So I was on a desperate search for empty insulin vials for a project, when low and behold, I found a blog post where someone had collected their empty insulin vials for over a year. I feel like I go through a bottle of insulin every week. It’s like water to me. And for so long, being diabetic was this thing that I would hide like an addiction. I have been diabetic for 12 years! Thats a dozen years of finger pricking, insulin injecting and hospital visits. Sometimes I feel like a lab rat. But then in the middle of the night, I stumbled on this website, and I think its the coolest thing. It’s like facebook and myspace, but with a cause! Connecting diabetics.
I have met 2 other diabetics that are not in my family in my entire 20 years of living. My great grandparents were diabetic and both my grandparents on my mother’s side are diabetic, Type 1 and Type 2. Half of my aunts and uncles are prediabetic and the other half are type 2 diabetic. 2 of my cousins are type 1 like me and 1 is type 2. Welcome to the never ending genetic mutation that will forever control our lives in my family.
But I have found a place where people might get me. I have lived in dorms for 2 years at college and nobody has ever known that I was diabetic. When I test, I do it when nobody is around, I constantly go to the bathroom to either take my insulin or adjust my bolus and its kind of time consuming. How is it that after 12 years of being diabetic, I am still hiding it! Maybe here is the place where I can be me, a 12 year veteran of the war on diabetes.