SeeLight

Rachel Moss and the Legions of Hiding Assholes

Those of you who haven't yet heard ...

there's an internet brouhaha going on over a girl -- word used advisedly -- named Rachel Moss, who went to WisCon and posted a con report on Something Awful with pictures of mostly fat and transgendered participants, taken without permission, making fun of these people for their non-normativity. She apologized, then took her apology back. She took her post down, but someone else put it back up without her permission and a dogpile of cretins jumped in to finish the work. By the time they were done, they pulled WisCon photos off of Flickr to add to the mess, making fatphobic, transphobic, ablist, racist, and generally misogynist comments about a wide variety of individuals, many of whom are my friends, and all of whom are at least nominally my allies, by virtue of being WisCon attendees who treat others with the modicum of respect required for this Con. There's a link to a mirror of the original post at Angry Black Woman, who is also calling for people to post about this and make sure Rachel Moss' name is well connected to this on the internet.

I don't care about Rachel Moss -- the culprit here -- and I'm happy to see her banned from WisCon, but I'd be just as happy to see her show up again and get snubbed and hissed as she deserves. I doubt very much she'll even try to come back. Apparently she's on the public (blogging) record as having an eating disorder of her own--bulimia--which makes this attack both more understandable and more disgusting. I'd ask that no one who comes through this post attack Rachel Moss for her eating disorder--that's her problem--but rather for her unacceptable behavior regarding WisCon.

I have the advantage of having been an extremely close friend for 18 years of a woman who suffers from Cushing's Disease, a disease that affects women disproportionately, and that actually makes women fat. I got to see her develop from a physically healthy and average-sized petite 20-year-old into an obese woman in her late twenties, without any "normal" reasons for the change. I got to watch her fight misogynist doctors and careless HMOs for over a decade before she could get someone to diagnose her with the often fatal disease she already knew she had. I got to see total strangers casually call her "lardass" and suchlike on the street, dropping bombs on her when they weren't even in a bad mood (I get the bombs usually when the bombers are in a bad mood), simply because that's what you do with a fat woman.

 

And we're talking about a woman whose obesity was very definitely not "her fault."

But then I've also gotten to see in close friends the effects of early abuse and early eating disorders pushed upon them by family members (I tend to think pushing eating disorders on a child is abuse, but the abuse I'm talking about was often from someone else, and far more serious and devastating than even eating disorders). If these people "made themselves" obese by overeating, what person who knew the kind of childhood they had, the kind of families they have, could possibly blame them or say that their eating was their own fault?

And who the fuck are these people to take it upon themselves to decide that someone deserves to be openly hated -- and to hate themselves -- for a body that they did not choose? Thinking about it makes me want to cry in a way that thinking about all the bullshit that actually touches my own life --- the racism, the stupidity about multiraciality, the neverending aggression I get from men for being tall, and all the put-downs I've had from misogynists --- does not make me want to cry.

My feminism, my antiracism, my refusal to allow total strangers to get me to agree that my tall woman's body is abnormal, all of these empower me. But watching fat people get smacked down makes me want to cry because while most of me is an ally, a small part of me still tugs me towards the smack-down crew, and how can we fight this when I'm also the enemy?

There's still a little voice in my head that agrees with such awful people as Rachel Moss when they say awful things about fat people. I've come close many times to stomping that little voice out, but it's a tough one. It's the same voice that tells me I'm fat, but it's okay as long as other people are fatter. I know a lot of you out there know that voice, even if you won't admit it.

Rachel Moss knows that voice, only she has completely failed--if she ever tried--to stomp it out. She's let that voice take over, and it's a monster's voice. That's what she's turned into for the time being: a monster, who's projected her hatred of her own body onto the bodies of others, to get some relief. Who can really doubt that that's what's happening with women who hate on fat women?

