Sweet D

What my family has always lacked in mental stability, we’ve more than made up for in physical health. Other than an odd cold or the chicken pox outbreak of 1992, aka the worst Valentine’s Day ever, we’ve all been relatively healthy. In fact, prior to my having any tangible relationship experience, the only obstacle I prophesized in a future partner was seeing his feet. As ridiculous as it sounds, I had no desire to bare witness to any part of the fictitious man of my dreams that I might find unattractive. At seventeen, I had the luxury of nitpicking the dos and don’ts of foot exposure. Obviously, I hadn’t taken into account that love will change your perception of everything…even feet.  Until the summer of 1996, when I started working with my future husband, Michael at the now defunct 2 Day Video. He was tall, handsome, clever, and thoughtful; a combination usually reserved for romantic comedies. My first day on the job, we bonded over a shared love of the 1995 action epic Heat. Shortly thereafter, I confided to a fellow employee my interest in Michael to which this tactful colleague of mine leaned in and whispered, “He’s a diabetic.” Really? I could have sworn I was talking about dating him, not becoming his primary care physician. So, I responded, “Big deal. He can’t eat sweets.” After all, I wasn’t interested in diabetes, I was interested in Michael. What did one have to do with the other? But that’s not true, is it? Michael was in many ways already taken by the one mistress I’d never outdo.

Long before Michael and I filled our days shrink wrapping VHS cover boxes, while I was storming out of the optometrist office following the news I’d be adding spectacles to my already nerdy facade, Michael was losing weight…fast, thirty pounds of it. For a guy with a slender, 6′ 1″, 150 lb. frame, thirty pounds makes a world of difference. Following a brief stint in the hospital filled with guestimations and tests, Michael officially learned he’d won the ill-fated lotto of becoming the first diabetic in his family. So much for heredity. No more single living, dinners comprised of Doritos and Dr. Pepper, or sleeping in til noon, he was now a reluctant partner to diabetes. Instead of focusing on his junior year of high school and the accompanying awkward ascend from teendom to adulthood, Michael was learning his sliding insulin scale to balance blood sugar levels and the importance of calculating carbohydrates for each meal. Every moment scheduled, every action deliberate. So goes the life of a diabetic. By that summer in 1996, though still only a baby diabetic, Michael displayed astuteness surprising, albeit completely understandable in correlation to the ever temperamental diabetes, for a 19 year old. Ostentatious and vengeful, should you forget to mind diabetes, there’s no chance she’ll let it go.  After a while every diabetic learns, it’s best to put her first.

Not that Michael hasn’t made blunders and suffered the costs. Diabetes doesn’t take a turn for the worst unbeknownst to the world around it; not at all. If his blood sugar is too high, Michael becomes irritable and exhausted from the surplus of sugar literally weighing him down. At first, I said I understood that sometimes his attitude was a little worse for wear due to high blood sugar, but, me being me, secretly I assumed he was just being an ass. It took a while for me to grasp exactly how diabetes can change a person’s behavior. Sometimes Michael isn’t Michael. Sometimes he’s just shy of “There is no Michael, only Zuul”, and until that sugar is back where it belongs, there’s no hope of my speaking to him. Still, dealing with high blood sugar is visibly much less horrifying than low blood sugar. When a car is low on fuel, it sputters until it stops. The diabetic equivalent of this is seizures. And seizures…I’m not much on. They seem such a large consequence to hinge on a small action; I skip a meal and I’m that much closer to my goal weight, Michael skips one and he’s that much closer to a coma. It may seem dramatic, but it’s true. I’ve seen the theory put to practice more times than I can remember. Since his introduction to diabetes, two of Michael’s bouts with low blood sugar have landed him in the hospital after passing out, once while putting away movies at 2 Day Video and again playing Tekken 3 at the UTA arcade, a gamer till the end.

Undoubtedly with diabetes, even the simplest of ventures require the extra planning akin to that of new parents minus the Diaper Genie and benefit of choice; insulin? Check. Test strips? Check. Glucometer? Check. What I’d taken for granted, what I’m sure at some point Michael had as well, was the ability to act impulsively. Usually people can’t or won’t understand what it is to make the choice we’ve made between living cautiously and saying, “To Hell with it!” However frustrating, the more attention Michael pays to diabetes, the less she interferes in our relationship. Over the past four years a large part of these affections  have been by way of a little pen tip-width tube delivering insulin automatically much like a pancreas, the insulin pump. Originally, I was opposed to Michael being held up by this little insulin string, but that string has allowed us to be free. Sure he still has stints with high and low blood sugar, even so their occurrence is far less i.e. my panic attacks have subsided. Before Michael and I were a couple, I once told him I couldn’t imagine giving myself daily insulin injections or drawing blood to check my sugar, flatly he said, “You’d be surprised what you can do when your life depends on it.”  As much as it pains me to admit, he’s right. I’ve let diabetes into my life, because my life with Michael depends on her.  Part of that is accepting diabetes trumps wife, every time.