My Relationship With My Body
Being diagnosed with a chronic illness threw my relationship with my body for a loop. I’ve spent the last five years reconciling what my body can’t do with what it can, but sometimes the latter outweighs the former.
It doesn’t help that most people I talk to either don’t understand what Diabetes fully entails, or get so uncomfortable when I talk about the realities of living with it that they default to telling me how strong I am or how they could never do what I do on a daily basis. I get it, Diane, you’re afraid of needles and so was I before my diagnosis. At a certain point I couldn’t smile and nod anymore and started being honest: You could do it if you didn’t have a choice.
Seriously, if you asked me a month before I woke up in the hospital how I felt about needles, I would tell you that at sixteen I still teared up every time I got a shot at my doctor’s office.
Those comments from people aren’t helpful. Believe me, I understand how uncomfortable this makes you, it’s natural to be uncomfortable when someone is telling you about a near-death experience they’ve had and the lifelong effects of a chronic illness. It’s not a fun topic!
Back to the point. I grew up having symptoms that, I was told, didn’t have a cause. I went through several doctors and a CT scan on my head to get to the bottom of my migraines, and there were no answers. To be clear, I didn’t want my pediatrician to find anything in that scan, I just wanted there to be something that could be fixed. But there was nothing. So, it seemed, my body was ringing a false alarm. I went about my life as normal, dismissing any day I felt sick or just off as part of my life now.
Until the day my body couldn’t fight anymore and started to give out. It had been screaming for help for nearly a decade, and it finally exhausted itself.
Ever since then, I’ve had to work on actively listening to my body. If I don’t treat a low blood sugar, it could be fatal. I can’t push myself to the limit anymore without my body reminding me that I need to take care of it. I am responsible for it, in more ways than before my diagnosis. I am responsible for injecting myself with a hormone that makes my body work the way it’s supposed to.
It isn't just physical, though. My diagnosis and my experience afterward fundamentally changed me mentally as well. The biggest change was receiving my generalized anxiety disorder diagnosis and subsequently starting therapy, but that isn't all. I will carry the trauma from that experience for the rest of my life–every time I smell that sterile hospital smell it transports me back to the PICU. At a recent visit to my endocrinologist, there was a woman in the waiting room who had been brought by ambulance to the office. She was in a stretcher with her son and two EMTs around her. Seeing her and hearing them ask her the standard questions (do you know where you are? Where you came from? Do you know what day it is?) filled my chest with panic. I had to remind myself that I was fine, I was safe.
This experience changed me. In some ways for the better, and some ways, maybe not.
Long story short, it's complicated.
