I’ve seen it in print many times. Can’t recall ever hearing it spoken.
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I saw it used not too long ago on an airplane seatback advert video of the menu options for on-board food sales. “Feeling a bit peckish … ?” was the intro to an offer for a melted cheese and ham squashed sandwich on an Air New Zealand flight from Australia to Christchurch. I figured is was one of those Brit-speak English words, like lorry or loo.
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. . . or bonnet or boot or whip-round or chips or first floor (ground floor) or fag or . . . LOL
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I first heard the work “peckish” in a Monty Python skit in the 1970’s, looked up the definition, and (to the great annoyance of several of my family members, friends and acquaintances) immediately began using it whenever appropriate. And I continue to use it to this day…
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Okay so this totally made me laugh! Thanks for adding humor and you make some very valid points. The analogies are perfect and the donkey/child comments applicable:)
And, for the rest of you guys on this forum, I know it’s not an ENTIRE gender issue. I think Stuart’s point about “it” not being visible is very valid to anyone who’s not walking this journey. And, I recognize that the first responders to this message were a lot of men:) So, thank you all!
I"m seriously fascinated by this “leg locking” thing because it’s happened several times and I started wondering if it was neurological or something weird. I’m just thankful to know it’s a diabetes thing and something to watch for when I’m playing! And, it sounds like it presents a little differently for everyone but I know what it feels like for me. Just didn’t know it was related. So bizarre.
Agree it’s true for anyone that’s sugar-normal to not get us! But, @Stuart made me laugh with his comments and that was the point. I’m over being mad and just trying to educate. My poor husband does feel terrible. He didn’t get “it” because he can’t. He’s just going to have to trust me when I say NOW and I"m not a chicken little person so he won’t hear it very often…I hope!
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I can relate. I often get strange responses when I have a hypoglycemic episode in the presence of people other than close family and friends. I have had type 1 diabetes for nearly 25 years now and most people are confused when I explain to them about the differences between type 1 and type 2. I believe people are more familiar with type 2 diabetes versus type 1. I think that in itself leads to the confusion and misunderstanding of how to help and/or the severity or potential severity of a situation. For your sake I hope your husband was just confused due to you being newly diagnosed. Perhaps he thought your request was more like “hey honey can you get me a glass of water” versus “hey, I’m about to pass out and probably slip into a coma and die, can you run to the kitchen and get me some juice?” Try discussing the issue with your doctor and/or a counselor. Sometimes professionals as such can educate in a way that is understandable to those that are affected by medical conditions that loved ones are afflicted with. In any case, I hope it works out.
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I was diagnosed two years ago at age 49, and my boyfriend at the time was super unsupportive. He thought the best way to “support” me was to make jokes about diabetes to distract me from getting depressed about it. Since I wasn’t married to him it was pretty easy for me to dump him (there were other issues in the relationship that made that the best course of action). Unfortunately your situation is not so easy. I suggest you start seeing a counselor or therapist immediately, because you are dealing with a lot even without the unsupportive spouse and you really need to bounce it all off of someone. Plus, I think you might want to discuss your relationship with your spouse and get some perspective on what your options may be.
Also, and this comes from living alone, make sure you have quick sugar stashed everywhere within easy reach so you don’t have to ask the unsupportive spouse–or anyone else–for help when you need it.
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No one really understands a serious disease in any but the most superficial way—until it happens to them.
What makes diabetes different, I think, is two things. First, the epidemic nature of it—there are so many of us now, that these conversations between knowledgeable patients and others are bound to happen thousands of times a day. Second (and this is the big one IMHOP), diabetes is one of the very, very few diseases where the burden of managing it well rests on the patient. So we have to become knowlegeable if we’re serious about living a life with genuinely good control; there’s no practical alternative.
Put all of that together and it’s pretty inevitable that these disconnects will keep happening. That’s the problem. What the solution is, I have no flippin’ idea.
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Are there any other diseases that are treated by a dangerous, even potentially deadly drug, where the dosage varies continually due to myriad factors and has to be administered entirely at the discretion of the patient? It’s really kind of crazy when you think about it. No one would do things this way were it not for the fact that there’s no other way to do it.
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and unlike many serious diseases, it’s basically invisible.
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A very salient point!
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It is crazy. You’re diagnosed with a lifelong chronic disease and told to self-administer a drug so that you may continue to live. You get the warning: don’t take too much, or too little, and be careful with dosing in advance. You ask, “How much should I take?” Even though many docs will try to be concrete, the real answer is, “It depends.” You might ask, “Depends on what?”