And who can doubt that that's what's happening with women who hate on disabled people? I read the blog of a friend every day who posts about how much pain she's experienced that day and whether or not--and for how long--she was able to stand before having to resort to her wheelchair. Her blog strikes me dumb because nothing I experience puts me in such physical pain and I can't even properly imagine it. And some ... god I don't have bad words enough to express it, let me resort to other languages ... some turtle's egg, some drecksau posted a picture of her in her wheelchair and called her a "cripple" and someone else hoped she'd get cancer and undergo chemo so she could cosplay Charles Xavier.

I'm actually crying with rage as I write this. I don't think I can dig deeper into the comments on that post to find the extraneous shit. So far they've turned a picture of a (black) friend of mine into an icon with the tag "100% N*gger" on it, hoped that a Muslim woman's head gets chopped off, and ... I'm not continuing with this filth. Who are these people? And will someone who knows how to do this please let the rest of us know how to get them kicked off the social networking services they're using so we don't have to hear about their shit anymore?

But all you need to know about shame and cowardice is that every one of those losers posting in comments is hiding behind a username and icon, and every single one of the women they are making fun of is out in the open on the internet.

I'm closing comments on this post because I'm just passing the word on.

Register Your Bone Marrow!

Hey all, somebody else needs a bone marrow transplant.

Actually, a LOT of people need bone marrow transplants. Bone marrow is much harder to match than blood, and it's much likelier that someone will find a match with a donor from their own racial or ethnic group.

But people of color don't register as bone marrow donors in the same proportions as whites. So people of color with leukemia tend to get screwed. Mixed race people especially tend to get screwed.

I'd do it, but my diabetes prevents me from donating just about anything. So instead, I'm passing on the word, hoping that some of you will step up and do it for me.

If you're a person of color, you can get a free testing kit. Click here to register, no matter what color you are!

A Letter to the World About My Body

Dear Everyone Who Isn't Me, and Especially the Wonderful Women of BlogHer,

I want to participate in your Letter To My Body project. I really do. I think it's wonderful.

But in trying to compose a letter to my body I realized something: I don't see my body as separate from my self. Presumably here, "self" is mind, while body is some sort of symbiotic adjunct. I don't pretend to understand mind/body split. All I know is that when I say "I," and when I say "me," I mean, in both cases, my body + my mind + my soul, if there is such a thing. My "self" is something composed of all the things I put "my" in front of, and my mind is no more--or less--connected to my self than my body.

This is not because I am Special And Better Than You. I live in this fucked up western youth and beauty obsessed culture, too, and I'm not all that strong-minded. Just ask my container of cornnuts.

I think it's, very simply, because I am a type 1 diabetic. Diabetes shares with other chronic, incurable illnesses a number of traits, and a great many effects on the psychology of the sufferer. But one thing I think is unique to diabetes (I say this in all ignorance; there could easily be other diseases with similar traits) is that the disease enables many diabetics to track the effects of eating and exercise--the twin bugaboos of skinny-bitch culture--on their bodies and minds in real time, and gives them the tools to control these.

I won't go into the details of why (I might at another time); let it suffice that diabetics under a regime of insulin therapy can feel amplified effects of eating various foods, or not eating enough food, or exercising too much or too little. These effects are felt immediately, in a matter of minutes or hours. And, most importantly, these effects work immediately on the brain functions, so that a diabetic's mood, rationality, even intelligence, memory, and problem-solving abilities, can change literally minute to minute depending on food intake and exercise.

When my blood sugar goes down, it's not "my body" failing "me," it's me fucking myself up. My mind disappears with the failure of my body. I literally lose the part of me that people seem to most consider the "self" when my body crashes. I don't see mind and body as dependent upon one another or arising out of one another. They are the same. They are two ways of talking about me.

You may not see this in diabetics who got the disease during or after adolescence, and you may not see it in teen girls whose parents underscore society's body-image lesson. But I got sick when I was eleven. I was a late bloomer in any case, and eleven for me was hardly even "tween." My first experience of body-consciousness was the disease and its management, not fat and boobs and periods and sex.

