But That’s Lauren

Last week during the birthday dinner for our brother-in-law, Lauren looked up mid-meal and said, “I can’t believe I just did that.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“I gave myself twenty units of insulin. I meant to cover twenty grams of carbs. That was really stupid. I’ve never done that before.”

“So you have too much onboard,” I said.

“Way too much. I’m not sure I can eat enough to cover that.”

“Everything ok?” Mere said.

“Yes,” said Lauren. “Is it cool if we go straight to dessert, though?”

Lauren has been a type 1 diabetic since she was nineteen. When we were missionaries and I met her for the first time, she had to give herself an insulin shot. She insisted it was no big deal. What she did not tell me then was that when she was diagnosed, she feared diabetes would forever redefine her—no one would want to marry her, she might struggle to have children, she could develop complications and lose her eyesight or her feet or her legs, she could die young.

Yesterday, I saw an editorial in the Boston Globe titled “I am a diabetic not a person with diabetes.” The author talked about health care workers changing who they spoke of chronic illnesses so as to not let those define who a person is, and while the author appreciated the sentiment, she asserted that diabetes indeed defined her. “My diabetes is the first thing on my mind when I wake, the last thing I think about before I sleep, and often something I must address in the middle of the night.” It was not to say that she was an illness but the chronic nature was always there.

This is true for Lauren as well. Every once in a while she will tell me she is just so sick of diabetes, of always thinking about it, always counting everything that goes in her mouth. More frequent are the times, though, when she is slightly distracted or her mood is slightly off. The explanation usually winds up being something, “My blood sugar is crashing and I don’t know why” or “I took a big bolus but my sugar won’t go down.”

She is such a genuinely patient person so consistently interested in other people and their challenges that it can be easy to feel slightly impatient when her mood or focus have wandered to her own problems. Usually there is not much I can do beyond offer to grab her a sugar snack or empathize with the struggle. In the case of the birthday meal, she could not eat enough and had to take a nasal spray shot of glucagon, which left her sinuses burning for two days.

“This is a good thing, though,” she told me. “A good reminder to you—if you ever find me passed out, you give me one of these. If my sugar is high, it won’t make things much worse, but if it is low, it might save my life.”

A strange way to find the positive in the situation. But that’s Lauren.

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