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Posted by klausen on 11:54:56 2004/02/29
In Reply to: Sick Child Tips the Balance for Parents posted by Ellen
Since I had highly unstable type-1 diabetes for 20 years before there were home blood glucose tests and had nothing other than totally inaccurate urine sugar tests for guidance, I wonder how necessary it is to destroy the lives of everyone in the family in a psychological and social sense with all this measuring and fretting just to get the biology 100% right? Many of my friends from the pre-home blood sugar testing era are still alive and well today, so if their parents had straightjacketed their lives to normalize blood sugar, that would have been a total waste.
Keep in mind as well that the longest surviving and the healthiest group of diabetics were those first diagnosed in the 1920s, whose major problem was that insulin was too expensive for them to take more than just enough to avoid starvation. It is thought that, because most of them never switched to long-acting insulins, they just lurched from one hypoglycemic episode to the next during the day following each bolus of rapid-acting insulin. But some physicians theorize that this is what protected them from complications, since diabetic lesions only form if there is persistent hyperglycemia, so as long as this process is interrupted by at least one hypoglycemic period a day, the lesions never have time to form.
In any case, it is already a kind of living death to spoil the enjoyment, creativity, and spontaneity of human existence by subjecting everything you do to the goal of imitating a pancreas, which is a mere biological machine. What are you living for if your every project and pleasure is harried and harassed to death with measuring and testing, with injecting and worrying, all so you can live on the razor's edge of hypoglycemia?
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