I got to participate in an amazing thing this weekend; I was invited to attend a graduation. 

Not just any graduation. 

Half of the graduates had worked their entire lives to get to be able to work for the rest of their lives, and it required a more skill and training than most jobs any of us hold.  The other half of the graduates had worked alone for as long as they could remember and had spent a lot of time feeling afraid or at least apprehensive of what went on inside their own bodies.  Those graduates, too, had to put in a lot of hard work and learn a lot to be able to work for the rest of their lives with their partner. 

I think all of the graduates loved nearly every minute of it.

Dogs for Diabetics.

When my friend and I arrived at the ceremony, I was 104.  I had had a juice box in the car on my way there because I felt I might go low and didn’t want to be low in this room with all kinds of dogs trained to sense and alert when I was low. 

So I’m sitting there, and the guy across the aisle from me is talking to his dog and trying to get his dog to sit still.  It was kind of funny because I think the dog was alerting my low; I felt somewhat embarrassed and thought I should have said something to the man. 

I wasn’t low, though, according to my meter.  I was just headed there.

My CGM has been a help to me—I can’t say otherwise.  It generally has been accurate on what my blood glucose was twenty minutes ago.  These dogs on Saturday are twenty minutes ahead of me.  They know what’s going on before any gadget I carry with me.

How amazing.

If you are a pumper and have ever been in a space with other pumpers, you know how you react when you hear someone else’s pump beeping or alarming.  I often forget and have a few incidents of surprise false alarms before I remember what it is like when we’re all doing our own thing. 

Afterwards, it makes me feel kind of alone, that having been with so many others like me was such a surprise.  It’s a little sad when I realize how infrequently I get to experience that similarity in my life.

After the ceremony I was chatting with a few people and three dogs near us were alerting a low to their companion.  Everyone started looking around and asking who it was; the dogs can sense someone’s low within 50 feet!  The man who was low was happy to announce it was him, and all the dogs got a treat.

The dog in front of me during the ceremony alerted her companion, a girl maybe 13 or 14 years old.  When the girl saw her dog alert her, she immediately checked her blood glucose, gave her dog a treat, and ate some sugar.  I guess that’s what she does now; she catches her lows before she goes low because her dog is there to help her catch them.

How cool is that?!

There is a funky power play in a doctor’s office, if you ask me.  The visit is about YOU and you are paying your doctor, yet there is always an element of fear for me.  Maybe a fear of being judged or a fear of being found out (how many times just yesterday was I above 200?) and we won’t even START with the required weigh-in each time I’m there.  So even though I’m the ever-important subject of the visit, and everyone else would be worthless without my presence, they still hold all the cards.

So really, it’s just odd and for me, rather unpleasant.

And then there’s the privacy element that turns our sense of normalcy on its head.  Get there, sit and wait.  Someone you’ve never seen before opens a door, mispronounces your name and you holler out and hop up “That’s me!” and then you follow that person back into a winding maze of hallways until you reach the weigh-in station or until you’re shut inside a new room.

If it’s an endocrinology office, you get to sit and stare at a poster of the endocrine system, or a poster of an endocrine related disorder.  (My favorite poster from a few doctors’ back had this one of hyperthyroidism; that poor person had the saddest expression and the biggest eyes!  But I digress.)

So you are left alone in a room.  For whoever knows how long.  And that room has all kinds of cupboards and drawers and papers.  (I’m a big—huge—believer in opening those drawers after a certain amount of time.  I can restrain myself for a good 45 minutes, but beyond that, I think they are fair game.)

But what is never EVER in that room?  Your medical chart.

That is what to me is the most interesting part—what someone has said about ME.  Never have I claimed to have a small ego, and the entire point of the visit is for ME to share things about ME with someone else, who in turns writes down either what I’ve said, or what their interpretation is of what I’ve reported.

Yet they never let me see what they’ve written. 

Working for doctors for twelve years and working with medical charts for just as long, I know for a fact that very very few of them are at all interesting.  Yet that knowledge doesn’t really help.  I want to see it!!

Yet I’m not willing to request a copy; I know it isn’t that interesting. 

But I still wonder.

I have been thinking about what age we all were when we were diagnosed and how that age affected how we deal with our disease.

