There comes a point where death isn't scary anymore. But hope...hope is scary.
I'm a fan of Grey's Anatomy on ABC. The latest episode featured a terminal cancer patient...a young and seemingly vibrant woman (minus the disease ravaging her body)...who was seeking physician assisted suicide. Those lines up there were ones she said in defense of her own death.
As they passed through the TV speakers, they hit me. Hard. I know they're just fiction, that some TV writer/producer thought them up. Someone thought they knew what it felt like to face that precipice. Maybe they actually do. Maybe they're writing from experience the way that I am now.
Those words hit me hard because it's a way that I've never verbalized about emotions that I constantly feel. I've never really considered death and hope in that way. The fear. In a reverse kind of way.
Death doesn't scare me. I don't believe that it ever has. Since I was a child, death stared me in the face. I lost relatives at a young age. I've even lost friends over the years...even though I'm only 21. Not to mention diabetes brings death to the forefront on a regular basis. So death doesn't scare me.
But hope...she's right. Whomever wrote it is right. Hope is so terrifying. Hope of a cure, hope of a life without complications, hope for being healthy. It's frightening, scary, just terrifying.
With the talk of an artificial pancreas and all the past 17 years of promised cures and solutions, hope seems at the forefront just like death. If you have hope, you have death. If you have death, you have hope. Either way, you can't escape them.
Hope reminds me that there are two sides to this coin. That there's a "what if" and a possibility. It reminds me that I might just get out without major scars. But then it reminds me that I might not.
Hope breeds disappointment. Like the promised cures that were supposed to happen 7 years ago. Or the first signs of a complication. It's the ball that drops. The sudden shift.
Hope is just plain scary. I can't say it enough. Hope takes strength to face and to keep believing. Hope is hard. It's a fight, a daily battle to keep your head up and your eyes dry.
Death is just easy though. Death is the release. It isn't scary. How can being done be scary? How can the ultimate solution be so frightening? It doesn't take strength to die. You don't fight to die (well, usually).
But you fight to live. You fight to live in good health. And all that requires hope. Hope to keep fighting, hope to have the ability, and hope to get the payoff.
So death is easy. And hope is the enemy.
I think in theory this article sounds accurate, but for a person who has a relationship with God, neither death nor hope are scary. For any one who loves God the hope of Heaven is much more than just a hope, it is a PROMISE, and death is not the end, it is a beginning. There is no "hope" in this life, only preparation for the next. I think the only way "hope" could be scary, is for the people left behind. The fact that it is going to be hard to live on without the other people or person we have had in our lives. We tend to view this with selfish hearts. What we need to remember is that we all will be in Heaven with the promise of eternal life, no sickness, pain, false "hope" or tears. If we accept Christ and seek to serve Him, our future is more than hopeful, it's guaranteed.
Hi cathi~ You're right that hope for the "afterlife" is directly related to religion/beliefs. My point was more about the hope for a cure or the hope for health in THIS life. Even with faith in Christ, there is still a portion of all us that would prefer health and that seek the promise and reality of a cure. Putting hope in Him to take that away whether in this life or the next...is still scary. No matter how strongly you believe, in my opinion.
Lindsey,
In your other post here you said you are on Accutane. A search on WebMD based on that drug-name showed an article that Hoffman-LaRoche has stopped selling it as of July of '09. You can still get it in its generic form, but it sounds dangerous.
Hoffman-La Roche are defending themselves against lawsuits - b/c the drug can cause depression (diabetes does that too), & psychosis, & even suicide.
You sound like you are pretty depressed. You shouldn't put off getting your numbers lower b/c of incidents of going low, you just need to get your endo involved w/finding out why those lows happened & go on fm there; you can do it.
What type of diabetes do you have? Are you on any diabetes meds? Some of them have been known to cause lows. There are probably many other reasons; but you need to speak to your endo to do this control of your diabetes thing more easily.
It is not about whether you like what she says, it is about how she is a specialist that has expertise about diabetes which will help improve your health & your life.
I lost close to 40lbs in the last 4.5 mos & I used to 'self-medicate' with food all the time; but when I got the diagnosis, I made like Nike & followed their tag-line - Just do it! & almost 40lbs later I can tell you it is worth all of the effort. I am not perfect, but I keep up staying in control.
