Yesterday it was five hundred days since my diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes. At times it feels like I’ve had diabetes for years, but at the same time it feels like yesterday. A few days ago I looked back at the first article I wrote about diabetes. I scrolled through it a bit but didn’t feel the need to read what I had written then. That’s crazy, isn’t it? Not much later the penny dropped. This was typical ostrich behaviour. Not wanting to feel again what I felt back then.
Five hundred days ago…
A year and a half ago, in the night of 22 to 23 April, I was admitted to the hospital. At half past eight in the evening, we were at the emergency room of the Sint Franciscus hospital, and around eleven o’clock we were in the waiting room of the emergency room of the ‘Havenziekenhuis’. Only a few hours later, there was already an article online with the whole story.
I am woken up every few hours for measurements and in between I sometimes feel very sad, because it is just too much.
– 23 april 2015
After I had informed everyone about the diagnosis with my first article about diabetes, I was invited to have some breakfast. While I was eating a sandwich, I saw a familiar face in the corner of my eye. A friend, who I see way too little, came by to give me a big hug and a balloon. I could not have wished for anything more at that moment. Whether it was that moment or later, I don’t remember very well; she told me that I could start counting down. Because it would take five hundred days before the so-called ‘mourning process’ would be over.
It’s an emotional rollercoaster and it all feels very unfair. But it is what it is and I will fight no matter what and do my very best.
– 24 april 2015
Is the mourning process over?
Now that the five hundred days are over, I don’t really know. Is the process over? Does it still have to begin? Have I accepted it? I had expected it to be much more difficult, that the real grieving process would be like the one you go through after losing a loved one. You do leave a bit of a carefree life behind you when getting the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. The life as it always was, is no more. Strangely enough, I can count the times that I have really been sad for longer than ten minutes, on one hand. Two moments in the hospital and in the past year a few times when things were not going so well. But mourning? No. It is what it is and I have no choice but to get on with my life. It requires some adjustment, but I still do the things I did two years ago.
I had secretly expected to end up in a very deep and sad state with enormous crying moods, but that is apparently not the case. In itself I’m glad about that, but it also makes me feel very neutral.
– 21 may 2015
It makes me sad
I never read back all my articles on type 1 diabetes until a few days ago. It makes me sad. Especially when I read the articles from the first few weeks, the tears well up in my eyes. Writing about it helped me enormously and it still does. But maybe I used it as a distraction. In the sense of ” I will write it down, because then I don’t have to deal with it anymore”, or something like that.
Sometimes I feel the need to get in the car, drive to an empty beach and scream at the top of my lungs. Just screaming. All those emotions. The blind panic I sometimes feel. The tears I sometimes laugh away.
– 14 november 2015
How is it possible that I have not been really sad more often? Am I perhaps hiding it all away? If reading old articles makes you emotional and you don’t want to read any further, doesn’t that tell you something? Or am I looking for ‘something’ that wont come and maybe is not needed at all?
“It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so very deeply.” ― David Jones