By Arianna Meyer
You’d think that as the girls line up at the starting line they are all wishing for the same thing. Wishing for their numbers to be perfect, numbers that will qualify them for later greatness. While the track girls talk about the numbers they hope they will break, I will be hoping for completely different numbers. I want numbers that will keep me from hitting the track unconscious. Numbers that will keep me off a hospital bed. Numbers that will keep my mother’s tears from pouring onto me, as I lay lifeless. I get it; it’s not as bad as cancer. No, I don’t spend all my days in a hospital but this is the hand I’ve been dealt and sometimes I truly just want to be normal. What people don’t understand is my loss of freedom from having diabetes.
The teenage freedom I crave so much is perfectly portrayed for me in all my friend’s lives. Going out, letting loose, enjoying their young years without a care in the world seems ideal for me but it’s just not plausible. Imagine writing down every food that passes your lips for three years of your life- that is my reality. Last year, the struggles of diabetes became too much for me, I had decided I’d had enough. I stopped the shots, stopped the blood sugar checks, and was done writing what I ate. This came with even more issues to suffer from. It stunted my growth for eight months during the most important time of maturity, and brought a slew of repercussions on different bodily processes. I dropped thirteen pounds over the course of three months. I was drinking seven to eight full glasses of juice a day, which resulted in up to fourteen trips to the bathroom a day. The normalcy I was striving for, the desire to be as carefree as my friends, and the wish to just wake up without diabetes was not happening and I didn’t understand why.
Under the pricked skin and the ports in my body lives Arianna. People forget with the insensitive questions like; “Why do you stab yourself with needles?” Yet, I have realized people aren’t there to point me out, they aren’t there to make me feel horrible about my disease, and they’re simply uneducated and curious. It suddenly came to me when I was in the doctor’s office watching my mother crying, my dad’s face flush with anger, and my doctor’s eyes fill with disappointment. What am I doing to myself? My parents took away my car, they took me off my insulin pump, sending me back to daily injections, and I lost my independence. I felt I lost my age, no more eighteen-year-old Arianna, now I was 10 years old again, newly diagnosed having my mom and dad watch over my shoulder. What was my sixteen-year-old sister going to think of me? What was going to happen if when we are left alone and I became unconscious, what would she? The questions- endless. The fears- endless. My decision- clear as day. Why was I letting a disease I hated so much dictate whether or not I could feel free? The disappointment my family would feel as they found out that I had been lying to them, leading them to think I was fine and taking care of myself when I knew I was ripping away at the lively Arianna they knew so well.
My doctor was fed up with me. She has a patient my age that gave up on Diabetes and had no intentions of gaining control again. The patient was recently diagnosed with kidney failure and now on dialysis in addition to her major struggle with diabetes. I had a pit in the middle of my stomach. I was careless, I had not a care in the world for diabetes but this was becoming too real for me. I had always heard if you don’t take care of your diabetes then one day you will regret it. All too fast it became all too clear, that one-day could be tomorrow. I am not going to become another statistic of diabetics who suffer because of their lack of caring, I was not going to become the story that my parents would tell people of the person I used to be. Now, after hearing the damage this disease caused someone my own age I have better control of my diabetes. I know how to carry myself and how to put my hate for this disease into fighting for a cure. I want to beat diabetes in a different way. Instead of fighting to push and hide diabetes, I’m conquering and proving my capability to rise to my challenge. I now understand that the numbers and I, have a new starting line…