Diabetes For Dummies. Rubin Alan L.

can’t eat the cake because I am diabetic.” The woman urging her said, “Thank God. I thought you just had incredible willpower.” Twenty years later, my patient clearly remembers being told that having diabetes is better than having willpower. Another patient told me the following: “The hardest thing about having diabetes is having to deal with doctors who do not respect me.” Several times over the years, she had followed her doctor’s recommendations exactly, but her glucose control hadn’t been satisfactory. The doctor blamed her for this “failure.”

      Unless you live alone on a desert island (in which case I’m impressed that you got your hands on this book), your diabetes doesn’t affect just you. How you deal with your diabetes affects your family, friends, and co-workers. This chapter shows you how to cope with diabetes and how to understand its impact on your important relationships.

      Achieving Anything … Or Everything!

      Diabetes has become such a common disease in the United States that in any group of ten people, one will probably have it. Is it any wonder that successful people have diabetes in every walk of life? In this chapter, I tell you of the accomplishments of just a few of them. Just like them, I can promise you that if you follow the advice in this book, your diabetes will never prevent you from accomplishing your goals. In fact, your success in managing diabetes may lead to success in other areas of your life.

Keeping good company

      If you have diabetes, you’re not alone. Quite a few famous people live with diabetes every day, just like you. Here are just a few actors that you may recognize:

      ✔ Tom Hanks: This actor has played numerous roles since he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2013, including Captain Phillips, Saving Mr. Banks, and others. Diabetes hasn’t slowed his career at all. In addition to acting, he also produces, directs, and writes screenplays.

      ✔ Wendell Pierce: If you enjoyed The Wire on TV, you enjoyed watching this actor, who played Detective Bunk Moreland. He has been in more than 30 movies and has played many roles on TV including Treme. Pierce has tried to help others with his disease by starting a chain of groceries that sell quality food in low-income areas.

      ✔ Sharon Stone: No one could say that this actress with type 1 diabetes has failed to obtain any roles or to play them with the greatest skill.

      People with diabetes also successfully perform in every professional sport. Here are a few sports and the athletes who live with diabetes and still perform at high levels: (To read about the role of sports and exercise in your life, see Chapter 10.)

      ✔ Football: Kyle Love of the Carolina Panthers and Jake Byrne, who played with the San Diego Chargers, are football players who don’t let their diabetes slow them down. Love has type 2 diabetes, and Byrne has type 1 diabetes.

      ✔ Baseball: Sam Fuld plays baseball for the Oakland Athletics and Brandon Marrow plays baseball with the San Diego Padres.

      ✔ Basketball: Gary Forbes plays basketball for the Toronto Raptors and Adam Morrison recently retired from professional basketball after playing for the Los Angeles Lakers and the Charlotte Bobcats.

      If you think that diabetes might prevent you from a career in the sciences, just consider these modern day researchers with diabetes performing at the highest level in every field:

      ✔ David Cummings, MD: A professor at the University of Washington, he is exploring the place of metabolic surgery in type 2 diabetes.

      ✔ Martin Gillis, DDS: He is clarifying the effect of diabetes on the oral cavity.

      ✔ Nicholas Mayall: He added to science’s knowledge of nebulae, supernovae, spiral galaxies, and the age of the universe, and he’s in no way limited by his diabetes. And neither should you be.

Realizing your potential

      The names in the preceding paragraphs are just a few examples of people with diabetes who have achieved greatness. Here is my point: Diabetes shouldn’t stop you from doing what you want to do with your life. If you follow the rules of good diabetic care, as I describe in Chapters 7 through 12, you will actually be healthier than people without diabetes who smoke, overeat, and/or don’t exercise enough.

      Reacting to Your Diagnosis

      Do you remember what you were doing when you found out that you had diabetes? Unless you were too young to understand, the news was quite a shock. Suddenly you had a condition from which people can die. In fact, many of the feelings that you went through were exactly those of a person learning that he or she is dying. The following sections describe the normal stages of reacting to a diagnosis of a major medical condition such as diabetes.

Experiencing denial

      Your first response was probably to deny that you had diabetes, despite all of the evidence. Your denial mindset may have begun when your doctor tried to sugarcoat (forgive the pun) the news of your condition by telling you that you had just “a touch of diabetes,” (an impossibility equivalent to “a touch of pregnancy”). You probably looked for any evidence that the whole thing was a mistake. Perhaps you even neglected to take your medication, follow your diet, or perform the exercise that is so important to maintaining your body. But ultimately, you had to accept the diagnosis and begin to gather the information you needed to help yourself.

      

When you accepted the diabetes diagnosis, I hope you also shared the news with your family, friends, and people close to you. Having diabetes isn’t something to be ashamed of, and you shouldn’t hide it from anyone. You need the help of everyone in your community: your co-workers who need to know not to tempt you with treats that you can’t eat, your friends who need to know how to give you glucagon (a treatment for low blood glucose) if you become unconscious from a severe insulin reaction (see Chapter 4), and your family who needs to know how to support and encourage you to keep going.

      Your diabetes isn’t your fault – nor is it a form of leprosy or some other disease that carries a social stigma. Diabetes also isn’t contagious; no one can catch it from you.

Feeling anger

      When you pass the stage of denying that you have diabetes, you may become angry that you’re saddled with this “terrible” diagnosis. But you’ll quickly find that diabetes isn’t so terrible and that you can do something to rid yourself of the disease. Anger only worsens your situation, and being angry about your diagnosis is detrimental in the following ways:

      ✔ If your anger becomes targeted at a person, he or she is hurt.

      ✔ You may feel guilty that your anger is harming you and those close to you.

      ✔ Anger can prevent you from successfully managing your diabetes.

      

As long as you’re angry, you are not in a problem-solving mode. Diabetes requires your focus and attention. Use your energy positively to find creative ways to manage your diabetes. (For help managing your diabetes, see Part III.)

Bargaining for more time and feeling depressed

      The stage of anger often transitions into a stage when you become increasingly aware of your mortality and bargain for more time. Even though you probably realize that you have plenty of life ahead of you, you may feel overwhelmed by the talk of complications, blood tests, and pills or insulin. When you realize that bargaining doesn’t work, you may even experience depression, which makes good diabetic care all the more difficult.

      Studies have shown that people with diabetes suffer from depression at a rate that is two to four times higher than the rate for the general population. People with diabetes also experience anxiety at a rate three to five times higher than people without diabetes.

      If you