Diabetes Stigma
Diabetes Stigma is the most demanding aspect of the disease. Rather than telling people I was diabetic I would to tell them I was vegan, it seems veganism is more socially acceptable than diabetes which has become the new smoking. Misconceptions surround the disease, making life harder for those who live with it the most common of these being that people with diabetes have brought the disease onto themselves by eating too much sugar or being overweight. This is not just restricted to the media as many health professionals still push the obesity barrow insinuating that diabetics are lazy, uneducated, bingers and a burden on the health care. A side affect of diabetes is that it can cause obesity rather than the obesity directly causing the diabetes. Without insulin to process glucose in the blood stream your body has no option but to eliminate the glucose by conversion into fatty tissue, the alternative is ketosis, coma and eventual death. People with diabetes are often tasked not just with the burden of managing their diabetes but also educating both the people and health care providers around them about the condition. The sense of shame that comes from others’ misconceptions, the social isolation and my own feelings of guilt have taken a terrible toll and have been and still are the most difficult aspects of the disease to deal with.
Infighting occurs among people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes to the point where even education and support groups are segregated in a form of medical apartheid. People with type 1 do not wish to be associated with type 2 as they did not “cause” their disease, truthfully the type 2 did not ask to be diabetic either. Lifestyle factors can contribute to the onset of the disease but these are simply triggers, if you are predisposed to being diabetic you will become diabetic the only question is when. How diabetes comes about and how it is treated may differ for each person, but the desire for a world without diabetes is universal.
A catch-22 is the only way to describe exercise and diabetes. To lose weight you must consume less energy than you use, so that your body burns the fat deposits that it has. But before the body burns fat it will burn all the blood glucose, as this is more readily accessible. For a diabetic this causes low blood sugars and the treatment for this is to consume more sugar. Effectively, diabetes will cause obesity, it’s very easy to gain weight, but almost impossible to lose it. Diabetics need to exert more effort, both physically and mentally, in order to achieve the same goals as non-diabetics. Add to this the need to “play pancreas” by juggling a potentially lethal highball of sugar and insulin and you begin to appreciate the dilemma I found myself in. Where-as others could drop the paper and kick the ball around with the kids, for me the activity would require planning, analysis and mitigation plans. It makes filling out the forms for a school excursion child’s play, literally. Eventually the requests to play stopped and with it came the spiral into darkness. With a fear of food and exercise making the management of diabetes even more difficult as stress and anxiety can quickly change a normal blood glucose reading to high leading to ketosis, coma and eventual death. On the upside I have found yoga to be an excellent exercise regime for diabetics as it promotes both physical activity and mental well being as well as non-competitive social interaction.
