Diabetes: This Time It's Personal!

It's the post you've all been waiting for: the tale of my diagnosis! There's actually a lot to the story, so I don't know if it'll fit in a single post, but it was also unnecessarily dramatic. This is some VERY personal stuff, with A LOT that seems to have nothing to do with diabetes. In fact, let's dive right into the drama!

EXT. 1960's CANARSIE, BROOKLYN, NY - ESTABLISHING

Whoops. I taught myself how to write screenplays a couple of decades ago... but scene headings are a great way of setting the scene. EXT. tells us we're outdoors. 1960's CANARSIE, BROOKLYN, NY, let's us know exactly what part of the world we're in. ESTABLISHING  would be a screenwriter's way of saying that the scene doesn't focus on any one aspect and that stock footage could be used.

So here's the subtext that couldn't and wouldn't be in a screenplay... Canarsie was predominantly Jewish back then, and a 30-year-old man who wasn't married was easily rumored to be a fagelah. That's the Yiddish derogatory world for homosexual. The man in question was my father.

A few years younger than him was my incubator, who was seemingly perpetually single.

Okay, let's get this out of the way. She performed the functions of a mother in my early years, but she was never a "mom," and she was so toxic that even calling her "mother" is too much of a stretch for me. She performed the minimal function of giving birth to children, but she continued the cycle of psychological abuse that she endured, with some mild physical abuse mixed in. She was an incubator. That's it.

Anyway, they met on a blind date and kind of forced themselves to stay together. If they hadn't, my father might have had the rumor of being gay hanging over him further, and she risked becoming a spinster. As I heard it - third hand, so take it with a grain of salt - they dated, got married, started fighting the night of the honeymoon, and never stopped fighting thereafter.

I'm not even an itch in my father's pants and I'm off to a great start!

The Plan: they were going to have three kids no matter what. Here is their reproductive efforts summarized:

1. Unnamed child - miscarried
2. Unnamed child - miscarried
3. Unnamed child - miscarried
4. Unnamed child - miscarried
5. Unnamed child - miscarried
6. Unnamed child - stillborn
7. Mike - died of leukemia when he was five and I was three.
8. Me - became a Type 1 diabetic at age seven.
9. Eddie - developed a bone tumor that turned out to be benign, but scared the bejeezus out of everyone because; until it was revealed to be benign, could have been cancerous. With his birth, the incubator was warned that any more pregnancies would put her in a wheelchair for the remainder of her life; the result of a herniated pelvic bone.
10. Scott - adopted

Note that the names have been altered to protect the guilty.

In truth, Mike's death was the end of any possibility that we'd be a "family." Eddie and I were already present, so when Mike died, she refused to so much as shed a single tear. When asked by an aunt why she didn't cry, she answered, and this is a direct quote, "Someone has to take care of these kids."

These events help you frame everyone's emotional status when I developed a nasty case of streptococcal pharyngitis. Okay, now I'm just showing off. It was strep throat. A very, very, very, VERY bad case of strep throat. I remember breathing hurt. When my youngest brother Scott caught it, he was almost hospitalized because it was so bad!

What comes next is pure conjecture. It's a good theory, but because it can't be duplicated in the same subject - me - there's no way of proving it. You see, Type 1 diabetes is classified as an autoimmune disease. Our bodies' immune system malfunctions, leaving us without a way to make insulin. So in my case, imagine the virus I had had a similar protein structure to my beta cells. Not identical. Similar. When the immune system goes on the offensive, it reads protein structures and attacks anything it believes is foreign. My body, confused by the terrible virus I was dealing with, killed the infection AND my beta cells simultaneously.

Voilà. Type 1 diabetes.

The incubator noticed several things. I wasn't as active as my seven-year-old self normally was and I seemed extremely thirsty. I'm told I took a container of milk from the fridge and drank right from the carton. (Mmm... All that lactose, (the sugar in milk, remember?), to make me even sicker!)

Weirdest detail for me to remember: the empty jar of baby food I was told to pee in was mashed carrots.

We rushed to the doctor's office with that sample and it was tested. And Dr. Needles - name unchanged because of its existential irony - said to the incubator, "You have to get him to the hospital. He may be dying."

One of the things a new patient has to do is submit a family history of illnesses. Subtracting the miscarriages and stillborn, which probably weren't included, Mike's death would be in there. So this utterly brilliant pediatrician used those words to describe the situation. "He may be dying." Fan-freakin'-tastic!

There's more to tell, but this post is long enough for now. And we really need something uplifting after all of that drama. So here's one foxy photographer.

Whatever he's shooting, it's

gonna look amazing in his

portfolio!

LATE EDIT: What is with this bizarre reformatting?!? I haven't a clue as to what I'm doing or how to fix it. 😠