‘I’ve accepted that diabetes is a 24-hour threat’
Nick Zajicek, 42, is a Dubai-based cameraman. Post his diabetes diagnosis, he travels extensively, shooting in remote terrains and participating in everything from scubadiving to kayaking
Iwas diagnosed with type 1 diabetes 30 years ago. I was almost 13, and suddenly was drinking lots of water, even about 10-15 litres a day, and going to the toilet continuously as a result. My mum recognised the symptoms as those of diabetes, and I went for a check-up. I didn’t really think much about it when I was diagnosed. It felt bizarre. Diabetes doesn’t run in my family. I was overweight as a child, but I don’t know that’s necessarily the reason I got it. It was very different 30 years ago too, all syringes and vials – the testing machines took ages, a blood sugar reading that takes 30 seconds now took about 5 minutes then.
But from that initial stage of eerie calmness, I’ve been quite furious about the diagnosis since. A lot of scare tactics were employed then. Docs would constantly say I’d get brain damage, lose limbs… threat were used to make you control your sugar, which was quite impossible as a 13-year-old.
I remember walking around as a 13-year-old thinking what’s the point, I’ll be dead soon. I started out with a fatalistic outlook, and looked at it as a death sentence.
But thankfully diabetes did not get to put an end to my travelling bug, which I caught early on. I’ve travelled extensively since I was
15 – when I was 18 I went from London to Egypt by land.
A year after that Egypt trip I almost died. I got seriously ill in England at university after I ran really high blood sugars. When I woke up in the morning at hospital I was told if I was even an hour late I would have been dead. And I remember thinking, if that had happened to me on a boat to Israel, etc I would have been dead.
So then I accepted it. I accepted that being diabetic is a 24-hour-a-day threat, but that you just have to carry on. I’m always thinking about it, you probably can’t go 30 seconds without, but that didn’t have to necessarily stop me from carrying on with my life.
Which is why I’ve been scuba diving and kayaking. I travel all the time – I’ve been to over 120 countries, I’ve just gotten back from camping in Jordan. I’ve filmed in Palestine, I’ve driven across Russia and every Soviet country, I’ve driven from Crimea to Japan. I’m an advanced scubadiver. I’ve gone on motorbike trips in so many countries across Africa, Asia, South America.
So with my job, I went all around the world. I’ve filmed in the military, gone on helicopters; I’ve been in very tough terrains. Like in an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Gulf in August – it’s an insanely hot, dehydrating experience.
I got diabetic frostbite in Chernobyl filming in the middle of winter in brutal conditions. I had to take my thick gloves off to operate the camera. I lost sensation in two fingers for about three months, and they went black for a while. After that it felt like there was thin air in those areas. It’s like feeling your flesh die. Funnily when I get cold now I start to feel it first in those fingers. As I’ve gotten older my circulation has diminished. I get cold way quicker than anyone else. A cut takes me ages to heal. None of these things came along when I was younger.
The beginning of summer in Dubai I get high sugars. If I’m filming on a building site during summer etc I’ll run high. When my sugar gets high it’s not a pleasant experience. I can feel it in my eyeballs, I start getting headaches, my mouth goes dry. People talk of having a bad temper during a high-sugar episode, and I think if your eyeball was being stretched across, you can’t really be in a great mood. I used to have that a lot before, but in the last few years, with my eye, you can feel really rough, so I try maintain good sugars. I go to the gym three times a week. I eat relatively well now, though I