Fade in.
Close-up on a hand, shaking slightly as it lifts a metal cup. Pan as the camera moves to the subject's face, barely able to take a swallow of fluid without spilling it. After a half-coughed swallow, the hand half-slams the cup back on the workspace. The man shakes his head, unable to concentrate, pushes off from the workspace, and snaps at several other people as he walks briskly away.
From the second I saw the hand shake, I thought, "He's low. He's acting like he's low. Get the man some orange juice; he's about to pass out."
As the scene from Stargate: Universe played on, dialog exposed that this character had pulled the equivalent of several consecutive all-nighters and was strung out on... coffee. Diabetes had nothing to do with this character's idiosyncratic (or should I say, "more idiosyncratic than usual"?) behavior. Hypoglycemia had nothing to do with this behavior. Well, maybe it did, since the characters were low on provisions, rationing food and water to the bare minimum for survival as they searched for more -- but there was no indication of this in the dialog or actions.
We've all seen diabetes portrayed in drama -- in some works more accurately than in others. One of the strengths of storytelling is letting the listener, reader, or viewer use his own imagination to fill in the blanks -- both before, and as, the story unfolds. In a traditional mystery, we follow the clues -- dialog and descriptive evidence -- suspecting one person then another, discarding some hypotheses and strengthening others based on character interactions, physical evidence, and alibis, until we come to a firm idea of what happened, to whom, by whom, when, and why. Our experience of life, drama, actors, and authors to-date color how we interpret the words we read and hear, the actions we see, and the visual clues placed in the scene. In real life, many of us have been party to the "Where's Waldo" version of "Spot the Diabetic" -- we see the pump controller, the glucometer, the PDM, the CGM receiver, the glucose tabs, the syringes and pens... But in fiction, diabetes -- or hypoglycemia -- does not exist where it has not been explicitly added to the story. Absent a few expository words, a meter check, or an obvious injection or bolus, there's no reason to think that any character is diabetic, or that diabetes is a factor in the storyline, or that it even exists.
So why were my first thoughts, "He's low"?
Is my life so colored by diabetes that I can't see caffeine overdoses, sleep deprivation, or any of a hundred other causes of shaking, loss of concentration, and uncivil behavior? (Is yours?) We've all heard the phrase attributed to Freud, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" (emphasis mine) -- meaning, that there is no hidden or other meaning -- that said cigar is neither symbol for, nor symptom of, anything else. Yet so much of our lives centers around avoiding highs and lows, keeping our own (and/or our loved ones') numbers in balance, and watching out for signs that we are about to escape the narrow bounds of "good control", that it's easy to see how that attention can spill over into other, unrelated areas of our lives -- or cross the line from vigilance to obsession.
We may not be able to escape diabetes in our "real" lives -- but that should not be a reason to burden other people's fictional characters with something their creators had not intended for them. Still, obviously, I do. Do you?
