I’M FREE.
Guys, it’s been two, TWO, whole days since my thirtieth birthday and I’m still here.
WE MADE IT!
I’m so excited to be starting this new chapter of my life; this chapter without a set end date. I’m free from those prognoses dates and I truly feel different as I go into my thirtieth year.
As part of my diabetes treatment plan, I work with a therapist who helps me keep my mental health in check so I can keep my physical health in check. I’m a firm believer that we have to care about our mental well being just like we have to care about our physical health. There will be several posts about this in the near future.
When I walked in yesterday for my appointment, she said, “Hey! You don’t look dead to me. Congrats!” (She’s awesome and that sense of humor is one of the several things we have in common.)
She’s very right. I’m very much alive.
Riding that high, I took some time Thursday through today to really reflect on my life and how fortunate I am. I did some tough reflecting on how it all has gone and what I’m doing with the next many years of my life. I took a moment of silence and prayer for the people I lost along the way, as there have been several and each birthday and diabetes diagnosis anniversary reminds me that others weren’t so fortunate.
I don’t know what would have been easier. My future mother-in-law passed away in December from complications from Type 1 Diabetes. She was diagnosed in her early thirties after she’d had her two boys and had been living her life eating and doing what she wanted. When she passed, her and I had had diabetes for about the same amount of time. It’s hard for me to imagine being diagnosed as an adult and having to adjust an entire life around something that I didn’t know anything about until I had it. I know people do it, but in some ways, I do feel my situation was more fortunate.
That said, I don’t remember life before this disease, but I know from reflecting and living it and working through some of it with my therapist that growing up with it had its own challenges. I know that my physical development was impacted by diabetes and that my psychological and emotional development was hammered on by type 1 diabetes.
I know that by the time I was graduated high school, I had lost several close friends from the thing I was constantly being told would ultimately kill me. I remember waking up at age 9 after a very serious low blood sugar in the back of my parent’s mini van at an amusement park where I had crashed. I know that I experienced survivor’s guilt for the first time when I was 11, and I’d experience it many more times in my life. I remember being 14 on a school chorus field trip and we went to sing to the patients in the dialysis lab; I came back to my mom’s office after school and sobbed into her arms because I felt so afraid. I know that at 29 I watched the man I love struggle with the loss of his mother from the same disease his future wife has.
I don’t mention all of these things in what is ultimately supposed to be an upbeat post because I’m garnering your sympathy. Instead, I list these things out to try to reflect on the things I lived through in this first thirty years of my life. I’m considering these experiences building blocks for whatever is coming. If you believe in the butterfly effect, I had to be a diabetic in order to live this life, and I had to have everyone of these losses and scares to be here now, writing to all of you.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; I’m so fortunate. My diabetes gave me a purpose and a platform and a complex and a lot of good things and a lot of not as great things. My diabetes made me the person I am, and at thirty I’m really starting to like me. When I talk about being grateful for this life, I truly don’t know how or why I was born this lucky. But I believe my diabetes, the people I’ve met, helped, known, loved, and the things I’ve experienced, are absolutely a part of the reason I’m here. On Earth, still existing despite being told how extremely unlikely it was that I wouldn’t.
I’m still finding my purpose, but I’m excited to live life without an end date. I’m going to take this next year and rock it.
If you’re interested in sharing what you’re going to do with this next year, we’re all ears here. Send me an email, share a comment on the post, or message or post to us on Facebook. This life is most fun with all of us in it.
With Love and Light,
-Megan C.
The Friendly Neighborhood Diabetics 