Scared to put a child through this. Sometimes its not a good day, sometimes I’m at the Doctors and on the end of horror evaluation. ‘I’ve been ■■■■■■■ like crazy and up all night.’ ‘It’s probably just nerve damage caused by diabetes,’ she replies. Turns out to be too much Diet-Coke irritating my innards.
Smack goes my toes off the doorstop around Christmas (no I was not drunk). First Nurse tells me, 'The one beside the big one that does not bend, that one is broken and has fused badly.' Surgeon at the hospital tells me, ‘It’s not broken, its probably diabetes killing off the nerve endings in your feet.’ I’m looking at this guy; I haven’t even taken my shoe off yet.
I’ve been through much of all of this already with Background Retinopathy, Macular Edema, laser eye surgery and an injection of Lucentis into my eyeball. And I think I’m on top of this, in no small way thanks to finally understanding my diabetes control is down to 90% diet and exercise and only 10% medication. So the last thing in the world I need is every medical professional who has read a pamphlet telling me I’m self-destructing, because it’s not me I’m thinking of anymore.
Conversations with old people, “Everything is so bad, everything hurts, everything began falling off when I turned fifty.” I’m thirty-seven years of age, I don’t want to be having these conversations ever, I don’t want to be gearing up for this hurt when my own little ones are either smashing windows or taking insulin shots.
Cursed by this, forever in the background of my life, I don’t want my child to be entering his or her diabetic solstice aged fifteen. I’m terrified to put them though this; not in reality because of anything wrong with me, but because of the headlines that kill us and the people stupid enough to believe in them. My kids will be brought up by Natasha and I in the most idyllic country surroundings and blessed with love, nurtured in organic protein and should they genetically disembowel as I have into diabetes? A natural worry I don't really have to worry about.
There is nothing about this disease; there is nothing about how I live now that would allow this condition to disrupt a young life.
On a good day, this is not such a bad disease to have and I have the healthy furry toes to prove it!