Music has always colored my life and, in turn, my life with diabetes.  Sometimes blue, sometimes neon pink, sometimes black.   My parents always had a record player, an eight track, a tape deck in our house and there were always plenty of albums and tapes to choose from.  Everything from the Beatles to Helen Reddy to Frank Sinatra to Devo.  When we camped in the summer, there was always a guitar around and some beautiful voices among my parents and their friends.  I never was instrumentally inclined, but I’ve been singing pretty much since I could talk.   So, yeah, music was – and is -  central to my existence.  And there are songs or musicians that I will always identify with moments or periods in my life.

I don’t remember all that much about the day of my diagnosis.  A few things stick out though, these small vivid glimmers of that hot June Thursday.   We were in the middle of a heat wave for one.  I remember the way the air felt sticky on my skin as my mother lifted me into our station wagon.  There was a really sick kid in the doctor’s waiting room, he was throwing up into a kidney shaped plastic pan, a rainbow of popsicle remnants.  His mother looked tired, and worried.  I recall the doctor I’d known since I was a week old and his kind old eyes as he called me “sunshine” and told my mother everything was going to be fine.  She didn’t appear convinced. 

What I remember most though was the nearly hour long drive from my hometown to Boston, where I would spend a week at the hospital.  My mother had bursts of tears and her knuckles were white, gripping and ungripping the steering wheel.  She had on a colorfully printed purple top.  What I remember most though, was the music on that car ride.  In particular, I remember in my half-stupor hearing and singing along to Blondie’s Heart of Glass, “Love is so confusing, there’s no peace of mind.”  Still now, hearing that song brings me right back to that day, more than any other thing.  I was eight and I really wanted to be Debbie Harry.  Even though I knew that my life was going to change drastically, and soon, I also knew that I still wanted to be Debbie Harry.  She was gorgeous, she was blonde, she hung out with the coolest guys, and she could sing.  I believe had it been a choice of going to the hospital and feeling better or going to New York City, meeting Debbie Harry and staying sick, I probably would have picked the latter.

As I got older and diabetes settled itself into our day-to-day existence, the music I loved changed as often as my bloodsugar.  You might have found me in my room dancing to Nancy Sinatra in the latex boots my mom had gotten me at a yard sale or stealing my brothers ACDC and Motley Crue tapes and banging my head like a crazy woman or lying in my mother’s lap, her fingers in my hair as Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald lulled me to sleep.   You might find me on the subway in Boston with a broken down walkman, all black hair and black lipstick with Robert Smith or Siouxsie Sioux or Jonathan Richman or Johnette Napolitano or Joey Ramone lighting my way or in my college dorm introducing my roommate to the Violent Femmes.  My music life has been much like my diabetes life, stopping and starting and filled with surprise and most especially, evolving. 

As a college sophomore, the day after I nearly died from a low bloodsugar because I decided that the consumption of a liter of raspberry vodka was a brilliant idea, I returned to my mother’s house and rested in my childhood bedroom in the dark, listening to David Bowie’s Space Oddity, feeling very much like Major Tom.  Alone, out of control, resigned, and floating.  “This is Major Tom to Ground Control, I’m stepping through the door, and I’m floating in a most peculiar way, and the stars look very different today.”   Once again, there is nothing that brings me back to that moment in time more precisely than those lyrics, than the sounds of those guitar chords.

There are other songs that are the soundtrack for my diabetes life.  Prince’s Darling Nikki and Terrence Trent D’Arby’s Wishing Well take me back to the first time I met one of my best friends with diabetes, Nathan, and to the week we spent in a hospital in Waltham getting diabetes education, but mostly causing so much trouble they threatened to send us home halfway through day three of that week.   Or James Taylor’s You’ve Got a Friend, which never fails to transport me to the Clara Barton Camp and the realization that I’d made friends who really *got* what it was like to live with this disease. 

What I love about music is that it goes on, it’s lasting and both life defining and life defying.  And boy, does it almost always make me want to dance.

Today, the music I listen to is much like my life with diabetes.  Varied, sometimes confusing, sometimes angry, sometimes too sweet.   Like a mix tape, there are moments of head banging ire and moments of lovely connection and moments of discovery and moments of familiarity and there are moments I want to just fast forward right past.

But mostly, my music life with diabetes has been and is a Blitzkrieg Bop…  A bumpy ride, a crazy battle, but in the end, one that I’ve made it a damned good time…  So, um, on the next thirty years?   Hey!  Ho!  Let’s Go!