Telling My Truth

When I was diagnosed with diabetes Mom promised that it wouldn’t define me. I was 14, and all I wanted was to be just like everyone else. Sitting next to Mom on the folding chair in the diabetes support group meeting, I listened to the mothers of diabetic kids tell stories about doing their kid’s shots, and not letting them play sports or away to camp. The kids just sat there.

“We just don’t like David to be far from home,” a mother told the group. David looked about my age. His mother was overweight in a soft way, a way that made me want to put my head on her lap, and I imagined what it was like inside their home. I knew they had wall to wall carpeting, a fridge stocked with juice, (in case David’s blood sugar got low) pretzels and sugar-free soda for snacks. I hated the word snack. I knew David’s house was in a neighborhood with sidewalks, cable tv and a 24 hour grocery store. I knew that his mother packed his lunch every night before bed, and sometimes went to his school to peek in on his class and make sure he was okay. David sat in his chair with his mother’s flabby arm around the back and I made a secret pact. I was not going to be like those kids. I was not going to sit on the sidelines and I was not going to tell the truth about this disease.

The truth stared back at me from the heavy, gray haired faces on the cover of the only magazine available, Diabetes Forecast with glaring headlines about heart disease, blindness and amputations. I wanted to read Seventeen magazine. I wanted to read about the latest jeans, how to find the right guy and I wanted to look at the ads for lip gloss, not sugar-free candy. The only other person at school with diabetes was Lillian, the head nurse who wore her white uniform with pride and her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She warned me about using diabetes as a crutch and I felt her watching as I stood in line at the cafeteria. I felt her shaking her head in disappointment when I took a muffin at breakfast or a cookie at lunch. She clucked her tongue like a chicken at me and was a depressing reminder of the reality I was trying to deny. When I did tell the truth about having diabetes, a glimmer of recognition rose to the surface of my audience and I was told, “My grandmother had the sugar diabetes.” I tried to explain the difference, but it was easier to just keep it to myself.

When it was time to take my drivers test, I was used to denying the truth. I’d worked hard at not letting diabetes define me and even though I knew how to do my own shots and could recognize when my blood sugar was dropping by the trembling of my hands, I looked just like everyone else. I’d been studying the driver’s ed manual and was counting down the days until my test. Mom drove me to the DMV over winter break, and I saw myself driving her back home. We walked in and sat down in a room full of people. Mom gave my hand a squeeze for good luck. Finally, the woman behind the counter called me to the front.

“Are you Amy Stockwell?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, you can’t take the driver’s test. You have Type 1 Diabetes,” she said. A buzzing noise filled my head and blocked out the voices in the crowded waiting room.

“She needs a letter from her doctor telling us that the diabetes is in good control,” the woman yelled across the counter to my mother as if I wasn’t standing right there. Everyone turned to stare, and tears filled my eyes. The truth was out and Mom was wrong. I ran out of the room in tears.

I didn’t want to tell the truth because it was ugly. The truth was mothers doing their kids’ shots and keeping them close to home, the truth meant not being able to drive without a doctor’s note, the truth meant being compared to someone’s dead grandmother. The truth was Julia Robert’s death scene in Steel Magnolias. The truth was dirty, needles and bloody fingers and drooling and stumbling around, needing juice or cake icing poured down your throat without tasting when you were low and coming back to life covered in sweat and sticky from the sugar, panting like an animal.

But the truth refused to stay hidden. I carried my supplies (my syringes, my insulin and my candy) in a small bag but when my blood sugar dropped, there was no hiding. There was depending on other people, sometimes strangers to shove candy down my throat in the middle of a church in Italy. The truth was carrying food in my bag, always needing to know when we were going to eat and what we were going to eat and feeling unfeminine, unattractive and unlovable. The truth was my blood sugar dropping every time I wavered from my routine, and sneaking around looking for food at a boyfriend’s house like a burglar after everyone was asleep. Opening and closing the cupboards, searching for a cracker or a granola bar and drinking Cranberry juice alone, in the dark, until my hands stopped shaking. The truth was hoping no one would see me.

The truth came slowly, like a leak in a backyard pool. I graduated from college, after proving that I could keep up with everyone else, and the truth began to empty out. I met my husband who shrugged his shoulders when I told him about having diabetes as if it was no big deal. I got pregnant and decided that if I could breast-feed in public, I could give a shot in front of other people too. I could drop diabetes into conversations and not get angry with yet another story about a dead grandmother. I could prick my fingers in the middle of a movie theater without scaring the person sitting next to me. I could subscribe to diabetes magazines that were now trying to appeal to a wider audience and had faces on the covers that resembled mine. I could start a collection of stories about living with diabetes and make friends with people who shared my secret. Suddenly, there was water everywhere.

I’m beginning to accept that I’m not like everyone else. I’m beginning to understand that a definition is just another layer. My name is Amy Mercer, and I am a woman with type 1 diabetes.

Amy S. Mercer is a freelance writer in Charleston and is working on an anthology about living with diabetes as a woman.

~Amy Mercer