Sure, I thought I was fat all through my teens and into my mid-twenties, when I smoked so much that I got really, really skinny. But I never got into the habit of doing anything about it, because the consequences of crash dieting and excessive exercise (insulin shock) or of not taking my insulin (which helps you put on weight) were so severe and unpleasant that I would simply rather be "fat" than have to live like that, day in and day out.

Don't get me wrong. Just because I consider my body's "flaws" in the same way I consider my personality flaws, doesn't mean that I haven't hated myself, and don't still hate myself often and often. I do hate that my thighs are fat. I don't like my legs, period. I really, really wish that that roll around my waist would go away. In fact, the moment a fad diet appeared that spoke the language of diabetes, I jumped on that wagon train and am still riding it.

I smoked heavily for well over a decade, and still smoke a little now and then. I used to drink like a fish, and still tie one on when I feel I can get away with it (I usually can't). I pig out. I do recreational drugs, when I can get them. I avoid exercise. I do all sorts of self-destructive things, still.

But when I diet, I'm not punishing my body, I'm punishing myself. When I struggle to control my diabetes, I'm not fighting my body, I'm fighting the diabetes.

I am my body, so the struggle is not against my body but against myself. It can be a subtle distinction sometimes. But at other times it's a huge, honking distinction.

It can be a bad thing. Because I don't objectify my body, I dress and groom to express my mood to a much greater extreme than most of the people I know. So I'll often mismatch the occasion, or go for two days without showering, or fail to wear makeup in formal situations and then go all out with the eyeshadow to go out for a beer. Other people seem so much more able to look better than they feel. I'm getting better at this, but it's hard to look like something I don't feel.

But it, of course, can also be a good thing. Because when I feel good about something smart I said, I feel good about my body. When I feel good about some beautiful prose I wrote, I look beautiful. When I manage to be kind to someone I don't have to be kind to, my shoulders relax. I don't live split in half.

Like right now, just now, when I was thinking about writing a letter to my body, and I peeled my mind away from my body for a moment and I did not at all like what I saw.  My body, apart from "me" is just a collection of failures. I hate seeing photos of myself for this very reason. I don't know how to pose for pictures. What I look like is in motion, because my mind and body are always in motion. You can't freeze a frame of that and get a true picture of me.

I don't think I've ever put this into words before. I've just never been good at participating in girltalk about bodies. My answer to "if there was one thing you could change about your body, what would it be?" is, of course, "take the diabetes away." But if you changed that, I wouldn't be me. Even that is me.

I've always been discomfited by this line of talk, and always thought my uneasiness was just political. But it's not. It's personal. I just don't think this way, and the project of trying to heal your mind/body split by underscoring your mind/body split seems like the wrong tack to me.

Talking to your body as "you" rather than "me", making two of one, won't make you love the putty that is your flesh any more than you already do. Hell, I have terrible trouble loving myself, and my every grain of flesh is animate.

Just wanted to try to articulate that.

Love,

Claire

2008 New Year's Goals 'N' Objectives

I'm not doing resolutions for 2008 because the word has too much of a "giving up for Lent" connotation. I'm going to do goals and objectives instead. That's less foreboding. (Plus, does the world really need another "why I don't do resolutions" post? If you don't do resolutions, then not-do them in silence!)

2008 Goals and Objectives, with subclauses:

1. Get writing again. This is the big, important one. I really didn't write at all in 2007, beyond some blog posts and revision on already drafted stories. Some notes and story ideas. That's all. No substantial work on da nobbles and no complete new stories generated. That's the objective. The goals are more immediate:
   
   
   
   1. full draft of a new short story every month
   
   
   2. completed first draft of the YA fantasy
   
   
   3. completed second draft of da Nobble
   
   


2. Read more challenging and inspiring material. In 2007 I read a shitload of YA. Deliberately. And I'm glad I did ... but I kinda feel my muscles atrophying, and I have a pile of grown-up books waiting for me. Also, nonfiction, hello?


3. Get on the insulin pump, which will definitely happen. I've taken the first steps already and the thing will appear in January most likely.


