I should start this post by saying there is a history of heart disease and stroke in my family.
My father, at 43 had a heart attack resulting in a quadruple bypass surgery. The doctors at the time of the surgery told him that had he not quit smoking eight years earlier, he'd be dead, given the condition of his arteries.
My maternal grandmother, who struggled with insulin dependent diabetes (we're unsure if it was actually type 2 or LADA) and its complications, for the last 35 years of her life, died at 62 of a massive heart attack.
So, when I received a call from my dad a couple of weeks back and he left a voicemail saying, "Nicole, I know I don't need to explain our family history to you. I had my surgery at 43 and you and your brother aren't far from that and you've got the diabetes, who knows what it's done to your heart. With all the snow this winter, I know you're working hard shoveling and I'm worried. If you have to, hire a plow, but please don't be out there anymore shoveling snow on your own" I got welled up. Sort of couldn't help it. I hate that my dad worries about me. I hate the phrase 'who knows what it's done to your heart."
The heart and brain are the body's two most important organs. One or the other of those gives in, and you're toast. Scary, given the ways diabetes can affect both. Outside of blindness resulting from diabetes, I am most worried that I'll have a stroke or heart attack that cripples or kills or me.
Of course, I do everything I can to protect myself. I do my best to manage bloodsugar, I exercise regularly, I eat reasonably well. But still, the very possibility of these complications scares and saddens me.
If I'm being honest, it's more than just the idea of physical damage to the heart and brain. In Celtic, Native American, Greek, and countless other cultures and traditions, an injury to the physical heart meant an injury or at very least a change to the soul (the spiritual heart). As crazy as it sounds, I wonder how the wearing away of my cells by way of diabetes impacts my inner person.
I know that the worry and the balancing of a life with chronic illness in and of themselves make a difference in the spiritual heart in most people. Life with diabetes can prompt increased empathy and kindness and intimate understanding of challenge OR it can prompt amplified anger and resentment and an attitude that life somehow owes one something in return for their heartache. I like to think that in me, diabetes has encouraged the former. But, could it be that it will in time, with its gradual wearing of my heart, also plant in me those seeds of resentment and anger? If my body were to give way, if my heart were to stop or need serious repair, would I be strengthened or made more weary and bitter?
And my brain. Always, the best gift I've ever been given, my strongest asset, my most valued possession. I dread that someday I might lose my brain to a stroke. That it might end up locked inside of a body that doesn't work or that I'll have a physically able body and a brain that's inherently changed, that isn't my own.
Having watched multiple strokes destroy my paternal grandfather and aunt, I have seen how this particular complication literally ROBS. How it makes off with understanding, comprehension, coordination, emotional and physical reaction. How, in the eyes of the stricken, you find occasional moments of lucidity during which those eyes say "help me escape, let me go." In my moments of deepest thought on the matter, I hope that someone would have mercy on me and do just that: let me go. I hate that I think that way; that I think like a person who would just quit. But I can't help that that's my honest reaction. I loathe being 37 years old and having to have these kinds of thoughts at all. And again, I wonder what sort of impact this chronic life and all its attendant concerns have on my inner spiritual self.
I am grateful for my dad, when he worries. I am thankful for the tools I need to best manage my diabetes. I appreciate the fact that I have a family history that's recorded and that I understand. But, I am still, so often afraid. Of what diabetes has done and is doing to my heart, to my brain, to my body, and to my soul.
I can certainly empathize with "let me go". Geriatric Alzheimer's runs very strongly in my dad's family -- one of the results of generations of inbreeding. Each generation has said, in its middle years, "if I get that [out of touch with reality] please don't let me continue on" -- and each generation, as Alzheimer's strikes its parents, holds on as tight as it can to whatever contact they can keep with their parents, unwilling to let go. It's hard to say whether our elders' own sense of how in-touch they are, or are not, lies.
As far as diabetes changing our hearts and changing our souls... it does, in the ways you have mentioned. But also, to take from the traditions you mentioned, is the Hero Cycle. In many ways, each person's life is a Hero Cycle, and it is the parts of each story where the Hero is beset by enemies all around that strengthen him and give him the tools to conquer or suppress the villain, emerging triumphant. And it is that suffering that makes him never forget what his subjects or social lessers must go through; he develops a sense of humility because he understands that his triumph is as much a part of circumstance as it is of personal strength.
Diabetes is one of those villains that keeps popping up in our own hero cycles, like Lex Luthor to Superman or Moriarty to Holmes. We may never find the tools to completely overcome it -- but also, we need not let it turn us into a Riddler or a Morgause. It is our choice how to handle our demons. The fight is a worthy one.