Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

"Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion." -Hunter S. Thompson

 

I've been so absorbed in taking over my late father's house this past year that I haven't been on here a great deal.

I still eat, compared to most Americans, a strict, yet nourishing and healthy diet and usually my blood sugar is very good. I don't rush to correct blood sugars like I used to. I still do, of course, I've just become slightly less of a perfectionist in my approach. According to my Dexcom data, my A1c has consistently been at or slightly below 6.5 since my last endocrinologist appointment, which was at least a year ago. I'm kind of just now coming back to the land of the living and going to see doctors and focusing on myself again. I had an eye exam recently and everything was totally normal and healthy. I think about all of the daily maintenance that this disease takes, and how I feel so incredibly wrecked and worn at times, so hearing "normal" can feel like a small miracle. When all the effort actually pays off.

But back to buy the ticket, take the ride. Recently I was at the Labor Day parade here in town. Every year, my dad always participated in this parade with his firehouse. It was very hard watching his fellow firefighters go by this year without him. After the parade, some firefighters and family rode over to his grave to pay their respects and say how much we missed him. The whole day was pretty somber for me. So, in not the greatest mood, I agree to go to a cook out at a local station for firefighters, police and EMT workers. There's not a ton there for me to eat. I know I put dietary restrictions on myself because I'm a vegetarian hippie on top of being a severe Type 1 diabetic. But I hadn't eaten all day and was feeling dizzy and tired, so I put some potato salad and beans on my plate. I was sitting at one of the benches, feeling sad as well as insecure and sorry for myself. It was warm out, and I was in a sleeveless dress, feeling more than usual that the CGM on my arm made me look like an invalid, defective. I knew those two scoops of potato salad were going to royally screw up the entire rest of my day. I went into my sister's car to inject myself with some insulin, and thought: is all of this just going to be meaningless suffering for me? And in that moment I started to wake back up to why I started writing on here in the first place. After almost dying from DKA in 2018, I never took this diagnosis lightly. To me, eating foods that don't spike blood sugar significantly and stabilizing A1c is a must, a given, the "easy" part (not always easy). There was no food to me that was worth diabetic macular edema or neovascular glaucoma, an amputation, dialysis. And for that reason, diet is not what I ever wanted to focus on here, other than the more divergent your diet is from the natural world, the worse it likely is for your health. Your health and planetary health are one in the same, one ecosystem. I've said that a lot on here. I hope we come out of this diabetes epidemic with a perspective shift, even if some "quick fix" possibilities are on the horizon. For instance, there's human trials now being conducted for islet cell transplantation. I actually received an unexpected call over the winter from the University of Illinois in Chicago. They were inquiring as to whether I would be a viable candidate to participate in a study. Type 1 diabetics would be injected with islet cell "transplants" in an attempt to get off exogenous insulin partially or completely, and after the islet cell treatment, participants would be put on immunosuppressive therapy to prevent the body from rejecting the new cells. Unfortunately, a similar trial was stopped in 2024 because 2 of the 14 patients died. Thankfully, I read recently they're now gaining ground on achieving islet cell transplantation without the need for immunosuppressive therapy. Obviously, it's not clear how far in the future, if ever, these therapies will safely be implemented. I remain hopeful! 

Of course, it’s worth noting an Rx for insulin, for many of us daily life support, is hardly a safe, fool-proof option. Human error, even pump error, has killed so very many people. Nearly myself included a handful of times. I started to write down when I do my once daily long-acting shot on a calendar in my kitchen because accidentally taking it twice could be a fatal error. After seven years of using Tresiba daily, I still get scared dialing that thing up to 17 or 18 units. 

I've always known that I "bought this ticket" for a reason, and I want to take the ride very much still and see if my research leads me beyond just disease management. There can be no such thing as true healing without acknowledging why you got the illness in the first place. There's a line from a Better than Ezra song that comes to mind..."Take back your life, let me inside, We'll find a door, if you care, if you care to anymore."

I do care to anymore, though I've taken quite a hit this past year with my father's unexpected passing. A lot of nights, I sit in the living room of the house I'm renovating, alone besides my two dogs, drinking a glass of wine or a cup of tea, listening to relaxing music (Mitski's My Love Mine All Mine). And I haven't been able to really transcend much of an existence beyond being very sad. The sadness is always in the background, even if I'm focusing on the house as much as possible during the day. Yet, somehow, the door back to my own life seems to be getting closer and closer. Nothing in the world belongs to me, but my love...Nothing in the world is mine for free, but my love... 

I have a lot of love to give.

The latest International Diabetes Federation data is startling. 1 in 9 people have full blown diabetes, or 589 million adults. They predict that 853 million people will have diabetes by 2050.