4. Work the blogs. This blog you are reading is easy, because when I don't feel like doing a big, long post about something challenging, I can do my equivalent of catblogging. But that's boring for me and you. Plus, I've figured out the difference between atlas(t) and atlas(t): Galleon Trade Edition, and I want to work both.


5. Get fit. I.e. exercise five days a week, minimum twenty minutes. No other goals there, because apparently, this is challenging enough.


6. Lose that 15 pounds. It really just slides off when I eat right, so the key to all of this is wanting to eat right, which means handling stress better. Which relates directly to the above objective and the three directly below.


7. Get regular massages.


8. Go dancing regularly.


9. Regular dinner parties, game nights, and other relaxing, small social events at my house. Yes.

This is more modest than last year's set, but very similar, because, basically, I'm the same person with the same desires and ambitions, which I made no progress on fulfilling last year. Argh.

Happy New Year, all! Please post links to your own resolutions so I can compare and contrast. And then feel badly about my lack of ambition or lack of realism.

Diabetes Videos: Good, Bad, Ugly

Okay, to finish up National Diabetes Awareness Month, here are two videos from YouTube:

This first one, which you don't need to watch more than a few seconds of to get the idea, reveals that only white kids get diabetes, and tries to make you feel sorry for the precious souls. The beeyotch who made it doesn't seem to get that "no one deserves this" isn't really an argument, and that diabetes research should be funded not just because cute, fluffy, white kids get it.

This second one is from a cool series called Cooking Up A Story:

Stories about real people and their special connections to food and sustainable living.

No on-air talent, no scripted programming, and no studio environments, just authentic stories filmed in native surroundings.

And, it features a hapa kid with diabetes! Yay hapa diabetics! He's cute, too, although no particularly fine point is put on that. Rather than trying to make you feel sorry for the poor cutie, the video just shows you the rollercoaster of blood sugar values that is a typical diabetic kid's day.

Note here: this is a not-so-good example of what life is like on the pump. The kid's BGs (blood glucose values) are really terrible and he can't seem to stay on top of them. This might just be a bad day for him. Or it might just be that he's a kid; kid's don't always handle diabetes that well. It's complicated and relentless.

Come to think of it, that right there is a much better argument for donation funds to diabetes research. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation is the typical place to do it, although their slogan about "saving childhoods" makes me gag. My childhood was technically more complicated than everyone else's, but it was still a childhood.

Why I Am Going on the Insulin Pump

Bakc when I first got diagnosed with diabetes---and this is twenty-five years ago now---I took two injections with a syringe a day, at the same time every day, got up at the same time every day, peed into a plastic tub and tested it at the same time every day, wrote that down, ate the same amount of food at the same times every day, went to bed ... yeah, you get the picture.

Back then, there were no home blood testing kits, so we had to check urine, which could tell you what your blood sugar levels were an hour or two ago, but not right that second. So I wrote down my urine test results (about five a day) and took them to the doctor every three months, who looked at the overall picture of when my blood sugar was high and when low, and adjusted my 24-hour-7-days-a-week schedule to try to even it out more. Sometimes I'd have to take more, or less, insulin for a few months, or take it at a slightly different time.

If my blood sugar went up back then, I just had to wait for it to come back down. If it didn't, eventually I'd have to call the doctor.

Nowadays, this type of treatment is mostly not used anymore, because it's so inflexible, and wears on the body. The goal is to get your treatment to mirror a healthy body's self-regulation as much as possible. So you test your blood sugar throughout the day to see where you are, and you "correct" your blood sugar values by taking insulin if it's too high, or taking sugar if it's too low. There's a science to it: a certain number of units of insulin will manage a certain value of milligrams per deciliter (I think) of sugar in your bloodstream; and a certain amount of sugar will bring your low bloodsugar level (mg/Dl) back up a certain number of points.

There's an art to it, too. If you've exercised, your insulin will be more effective so you'll want to take less. If you're sick, or PMSing, or just tired, or even just stressed out, your insulin might be less effective so you'll have to take more. The kinds of foods you eat affect how much insulin you'll need to take and whether you want to take it all right away; with some complex carbs it's better (for me) to take some insulin before the meal and some after, because it takes the body so long to digest the food.