The honest answer leads you down the rabbit hole: It depends on how much you eat, what you eat, the time of day you eat, how long it’s been since your last exercise, the duration and intensity of your exercise, the ongoing variability of other hormones that make up your metabolism, whether you are coming down with a cold or other illness, whether you are experiencing any stress due to work, family, or health issues, whether you are young and experience irregular spurts of growth hormone, if you’re female and what part of your monthly cycle you’re transiting, whether you’ve gained or lost a few pounds recently, whether you’re allergic to any of the food you eat, and the list goes on and on.
And the penalty for making a mistake can be significant. You can end up in the ER. You can go low while driving and cause a crash. It can be life-threatening.
It seems there are an infinite list of variables that impact blood glucose and you, the patient, with little help from the established medical community must administer the insulin dose and monitor its effects. Get distracted by life and you may find yourself regaining consciousness and wondering why all the emergency technicians are staring at you. You make dozens of metabolic decisions every day, day in day out, week in week out, year in year out. The decisions add up to hundreds of thousands over the years. If you manage to limit your mistakes to 1/2 of one percent, get 99.5% of your decisions spot on, you will make significant dosing errors 500 out of 100,000 decisions.
It’s a wonder we do as well as we do!
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This is a complicated subject. In the most simple terms, no, I haven’t felt like my wife was as supportive of my struggle with diabetes as I’d hoped she would be. I think it’s important to understand though that this situation isn’t easy on our loved ones either, whether they know how to show support the way we’d like it or not. The reality is over the last 5 years I’ve poured so much of my emotional capacity into diabetes that it’s affected everyone and everything around me. Much of that was emotional energy that would have been directed towards my wife and family in much more positive ways otherwise. So while they may not always seem as supportive as we might have hoped, it’s important to understand your spouse is suffering with this in many ways just like you are.
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Please make no apology’s on my account. LOL. I’m pretty good at making my own apology’s.
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Wow, this brings me back! I can remember, very vividly, being in middle school and walking down the hall way and my knee just… I don’t know, it just stopped knee-ing. I fell and was really embarrassed, but it turned out I was low. This has happened a few times, though not in probably 15 years. I’m glad I’m not the only one.
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A common thread I see here is the concept of resilience or our ability to adapt to adversity with a positive mental construct. It could be better but it could be worse but it’s how we deal with it that matters. It’s interesting to ask if we see ourselves as victims or as fortunate survivors with modern tools to manage our lives – I’m grateful I didn’t have to deal with the old insulins and lack of glucose measuring tools that some of the long-term diabetics talk about here. I’m not minimizing diabetes (since I live with it 24-7+), but it ain’t cancer. This will sound weird, but I’m happy to have diabetes. Why? Because after losing a lot of weight without trying, I knew the diagnosis was either cancer or diabetes and I got a lucky break. As for needing empathy from others, I have all of you so what do I care about what others who don’t have diabetes think? Why should I need them to understand what a glucose low is when it’s something that can’t be explained? Believe me, they have their own, often worse, problems – and ironically maybe they feel that we don’t understand them. Plus, they may be frustrated in that they care but can’t do anything anyway. Only we can manage our diabetes; my wife can understand or not, but if I didn’t bring glucose on a 5-hour mountain hike, then I’m going to win the Darwin award. Livabetes! Rock on.
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The thing is, sometimes they DO need to know, for the sake of our lives, because there ARE things they can do and that they NEED to do. As in the case of the original poster, KellyW, who was having a low and asked her husband to go get her something and he refused.
Last night my husband got home from work late. That made dinner late. One minute I was fine, and the next I wasn’t. I started having a low while trying to fix dinner and he was trying to talk to me. I was having problems concentrating on what he was saying as well as what I was trying to do and told him I couldn’t focus and we’d have to talk later. BECAUSE he understands what happens during a low, he didn’t get his feelings hurt, instead he told me to go sit down and finished plating up dinner for me.
I don’t really need his empathy, exactly, but I do need him to understand very basic things like the fact that I just can’t keep certain foods around the house all the time, and that if he wants those, he needs to eat them out of the house or take them to work - which he’s happy to do. He needs to understand that if he’s going to be super late from work he HAS to let me know so I can decide if I’m going to have a snack or eat without him. Diabetes isn’t just our own problem when we choose to share our lives with other people, because our lives directly impact upon theirs.
Our health problems cause stress for them, as you said because they may feel frustrated in that they care but they can’t do anything anyway. My husband can do things, though, because I’ve taken the time to educate him as best I can, and that’s removed a lot of the strain on our relationship that was there when he didn’t understand, especially when he came to understand that low blood sugar can make me snippy and snarly out of the blue - and that that has nothing to do with him.
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Well put. Ideally, in a relationship, we can help each other and it’s much harder when your partner is not in a position to understand your needs.
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