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Known to some online as her half-Vulcan counterpart “T`Mana”, Brenda was diagnosed with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and Type 2 diabetes in July 2002 – and sent away from the doctor’s office with nothing more than two conflicting diet sheets, a warning that she’d never be able to chart a way between the two of them, and a couple of prescriptions – both of which had intolerable side effects.
Given this challenge, a degree in engineering, and years of professional online searching and indexing experience, Brenda put her training to work to find a way between the low-sodium and diabetic diet sheets and away from the unknown long-term side effects of maintenance drugs. Her diabetes has been diet-controlled since January 2004 and she hopes to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Brenda’s first experience with an online diabetes community was a mailing list for members of STARFLEET: The International STAR TREK Fan Association, an organization with which she has been active since 1985. In addition to TREK fandom, Brenda enjoys historical costuming (mostly 16th-Century Elizabethan) and hanging out at Renaissance Faires and Highland Games.
Brenda’s real-life diabetes circle includes her mother, her boyfriend, and several members of her boyfriend’s family (all Type 2). Her diabetes role models (both deceased) are her childhood orthopedist and her stepmother’s father.
Lindsey is a typical, yet unique, Texas girl who loves shopping, movies and reading. She loves to travel and take risks. She dreams of diabetes cures, never-ending cheesecake and her own airplane. The rest you can discover in her blog!
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Nicole Purcell lists having type 1 diabetes last when she's asked to provide information about herself - because that's where it belongs.(Read More)
It's a matter of perspective. Mine is colored by having grown up a mostly non-observant member of a religion that has many prescribed and proscribed behaviors, and by having had to quickly learn and adapt to those behaviors at different times in my life.
For those of us who develop diabetes at a later age, the amount of study and lifestyle change needed to adapt to managing one's diabetes is similar to that of someone converting to a much stricter social/religious lifestyle (I'm talking about denominations like Old Order Mennonite/Amish and Chassidic Judaism). For those of us who grew up with the restrictions of diet, it is in some ways like growing up in a strict religious culture.
As you mentioned, the danger of trying to "opt out" of strict diabetes care results in life-threatening physical danger. While the shunning and symbolic death/mourning involved in leaving these sorts of religious communities (or not following their strictures and being cast out from them) is mostly symbolic to today's non-believers, in previous centuries, it could result a real physical danger -- one might either be killed directly (by stoning, burning, etc.), or one might cast out far from civilization and left to face the elements (including wild beasts) without any possibility of assistance from any other person. So conformity really was (and in some communities, still is) a forced choice.
As I see it, the choice I make, and you make, is to take care of our physical bodies by following the appropriate rituals of care for our diabetes. Just as we can choose whether or not to observe all the rituals of our religions, we can (and do) choose to live with our diabetes, in as healthy a manner as possible, for as long as possible.
Brenda Bell (T`Mana)
T2 D&E dx 07/16/2002
T3 to 2 T2s (metformin/other
oral)