Point is, you control the whole thing yourself now, not your doctor.

This is now possible because: a) we can test our blood sugar and know where it is right this second, and b) we now have artificial insulins that can work much faster than the more naturally produced insulins I used to have to take. When I was first diagnosed, I took cow insulin. Those allergic to cow took pig insulin. You can probably imagine how much this did NOT mirror a healthy body's self-regulation. It wasn't until my college years that human insulin could be reproduced. A few years later they came out with Humalog, a human analog product that starts working much faster.

So the treatment I'm on now, and have been on for far too long, involves taking a basal insulin, a long-acting type of insulin that releases in my body over the course of 24 hours so that I always have insulin working, and then taking bolus insulin, a short acting type of insulin that responds immediately, so that I can take it right before I eat, or when I've discovered that my blood sugar is too high. The bolus I take with a pen, which is an injection device that looks and works a lot like a pen, only with a syringe cap instead of a nib, and an insulin instead of an ink cartridge. You can carry this around easily and shoot up in front of other people without them noticing half the time.

But the treatment is still vulnerable to human error ... or in my case, human laziness. If you don't FEEL like getting up to go take a blood test or take your shot, then sometimes you don't. Or sometimes you just get it wrong.

The pump takes a lot of that error away. Like the body, the pump's basal insulin output is done with the same sort of short-acting insulin that the bolus output is made with. But the pump gives you a little basal insulin every hour or half hour. You program it to give you the right amounts. Then, when you eat, you type in a bolus and it gives it to you right away.

It's a little hard to understand why this is better without knowing all the ins and outs of diabetic treatments, and I'm not gonna bore you further. Suffice it to say: it's a LOT better because it gives you more control.

The rub? You have to wear a hypodermic tube at all times so that the insulin gets delivered into your body. I could have gotten a pump ten or twelve years ago, but it's taken me this long to get over the psychological block against wearing a disease machine sticking out of my body. I'm over it now, but it's still pretty trippy.

Anyway, I'm set to get a pump before the year is out. We'll see how it works out.

Chronic Disease and Doctor Phobia

Despite the grand title for this post, I've done no research and have not even anecdotal evidence to support my assertion that chronic disease will give you doctor phobia.

No, not everybody. But seriously, think about it. The reason that most people aren't afraid of doctors or don't hate them might be that most people, most of the time, for most of their lives, are fairly healthy. Or, if they're not, their poor health is a result of lifestyle, and manifests in frequent bouts with colds and flus and things of that sort, i.e. not doctor-ready disease. So most people just plain don't see doctors very often, very long, or very intensively.

People with chronic disease associate doctors with bad things: the time you got so sick you almost died and went to the doc/hospital and they told you you had a disease which would constantly threaten, and in the long run shorten, and on a daily basis completely alter your life. And thereafter, going to an office to get frequent updates of bad news.

And this is the best case scenario. I mean, this is what happens when you have good doctors. When you have bad doctors, you can add to the above:

1. The time/s something really bad happened that didn't seem to have anything to do with your disease and your doctor blew it off and you ended up in the hospital, and it was a fellow chronic disease patient who explained to you what was wrong.


2. The time something really bad happened that DID have to do with your disease, and you ran around the doc's office/laboratory/hospital, freaking out and telling everyone what was happening to you and what you needed and nobody would listen to you or give it to you until you'd had a meltdown/seizure/fainting fit.


3. The time you were in shock, a condition which is a common side effect of your treatment, and your doctor let you walk out of his office into traffic because he didn't like how you were behaving.


4. The time/s your doctor didn't know something that you did know, but wouldn't admit it and made you feel like an idiot, even though you KNEW you were right and an article came out years later that proved you right.


5. The times you went to your disease doctor for common problems and s/he told you s/he wasn't a primary care physician, so you asked for a referral and they wouldn't give you one, then you picked one out of the phone book and they were so clueless about how your chronic disease behaved with common problems that you (see a theme developing here?) ended up in the hospital.


