 micro liters at a time.
I'll be first in line when the magic cure appears. I'm counting the seconds as it can't happen fast enough. I am so tortured from the sugar swings. It's just plain wrong and my body and mind tell me every day. For any diabetic that does not feel completely tortured by this you have no idea how lucky you are. If I had the choice of living another life diabetic or never existing at all without a question it would be never existing. When they came up with the word suffering Diabetes was as the top of the list.
It's made me more "in tune" with my body, and is the reason that I'm studying to become a registered dietitian.
Thankful for D? No way. I think it would be a rare person or situation to be thankful for a condition like this. Maybe even a little warped. But, the challenges we face can bring positive results to our lives. Like any challenge can and, for the most part, does. Sometimes you have to look for the positive to realize it is there. Sometimes it just sneaks up on you. When we refuse to aknowledge it we can be caught in the darkness of our problem. The same is true for our family and friends. To be abandoned by them is a sad and shameful commentary on their existence.
As I said above, I think that it is unfair to post something so negative - I am not trying to put a smiley face on anything nor do I believe positivity to be a waste of my time; I am simply trying to take notice of good that can come from seeing things from another point of view. Perhaps, some of us chose not to bother wasting our time and energy perpetuating negativity.
Thank you Amy :)
FHS - do you no think that embracing your life as it is is a positive thing??
I appreciate your perspective and thank you for your efforts "not to dump" on the thread ;)
Cheers for that "up" reply :)
I share your love of baking - not long til you get that ink, now eh??? :)
I totally understand where everyone is coming from - I have had D for 14 years, was diagnosed under horrible (near fatal) circumstances in the middle of high school - but I simply cannot devote my energies to hating the disease for any reason, because I think that kind of attitude robs me (not everyone, but ME) of truly feeling well. I do not understand why anyone would want to/allow themselves to be consumed by it (negative emotions, etc.)...why not convert that into something else?
I feel tortured some days too - and this disease has tried to take me out twice, but I am still here and I would go through it all again and again...because I get to wake up, draw breath, look at my beautiful boy, peer out the window to a wonderous world full of things to see and do. Would I like to be cured? Yep, sure would - but I also think of people (diagnosed before modern treatment) who never made it as far as some of us have...
That's awesome, Laura - good luck with your studies!!
And, I agree...it totally makes you more in tune!
Totally steal it - it is something my grandmother used to say (she passed last fall at 94 after suffering heart failure for years) and it would make her pleased as punch to have it used :D
I do not think I am warped and take a bit of offense to that - I am thankful because for me the alternative to being diagnosed w/D was death.
I agree Bec. D or no D life holds no gaurantees for anybody. D is only one of the awful things that have come into my life. Many folks on TuD have MUCH more to deal with than D. Life is what it is. You just keep going or you waste away and "wake up on the wrong side of the dirt" (absolutely love that BTW). D is awful, cancer is awful, losing a child is awful, but what have we to gain by simply giving up and playing the victim of our circumstances? We can all go through time of feeling sorry for ourselves and being angry at whatever has happened. This is normal. To hold onto those nagative attitudes is a poison more deadly than our disease.
Now that I can agree with - I am not saying that people should not feel upset, angry, frustrated, negative, etc....I have felt all of those things and more, I have had horribly dark days, but I find that just drains me and cannot afford to exhauste my energies that way.
All I wanted to do was present another side of D...