So my first exposure to Type 1 was through the boy crazy city girl character Stacey in The Babysitters Club series. I devoured those books from about age 6 to 8 and it really normalized the condition for me. It also, weirdly, made me familiar with some of the symptoms of the disease before diagnosis, which may have contributed to my son’s early diagnosis.
I’m not singing the literary praises of those books per se, but that got me wondering: What other books portray Type 1s? I know there is a whole genre of horribly educational “I Have Diabetes, What Does That Mean?” books, but I’m wondering about books with a real plot and characters with T1D. Which ones did you really like/hate? How did they affect you?
There is an episode of the walking dead midway in the last season that has a type one diabetic central to the plot. I think the episode was called “always accountable”. South Park has a type one diabetic character but he’s never central to the plot. Other movies and shows I’ve seen are unrealistic depictions.
Let me guess, the person died? Seems to always be the case when there’s a character with Type 1 in a post-apocalyptic story… (Though I suppose that’s at least probably accurate, for once…)
I’ve never really seen a good depiction of a multi-layered character who also happened to have Type 1.
I’ve mentioned this on Beyond Type 1, but a Type 1 action hero would be awesome. Whether it started as a book and then became a movie doesn’t matter to me.
But the hero (or heroine) would be like Dirk Pitt meets MacGyver–or Nancy Drew meets Martha Stewart. Like the Clive Cussler novels, they should always stretch believability to the breaking point in every way except for the portrayal of Type 1.
Long chase of the bad guy? Better get something to stave off getting a low. “Borrowing” pop from people on a crowded boardwalk. Mixing up the glucagon during the chase.
And doing completely evil things to the bad guy: injecting him with insulin to slow him down. Sticking a syringe in his eye just as he’s about to shoot someone.
My only exposure to diabetes before I was diagnosed was a character (the grandmother) in Roald Dahl’s novel The Witches, which my mom read to us when I was in perhpas grade 2, and later on the movie, which I saw in the theatre when I was in grade 3. I was diagnosed with diabetes a month into grade 4. This character had Type 2 diabetes, but it’s really my only memory of the term up until my diagnosis. I think it’s only in hindsight as an adult (having re-watched the movie at some point) that I even took note of it, even though it does play an important part in the unfolding of the plot.