6. The time/s you started with a new doc and during the intake interview the doc came up against the fact that your symptoms are atypical, so s/he just plain wrote down what s/he expected your symptoms to be, rather than what you had just told them they were, and you only found out later when you got the ten-page DMV form back from them that they had to fill out for you to get your drivers license, that they had sold you out to the DMV for the typical, and more dangerous, symptoms that you didn't have.

Yes, all of these have happened to me.

And, on top of all of this, I had the ultimate bad experience: during a common, out-patient surgery in 1999, my anesthesia began to wear off halfway through the surgery, and during the last fifteen minutes I felt what was going on. (It was eye surgery.) It hurt, but the anesthesia hadn't worn off entirely, so it was really more about fear and loss of control than anything else.

After that I didn't go back to that opthamologist for three years. Sure, I made appointments, but then, when the day for the appointment came, I'd just ... forget. Then I'd remember when it was too late and make another appointment and then ... forget. Again and again. For three years. Finally, it occurred to me that I didn't actually have to go back to that doctor and I found a new one. Two years later, I finally got my butt into a seat in his office.

From there things went to worse. I was absolutely awful to the staff in his office. Of course, they put me through an obstacle course which was worse than usual: a clipboard for my info, a nurse to take more info, a tech to do the tests, an underling doc to do an initial examination ... all of this before I got to see the real doc. The underling doc asked me some questions which made it clear that he wasn't too familiar with diabetes ... and I told him so. By the time the real doc came, I was persona non grata. Even after I burst into tears and commenced to sob in his office for half an hour, it didn't seem to occur to anyone to ask if I was alright. All that mattered was how I was treating them, how they felt about me.

I finally explained what had happened to the doc and he got a lot nicer ... but not before he had defended the bad doc to me. What an asshole. Yeah, both of them.

Now understand: I realized that I was avoiding the eye doc, but I didn't actually feel any fear per se. I didn't feel anything, not even the desire to avoid the doc. It was all happening under the surface, and manifesting in a very simple inability to remember my doctor's appointments. After my crying jag at the eye doc's, I realized that I had been hiding a leetle bit of trauma, but I still didn't realize that I might be doctor phobic until this past week.

See, I'm trying to get in to see a new doc, who works together with a primary care doc (my current doc doesn't do that, but it's important for chronic patients whose common flus and infections are complicated by the chronic disease). I made an appointment, forgot it, made another one, and forgot that, too.

It was weird. The second appointment, I put it into three different calendars and reminded myself mentally of the appointment three or four times a day for a week. Then, the day of the appointment, I forgot about it from nine in the morning until 5 in the evening--exactly as long as needed to prevent me from doing anything about it.

It was bizarre being able to observe my own neurosis in operation. So obvious! So unsubtle! So effective! I decided to nip it in the full-blown bloom and went straight into the doc's office the next day, without an appointment, and asked to be allowed to introduce myself to the doc, just for a sec. He seems like a nice young man, the first doc I've had who was very obviously younger than I. Let's hope that does the trick.

People who know me consider me independent in the extreme, and it's true, I insist on my independence. But what no one realizes is that my life is lived in a state of the most abject dependence: on doctors. The pharmaceutical products that literally keep me alive--insulin and thyroid--aren't available over the counter, why exactly, I don't know. I can't get a lifelong prescription for them. I can get, at most, a year's prescription for the stuff I've been using for twenty-six years. I need a doctor to get them for me.

I can't even order tests for myself. I'm supposed to get a certain set of tests done quarterly, my entire life, but I can't order them myself, or read them myself. A doctor has to order them for me and gets them sent directly to her/him. I can't even go and look at my medical files at will. I have to request them and go through red tape.

My health, my quality of life, even my mobility (like my ability to get a driver's license) hang by a doctor's whim, mood, ability to understand, or free time to keep up with their medical journals. No healthy adult has a life so affected by another adult's quality of mind--not even an employee of a bad boss. It's impossible to understand what this is like if you are not a chronic patient yourself.

