Postcards from the shed TV chippie Rob Palmer shares his daily struggles
If someone you know is mistaken about diabetes, seize the chance to help them understand, urges everyone’s favourite chippie Rob Palmer
Anyone who’s been living with diabetes for a while will know there are moments when you’re feeling on top of things – hitting the bullseye, no- time- to-g et- it wrong because you’ve been getting it so right… Then along comes a one-sentence clanger from your endocrinologist!
Now, let’s be fair. As much as you live with diabetes every day, so does your endo. They may take weekends and holidays and you may feel they don’t always slog it out for a whole five-day week. But they are regularly updated, trained and focused on a lot of the inconvenient truths that day-to-day diabetes management just doesn’t cover. They also have your best interests at heart.
The sentence that knocked my socks off was to do with all the other problems that an autoimmune disease can throw at you.
To keep things positive, and to cut a long story short, the result was I learnt a few things about diabetes that more than 30 years of living with it hadn’t shown me. My misconception of how my management would affect me came as a shock.
Now, if I can still be learning what’s what in type 1 land, how’s a member of the public with no link to diabetes going to have a snowflake’s chance in hell of understanding it at all?
There are plenty of clangers that come up with discomforting regularity. “Are you allergic to sugar?” That’s probably the most common. “Should I stick you with insulin if you collapse?” Another beauty. Or, “That’s a lot of needles.
You must have it really bad.”
Perhaps my least favourite is the disapproving look followed by, “Should you be eating that?” Let’s discard the ignorance and focus on the heart of what’s happening here. People care. To ask a question or make a statement that seems absurd is, in most cases, an effort to understand. It’s also an opportunity to give someone a little information that may increase their awareness.
It makes perfect sense that someone can have no idea of the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. I mean, they both have nearly the same name for starters and they both involve blood glucose levels and insulin. Crikey, I didn’t even know there was a Welsh language before I travelled to the country as a 25-year-old. Yet, now I can speak it to my children. It’s just a matter of exposure and understanding through education. (A Welsh wife didn’t hurt either!)
I think we all have an opportunity to tackle diabetes by how we cope with misconceptions. A misunderstanding is not an insult and in sharing our awareness, simply and clearly, we make diabetes a smaller adversary each time.
In most cases,
someone’s question is an EFFORT TO understand