I think there is a huge difference between the types of diabetes, and one of the reasons I think they are so different involves how old we were when we were diagnosed.  I know many type 2s and type 1.5s see type 1 as just a different variation on their same disease yet I know very few type 1s who think their disease is the same as type 2 or type 1.5. 

I can’t figure it all out, but I think one of the reasons we see the diseases differently involves who we were when we were diagnosed.

I’m not talking about whether we call type one juvenile onset and type two adult onset: I’m talking about how much of the world we knew before our diagnosis.

I guess it’s the same type of idea as a parental divorce: it can be devastating to a child at any age, but sometimes a younger child doesn’t always have quite the division of “before” and “after” as a teen or even adult child does.

Many of those diagnosed with type 1 in teenhood or adulthood marvel at the work that goes into diabetes.  For me, being diagnosed at 10, the work load didn’t make a huge impression on me—I was still learning about the world outside of my grade school; I simply had no comprehension of what “insulin dependent diabetes” was going to mean to me.  The amount of work that diabetes actually takes has been secondary for me—it’s just a part of my life at this stage, and I tend not to see it as something no one else has to deal with.

I know several who were diagnosed later in high school and even college who were able to see the diagnosis as a huge thing that divided them from their friends—and who have struggled with accepting their disease as a result.  Denial was certainly something I carried around with me for years and years, but I didn’t have the thought that “everything was fine before my diagnosis”. 

I think people who are diagnosed later in their lives (in their 30s and beyond) just have a whole different set of expectations of themselves, a whole pile of misunderstandings of the disease, and a whole different set of fears accompanying the knowledge that Everything Is Different Now.

Again, this is just one of the things I’m thinking about these days.  Let me know if you have an opinion on this one, or if you had a different experience when you were diagnosed.

(I know that a lot of you might feel differently than I do on this subject.  I’m okay with that.  This is just me saying what I have on my mind, not necessarily making recommendations to you about your situation… just think about what I’m saying a little and I’ll be happy.)

Well, shoot. 

I guess I’m in denial or something.  It never occurred to me that I needed special accommodations to take a state exam. 

To me, special accommodations are for people who need extra time, or who have a real reason to have a different exam than the masses.  I never think about myself in that situation.

But today I was looking at the exam rules for an upcoming exam I’m taking and lookee there: no food is permitted.

Dang.

So now I have to fill out a special form and endure the lady’s questions “why didn’t you put that you needed special accommodations on your application?!” just to be allowed to have my meter with me and some food nearby.

Seriously?! 

I don’t want extra time.  I don’t need a special desk to allow for a physical disability.  I don’t need anyone to read the exam questions aloud.

I just don’t want to be hassled by the proctor when my pump beeps and they’ve told us it must be silent in the room.  If I for some reason go low during the five hour exam, I want to be able to drink some juice without being accosted by a proctor or have my exam thrown out.

Why is that called a special accommodation?

Now, granted, I understand that they need to know I have type one diabetes and they need to know why I might beep.  I understand that they don’t want food in the exam room.

I just can’t figure out why I need to send this form to my doctor just so I can take an exam.  It isn’t like this is something I’d make up.

Maybe I’ll send them a copy of the form I sent to the California Bar when I took the bar exam.  That’s the only other time I’ve needed to request permission in writing to have food with me.  But that exam was three days long, so it seemed worth it.  This one is only 200 multiple choice questions! 

I guess I’m fortunate to be as confident in myself that I mentally need no special accommodations for any test or competition with others.  My disease simply doesn’t enter that kind of picture to me.

Does that mean I’m in denial?  Maybe.  Does it mean I consider myself “normal” and only want the special treatment for what I really do need? 

You bet. 

I guess I don’t see how treating a kid with diabetes differently during a spelling or math test (when the test isn’t timed and they aren’t going low) helps them out at all.  Maybe parents are in denial when they teach their children how they can bend the rules “because of their diabetes.”  Maybe parents don’t know how easy it is to manipulate our own blood sugars… just a little more candy, a little more insulin, presto change-o there you go: wacky number on demand.  (It’s the non-wacky numbers that are truly difficult.)

I don’t want special treatment.  Just treat me the same as everyone else.  I work pretty hard to make my playing field level with everyone else.

I wouldn’t want it any other way—how else would I know that what I’ve accomplished is what I’ve really accomplished??