My two favorite blogs remind me that Diabetes has been hovering in the background for all of my life, even though I was not diagnosed with Type 1 LADA until I was 63 years old. One was written for the 2014 DBlog Week: Multiple Causes and One Issue (DBlog) The second was written for TuDiabetes in January, 2015, reprinted here:
My Friend with Diabetes
During the late 1930s and '40s, we lived across the street from a “mom and pop” grocery store. As my dad would say, the “fly in the ointment” was that during those depression years, we didn’t have much money to spend there. I was eleven years old when the owner, Mr. Lowe, allowed me to visit with his wife in the little kitchen/living room in the back of his store. They appeared to be in their sixties. Every morning Mr. Lowe carried his tiny, underweight wife downstairs from their upstairs bedroom and deposited her in an old fashioned wooden rocking chair.
Mrs. Lowe was totally blind and couldn’t walk. Mr. Lowe said her toes were curled up to let the “evil” out. He communicated with the spirits by tapping the eraser end of his pencil on the store counter, and the spirits allowed her very few visitors. I washed and dried their dishes every afternoon, then read to Mrs. Lowe from her one and only book–“Girl of the Limberlost”–for about an hour, while she rocked back and forth. That book was her life, as far as I could tell. The Limberlost Girl collected butterflies; perhaps those butterflies gave Mrs. Lowe beauty in her mind’s eye. The spirits never suggested that I be paid for my daily service, but that was OK. I just loved reading to my friend and being her contact with the real world, although we really never talked about my life. We moved when I was about thirteen years old, and I never saw the Lowes again.
Last night, during one of my occasional sleepless nights, I thought of those childhood days and of Mrs. Lowe. It seems clear to me now that she probably had Diabetes, quite possibly late onset Type 1; my own diagnosis of Type 1 came when I was 63. I couldn’t help comparing her life to mine as I remembered some of my bedtime routines: I took my nighttime dose of Levemir; did her husband give Mrs. Lowe any insulin injections? I took off my shoes and socks and checked my feet. My right foot has three problem toes that hurt and that I keep bandaged; fortunately there were no changes in them. The bottoms of my feet are numb, but my toes are not curled as hers were to let the evil out! I lay back and read my Kindle with its backlight and large font (a dog book, of course); it helps my reading although I’m far from visually impaired. In fact, unlike my old friend, I have little in the way of complications.
I woke up from a short sleep this morning thinking how lucky I am to be living in 2015, when we have access to Diabetes education, Diabetes supplies, and the DOC including TuDiabetes.