The "good" diabetics I know (of), the ones with good control, manage a sort of doublethink that I can't maintain: while they educate themselves thoroughly and relentlessly, they also maintain a plausibly deniable subservient relationship to their doctors. If you read their blogs or listen in on their boards, they never make a move without checking with their docs first. They'll even use language that fits more with a parent/child relationship or a military hierarchy: getting "the go-ahead" and such like. Permission granting.

I'm not sure this isn't the healthiest way to deal with doctors who are trained to unconsciously despise patients, and to consider themselves--and not the patients--the hero of the story. Until our medical system evolves further and doctors get less adulation from patients kept ignorant by the appalling state of our pubic science and health education, and more understanding from well-informed, empowered clients (which is what we are), to stay healthy you probably do have to behave like a good child.

Which means I'm fucked.

By the way, this is all by way of saying that I won't be getting the pump in November. My next attempt at an appointment with the doc isn't until early December.

Diabulimia

I was horrified to read this article in Salon about Diabulimia, a new eating disorder that affects only Type 1 diabetics like myself.

As I wrote in the previous post, when you have full blown diabetes, you'll eat carbs but not be able to use them, so you'll be essentially starving to death. And yes, you'll lose a lot of weight. The four big symptoms of diabetes are: excessive thirst, excessive urination, extreme weight loss, and blurred vision.

This article talks about young girls and women who are Type 1 diabetics who use diabetes to lose weight. Yep, that's right, they starve themselves while eating tons of food. As long as they don' t eat fat or protein, they'll lose weight quickly.

The thing the article doesn't mention in much detail, presumably because the writer isn't diabetic, is how awful hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) feels. When you don't take your insulin but still eat, you have tons of unused sugar running around your system. It doesn't just run innocently around, though. It collects where it shouldn't.

Like in your eyes, for example. The blurred vision? That's you going blind. It takes a few years, but unchecked hyperglycemia deposits destructive sugar in the blood vessels in your eyes, which then burst from the pressure, damaging your retina.

Or in your kidneys, putting pressure on them. Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure. Why? Because your body tries to flush out this destructive loose sugar and you have to pee, literally, every fifteen minutes, and are thirsty all the time. Processing all that sugar destroys your kidneys.

Your eyes feel swollen and you can't see properly, even with glasses. You're thirsty and can't quench your thirst no matter how much you drink. It's like a Greek version of Hell. You can't move far away from a bathroom or you'll pee your pants. Your joints feel like they're swollen, your head feels like it's swollen, and gravity is stronger. You're so tired you can't walk very far without having to sit down and rest. Your heart races all the time and you're breathless with any exertion. You just feel sick. Constantly, so that, although you're tired all the time, you can't sleep.

It's horrible.

And that's just the direct effects. Secondarily, yeast and fungi loooove sugar, remember? So you get yeast infections. Yes, even the guys. Guys, did you know you could get yeast infections in any warm, moist body crease? Ladies, imagine a yeast infection that just. won't. go. away. Also, itchy skin infections.

Cuts don't heal and get infected easily. Tattoos are clearly out. And you're more susceptible to other diseases, especially bacterial ones.

It's gross, it feels terrible, and your quality of life is shit.

This is why it horrifies me that girls can hate their bodies so much that they'd put themselves through this hell just to look thin.

What is this world coming to?

National Diabetes Awareness Month

November is National Diabetes Awareness Month and I'm going to observe it this year.

I'm going to post a little bit about diabetes, and I'm also going to--this month--finally get on the insulin pump. I have an appointment with a new doctor on Monday and I'm going to get the ball rolling. Yay!

But first, what IS diabetes? I find that most people don't know, and don't realize that they don't know because it never occurs to them to think about it. It has something to do with not eating sugar, they think. You can't eat sugar.

Frankly, I've heard some really stupid things about diabetes, and seen even stupider things on TV and in the movies (there was a scene from Night Court where someone went into insulin shock, so they cured her by giving her more insulin. Nice logic there.)

