When Homework Hurts (More Than Usual)

Do any of us like homework? The answers will vary. Some of us do. Some don't. But no one likes doing homework when the material is thirty pages of reading about how diabetes is one of the primary causes of kidney failure.  Or an hour long documentary on retinopathy in which the narrator never specifies between type 1 and type 2.  Or that blindness and retina damage more than likely occur only when diabetes has been poorly managed/uncontrolled for an extended period of time. What a Debby Downer.

All diabetics encounter this problem at some point in their lives.  The commercials that ask, "Are you diabetic? If so enjoy your future with heart disease!"  The ignorant strangers who immediately counter you with "Oh! My grandpa died from that."  Do we get used to it? I guess. Do we like it? No. Would we like it to change? Yes. We're WAITING, everyone.

Now I'm not saying that we should be forever sheltered from the frightening statistics in our homework, especially those brave souls who decided to attend school and take classes specifically in the medical field.  What I am hoping for is more detail. More specification between type 1 and type 2.  More specification between the end result of adhering to your diabetes care and not adhering. And more consideration for those who don't have the means for this care. No disease or disorder should be thrown into the blame game.

I recently was doing some volunteer work, during which my old endocrinologist stated that there is no reason why a newly diagnosed baby girl couldn't live a healthy life until she was an old gray-haired lady, much like the doctors who diagnosed me told my parents.  She also said that complications more commonly result from type 2 diabetes, and that many of the complications we are seeing today are the result of the lack of advanced care there was when the elderly today were diagnosed.  And I thought, can someone tell my professors this?  Can someone inform the media???

I understand that I have to do my homework. I understand that when the topic of the week is end stage renal failure, diabetes will be mentioned.  But that doesn't change the way it makes me feel when I read it.

A Backpack Full of Boulders

Grad school is hard.

I knew this going in.  Especially entering a field as intensive as social work.  You've got your homework. You've got your field work. You've got your homework for your field work. Classes. Commuting.  Commuting with a broken CD player while the same 5 songs play on the radio. Your part-time job.  But all of this is in addition to the heaviest work of all--your diabetes.

Having diabetes for so long, I hardly think twice before starting on an endeavor about how it will affect me.  I just assume that it will fall into stride and I will figure it out as I go along. However, this isn't always as easy as it sounds.  Driving home from central to north Jersey at 9pm is annoying at best, but when your blood sugar has been running low all day and you don't know why, it becomes downright aggravating and even dangerous.  Without a sensor I am constantly wondering if my blood sugar is going to drop while I am driving, so I test like I nut before and during.  And the last thing I want to do is wait 15-20 minutes to make my hour drive home, when I have to wake up at 6am the next day for field work.

On one of these late drives home, I was thinking about how tough grad school felt. I'm typically a good student, and I love social work and love what I'm doing. So why did I feel like I was crawling through the mud by the end of the week?

It slowly dawned on me that going into grad school, I already had a heavy load.  I pictured a backpack stuffed with rocks, with straps that were sutured into my shoulders. Sometimes we forget about how heavy diabetes and other things can be, and how when we start a journey, we can't take the backpack off to lighten our load.  We just have to adjust to the extra weight. Maybe do some squats. Or whatever the mental equivalent of squats is, to strengthen ourselves.