Other than the expected shock, you never know how you'll react to someone passing away in front of your eyes -- or while you are en route to a critically-ill relative -- until it happens. I don't usually experience grief in terms of torrents of tears. I do experience a degree of depression, and psychological paralysis, and for months afterward (sometimes even years!) I think I see deceased people walking in crowds (they're pretty obviously someone else who looks similar). Right now, logistics are the only thing in my mind.

Logistics -- not that my mother has left this world, and my father is in his own Alzheimer's world. How are we going to make sure my sister can continue to survive? How are we going to deal with personal effects? What can we keep, and how do we sell what must be sold? How are we going to foot the unpaid bills of burial -- not to mention whatever emergency-room bills follow?

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I got a bit of flak from a number of folk in the type 1 community for juxtaposing the You Can Do This project with the "you CAN eat this if you have diabetes" mentality of, well, many of the same folk. The issue is, the same folk who are, on the one hand, encouraging us to test and inject and correct are the folk who are talking about Food Police and Diabetes Police and how we, as people with diabetes, have to fight against those stereotypes by -- well, by eating all those things we should never touch with a ten-foot-pole.

This may work for people with type 1 diabetes, but it can be deadly for those of us with type 2.

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There's something that haunts every person who remembers Life Before Diagnosis. We describe it as spontaneity, carelessness, social acceptability, freedom.

What it boils down to are food and money.

For starters, diabetes robs from us the ability to "just" eat when we are hungry, not-eat when we're not, and not have to weigh, measure, and log every morsel that passes our lips. Then, it robs from us the (admittedly ill-advised) pleasures of the occasional ice-cream sundae or wolfing down half a pizza pie. And because we can't be certain of the foods that we don't prepare ourselves, it robs us of the ability to eat at friends' and relatives' homes, or even casual-dining restaurants.

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It is often difficult to ask for help. Many of us see it as a sign of weakness, or as giving up our independence. In the case of those of us with diabetes, it may mean coming out of the insulin closet for the first time, exposing ourselves for possible loss of job opportunities, medical insurance, or even medical care. One might say that for some of us, getting the medications we need to live right now puts our future income, and our future health, at risk. On the other hand, sometimes that exposure can point the way for others with similar difficulties to find life-saving solutions. In that sense, those of us who go public with our pancreatically-challenged state are sometimes privileged to be the lightbearers for others' lives.

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I don't like to post "downers" on Blogabetes unless I can turn them into cautionary morals, or calls to action (either on our own behalf, or on the behalf of all people with diabetes) -- most of us have too much negativity in our lives already. That said, life has been throwing me the sorts of curve balls that force me to think more of survival, mortality, and quality of life than I am comfortable dealing with.

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RichSeattle

Yesterday, I sat in on a diabetes education training class at one of the local children's hospitals. My mentor suggested participating in order to better understand what a CDE does on a daily basis. That way I would know exactly if I wanted to go forward with this as a career.

It was definitely a great experience. Not only did I get to see a close up view of a CDE's job, but I also met some new contacts and opened my eyes to the real world. I don't think CDE is what I want to do, but it's still a possibility.

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