Okay, here goes: you know how when you eat, your food is broken down in your mouth, stomach, and intestines? The protein is broken down into amino acids and you get vitamings and mingerals, and all that good stuff? Plus fat?

Well the most biggest part of your food is carbohydrates. Bread, pasta, corn and beans, taters and roots. Fruits. All of these things deliver carbs. And sugars are also carbs, of course. Sugar is a kind of carb. Everybody knows this, after Atkins and South Beach.

What a lot of people don't seem to know is that ALL carbs either get broken down into sugar (glucose) or get passed through your system and out the other end (fiber). The glucose that was your sandwich or your mac 'n' cheese is absorbed from your intestine into your bloodstream, and circulates around your body as ... blood sugar! (or blood glucose, "BG".)

The BG is taken up by the body's cells out of the bloodstream and burned for fuel (or stored in the liver and muscles for fuel later.) That's the simple version, anyway. But this doesn't happen automatically. For the cells to receive and use the blood glucose, the hormone insulin has to be present. Insulin binds to the cells and activates their receptors so that they can use sugar. Without insulin, the BG just circulates and circulates without being used, until it is eventually excreted out the usual channels (urine, sweat, tears). Without insulin, no matter how much you eat, you starve to death.

Diabetes is, quite simply, a disease that keeps insulin from triggering your cells to receive sugar.

There are three ways this can happen, and therefore, three kinds of diabetes:

1. Type 1: the body's immune system identifies the beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin as foreign, and release antibodies to attack them. Over time, they destroy all or part of the body's ability to produce insulin. Type 1 diabetes is caused by the lack or insufficiency of insulin.

   Type 1 requires insulin injections for treatment and is therefore often called "insulin-dependent diabetes."

   Also, Type 1 tends to occur in children or younger adults who are otherwise healthy, is genetic, and is probably triggered by a standard viral disease like a flu. Type 1 is not preventable with lifestyle changes. (There are some experimental treatments that can be given to people at great risk for Type 1 diabetes, but this involves compromising your immune system and/or taking preventive insulin shots.)

   About 10% or less of chronic diabetics are Type 1.



2. Type 2: for a variety of reasons, the body becomes desensitized to insulin, and can't use it effectively. This is often accompanied, later, by some impairment of ability to produce insulin. Type 2 is caused by the inability to use insulin.

   Type 2 can be treated with, in order of severity: diet and exercise, drugs to stimulate insulin production, insulin injections to supplement insulin production.

   Type 2 is also genetically influenced. Type 2 is the kind of diabetes that we are seeing a surge in as a result of the obesity epidemic, and can be influenced or even caused by lifestyle. "Can be," I said, though. Some people have such a strong predisposition to Type 2 that they can be doing everything right and still get it. And some people can be obese, and do everything wrong, and NOT get it. So there are no guarantees.

   90% or more of chronic diabetics are Type 2.
   



3. Gestational: experienced by pregnant women with a genetic tendency to Type 2 diabetes. Hormones present during pregnancy cause them to become desensitized to insulin, as in Type 2. Usually resolves after birth.

There's a huge confusion between Type 1 and Type 2, and people are starting to shame diabetics because of misperceptions. So let me repeat: TYPE 1 DIABETES HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH LIFESTYLE AND IS NOT PREVENTABLE.

TYPE 2 DIABETES IS NOT ALWAYS PREVENTABLE.

The other big misconception is that insulin is a cure for diabetes. If you've read the above, you'll have noticed that taking an insulin shot doesn't seem like something that'll cure anything. The cures would have to involve: for Type 1 some way to keep the immune system from destroying the beta cells, and for Type 2 and Gestational some way to make the body sensitive to insulin again.

All injected insulin does is mimic the natural action of the body ... mimic it badly, I might add. It's much easier for your body to regulate itself automatically than for you to do it by hand, consciously.

Okay, I'm bored with this topic now. Will write more later.

By the way, I'm a Type 1. Have been since I was 11.

Oh, and the image at the top is of insulin crystals. Pretty, no?