Get help for all of your issues & I wish you the best. Nobody deserves to suffer needlessly.
seeker613
Hi seeker~ Thank you for the concern. The studies that link Accutane and depression are not conclusive. And I'm not depressed. As for the lows, I have always been prone to unexplained lows. I just deal with that...the lower my A1c goes (the lower anyone's goes) then the more lows I experience. And the more unawareness I see. I'm a type 1 so lows are sometimes just part of the business. Again, I appreciate the concern and to each his/her own! I just choose to focus on one health issue at a time. And after 17 years of this disease, I know that I have to stabilize the outer controls (like Accutane and PCOS) first. Congrats on the weight loss! I know how freeing that is!
Lindsey, if you are type1, then you are on insulin & lows can come fm the amount you take, & the type you take, long lasting, or fast acting & when.
I'm glad you are not depressed, the talk of how hope is the enemy & your not wanting to listen to your endo brought this to mind. Hope was the enemy for that woman in that TV episode (I saw it) since she was dying anyway & went thru so much time hoping & not having it help. It is always good to listen to experts. You are not in any _immediate_ danger from your glucose levels causing hyperglycemic probs (diabetic complications are waiting in the wings if you avg over 160 for too long), & while hypoglycemic shock can be dangerous, & the instances you've had can be scary (sounds it to me) that doesn't mean that getting better control of the highs will cause (more) lows; they have sources of their own & it may not be written in stone that shooting for under 200 (1 step at a time is what you like),rather than 250 as a target range will cause more (or more dangerous lows).
I have D also & while it is much better under control, I can relate, even if I'm not on insulin & have concern for my fellow D 'passengers' on this trip. I applaud those who have to use insulin. It takes a lot of extra time, effort, & control to be effective. I want you to have more effective control of your lows & that is why you should speak to your endo about the lows & what causes them. I'm no doc, but maybe you only need a pre-bedtime snack, maybe you need some tweaking of your meds.
It can be a challenge, but not having those lows sounds like it would be worth it to you. Accepting what your endo recommends may be unplatable for you, but she is a doc & a specialist & I wish that I could pick the brains of an endo sometimes, to better understand what is going on. Knowing helps. Look what it did for me.
Open your mind & open your heart & I wish you much success w/managing all of your conditions. My recently departed brother, my only sib (folks are gone for a while now) had seizures & succumbed to one; so I took your having seizures & D to heart as things I can relate to... All the best, seeker613
IMHO, it seems that bringing your pre & post meal numbers into a lower range does NOT necessarily mean that you will have more or worse lows. Sometimes one can have a rebound low fm being to high & my doc says that such aren't as likely to occur for type2's who are not on meds.
ooops, the last paragraph, fm IMHO should have been polished & put into another part of the body of my msg. a1c is the average & I'm hoping you can get better control in general & there are insulin related reasons for lows, & I've seen on diff boards on the 'net that ppl have lows for many reasons; but if you've had a history of _unexplained_ ones - I defer to your endo, she's the MD & specialist. seeker613
i would first like to say that you Lindsey are the reason i signed up today for Dlife.com i read your entry in Diabetes Forecast today, (my grandma passes her used issues to me) and i thought hhhmmm, sounds like a good sight. i am also 21 years old living with diabetes for almost ten years now. so with out purses and our disease we have a lot in common.
but besides that we also love grey's anatomy. when i also saw last weeks episode and heard what the dying woman said the words rang so true and brought tears to my eyes.
when i was diagnosed almost ten years ago, like you said, the hope for a cure right around the corner was always lurking around especially at the doctor's office. my mother and i always knowing next year would be the year or the next or the next. and all those next years become just that, years. and holding on to hope is a damaging thing. sometimes i would say i would rather die than to have to deal with this. sometimes i still do. and the little bit of hope i still have eats at me 99.9% of the time. so yes lindsey you are utterly and morbidly correct, without death we have no hope and with out hope we have no death.
you are an extremely talented writer and i'm glad to have found your blog. i can't wait to see next week's wisdom on grey's and i know you can't either.
Hi megan~ Thank you, thank you! Readers like you are the reason I love to write! It makes putting these morbid and scary thoughts out into the world wide web so worth it! I really hope you'll continue to read! We can rehash Grey's together! (So ready to see what Mer has to say about babies!)