Things Said and Done, Betes Style.

Being a person that has diabetes, I've discovered many things about myself that put me in a category of my own. These are a few things that I've experienced over the years that a non-diabetic would probably never see (or do) during their lifetime:

1) Watch your finger spray a line of blood across your best shirt (this is after taking a blood sugar of course, my fingers don't just spontaneously combust).

2) Chug a HUGE glass of water mixed with about a cup of sugar.

3) Out of nervousness, tell your skydiving teacher (just before jumping out of the plane) that you're diabetic and that your sugar may drop severely while in the air and expect him to be okay with it.

4) Eat everything in the fridge in the middle of the night due to a low blood sugar, while staying over at your friends parents' place.

5) Pee in your bed (and I mean really pee your bed, like a litre of pee) in the middle of the night due to a high blood sugar. I was 21 years old when this happened and my boyfriend at the time was sleeping soundly next to me. Let me tell you, it was mortifying.

6) Tell your dentist you have diabetes and that's probably the reason why you have a cavity (didn't get away with that one).

7) Use your diabetes to get out of an oral presentation in boarding school and then have to sleep in the infirmary for two days so the school nurse could keep an eye on you.

8) Argue with your university professor about his use of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes terms in front of everyone during a lecture. He was actually embarassed, and I felt bad...after the fact.

9) Become acutely aware of the amount of carbs in a banana, a pancake, a bowl of pasta, a slice of pineapple, a Starbucks hot chocolate, a cube of fudge (changes depending on size of said cube), anything really. I'm a whiz at carb counting yet I failed grade 9 math. It's still a mystery to me.

10) And last but not least, karate kick a co-workers chair while yelling "NO FOOD!?!?" after having run across the office to a department that usually has some snacks on their filing cabinet. It was very inappropriate and I got a few grumbles after doing that. Sometimes I get a bit aggressive and mouthy when my sugar is low.

All this to say that my diabetes has added a dash of colour to my life. 18 years of having diabetes can get tiresome at times but I keep on trekking and karate chopping, and I'm just fine. There are many more things that I've said or done while under the influence of too much insulin or too much sugar, but the ones listed are some of my favourites.

And for all of you non-diabetics out there: the next time you ask me if I'm going to go into a 'diabetic coma' right before I bite into a lovely piece of 'Death By Chocolate' cake, please watch yourselves. My sugar may be low right in that very moment and I won't be able to refrain from calling you a dolt and then eating my piece of cake, and yours too.

My insulin pump has been wrongly identified as a beeper among other things, on more than one occasion.