Muscle Clip Art

Have you ever had a diabetes moment that called for desperate measures?

I've had a few too many to count.

Picture this.

I am in college. I am spending the night at the penultimate bachelor pad of my then-boyfriend. A few hours after going to sleep, I awake in a panic. I am covered in sweat, my t-shirt stuck to my skin in all the wrong ways. At first, I can't figure out where the hell I am. When I finally get some of my bearings, I grope around in backpack for my meter. And realize I have no meter. I know that I've left it on my bed in my dorm room. My boyfriend is passed out cold - or at least is pretending to be. And in that moment, driving myself the fifteen minutes back to campus seems a bad move. Oh, well, I think, I'm definitely low.

I stumble across the floor and into the kitchen. There I find a bottle of mustard, a bottle of oil, a frozen pizza, a half bag of sugar, fifty cans of beer, and about a cup of cool whip left over in its white plastic container.

There is no juice to be found. I weigh the options. The frozen pizza? Now that won't do, given how close I feel to passing out. How about some beer with sugar mixed in? Clearly not a great idea. Oil with sugar? Oh, my god, ugh. Water with sugar? Had tried that before and proceeded to throw up.

In the end, the cool whip won the war of desperation in my head. I took the cup that was left and mixed it with several tablespoons of sugar. Needless to say, it wasn't exactly a culinary masterpiece. But after it hit my blood stream, I felt so much better. There would be other moments of desperation in the kitchen of that bachelor-pad over the course of the next year.

When you have diabetes, you have to get good at handling desperate situations. In the majority of cases, the desperation is low blood sugar and food related. You have to figure out just what kind of food you're willing to consume when all of the options seem disgusting or unworkable. For example, when you've gone through the entire store of hard candy and/or glucose tabs you carry on your person and you're at a workplace with a sold-out vending machine. I know I'd scour that office, asking anyone if they had candy or anything high in sugar that could help. And if I had to, I'd resort to the sugar packets in the kitchen.

But do we take other, even more desperate measures?

Like the time we spend logging, calculating, dosing, reconfiguring. In a sometimes hopeless attempt to control this disease.

Or the way we try to get the most possible time and use from our supplies. For me, seriously hazardous overuse of lancets is more than laziness, it's wanting to get the most for the money I spend on a box of those things. And I can't count the number of times I've walked the thin line between a perfectly good four-day-old insulin pump infusion set and a dangerously painful four-day-old insulin pump infusion set. Diabetes is crazy expensive and these efforts in conservation, risky as they are, sometimes seem necessary.

There will never be a shortage of desperate times or desperate measures in the life of a person with diabetes. But there is a bright side. With each desperate situation, we learn. We become more aware of the corners we can cut without hurting ourselves. We become better prepared. We become more able to steel ourselves against the difficult things we come up against. We are made stronger.

D is for diabetes.

D is for desperation.

But most of all, D is for determined, d is for durable, and d is for driven.