I Missed It... Because I Was Missing the Point

D-blog day: I missed it.

And every other day for the past two months as well.

I've been busy doing a whole host of things, many of them really exciting and positive. But underneath it diabetes has been wearing me down. For some reason I've engaged in battle, a battle I know I can't win because I know diabetes won't just go away, silently and alone without sharing my feelings here or anywhere else. I've been wallowing in a loneliness not borne of having no one around me, but of having no one to share diabetes with.

I know, I only have myself to blame for being so daft!

I lay in the darkness on the floor of a house in Falmouth, Cornwall, last weekend, listening to the slow even breathing of sleeping people around me. I wasn't sleeping as inside me a tide of rage bubbled angrily and excess glucose coursed through my veins. The anger felt so strong that I physically placed my hand over my mouth to suppress the scream that threatened to release my pent up fury. Fury at the blood sugar of 17mmol that wouldn't come down. Fury that diabetes had had to repeatedly get its voice heard during a weekend away with friends that should have been simply fun and carefree. And all the while a guilty little voice was picking away inside me, nagging that the coke with those Vodkas wasn't diet, that maybe I shouldn't have had a slice of birthday cake despite it being the 30th birthday of a very good friend, that maybe I should have made the time to test my blood sugar just a little more often. I take my eye off diabetes for just one moment and it fights back, showing me who is boss.

Several weeks back I forgot to take two hydrocortisone tablets in a row. Forgetting just two doses of a tiny, bitter, white tablet was enough to send my blood sugars so low that I passed out on the number 42 bus, and was found by the driver at the end of the line, slumped in my seat with my clothes drenched through by my own sweat. The lack of cortisol had sent my blood pressure so low that the paramedics couldn't read it. I take my eye of my medications for just twelve hours, and my body gives up.

And all the while I can't help but feel desperately frustrated by, and even resentful of, people around me. The people I encounter who have diabetes themselves, and should 'get it', but have no care for their own health and are dismissive of my attitude to mine. The friends and the people who just simply don't get it. And perhaps worst of all I'm frustrated by those who have a little knowledge. These are the people I find myself hiding my blood glucose test results from, even when they show an interest as I prick my finger, because they know enough to understand the result, but not enough to understand that highs and lows happen. That they aren't all down to something I did wrong. They aren't all my fault. So I hide my results and most of all, I hide my feelings from these people that I fear might judge me as a failure.
Because I'm also tired of the educating and telling.

The more lonely I have felt in dealing with diabetes, the more I have retreated away from the D blog community. It is easy to find excuses. Like: The simple excuse of "I don't have time right now". Like: If I don't want to think about diabetes, then I'm sure not going to sit down and write about it. And rather like with recording of blood sugars, the longer I've gone without blogging, the harder it has been to return to it.

I've been blankly staring past the obvious truth of the matter: That all the things I'm most frustrated about and that drive my sense of isolation and loneliness don't apply to the D-blog community. Because you are the people who do get it.

The very people I shouldn't be hiding from.

I may be on a different continent to the overwhelming majority of D-bloggers but, despite my occasional feelings of isolation due to the lack of other UK bloggers and the general disinterest and apathy that represents to me, there aren't really any borders, boundaries or oceans where blogging is concerned. We're all one family, and I should have been here saying that on November 9th.

I guess it is my testament and tribute to the group that I have faith that despite my prolonged absence not only from my own blog, but also from the reading of and sharing on the blogs of others, I will still be welcomed home.

This is a community that deep down we'd all rather not belong to, but if we have to have diabetes at all, I'm so thankful that it exists and that there are so many others out there who always understand and frequently share my feelings.