Did you eat too much sugar?

I was young. Maybe ten years old, and I’d been Type 1 Diabetic for most of my life. I’d educated adults on what insulin was, how it worked and how I had to take it and test my blood sugars on a regular basis to determine how much insulin I needed. But it was the first time someone had asked me this question, and put my disease on my shoulders.

“Did you eat too much sugar?”

The truth is, I didn’t. I didn’t do anything to cause my diabetes. Truthfully, very few people do. With Type 1 Diabetes though, it has absolutely nothing to do with diet, exercise or any other lifestyle choices.

There are multiple kinds of diabetes, but because Type 2 Diabetes is the most common, it’s the one that gets most of the attention. Type 2 is what people jump to when you say the word “diabetes”. Images of Wilfred Brimley’s mustache and chubby people of a certain age.

That image is not what my diabetes looks like.

Mine looks like waking up in the middle of the night to my mom looking scared and trying to get me to wake up and drink so juice because my blood sugar dropped. It’s forcing food into me because I took the insulin for it, and if I don’t cover it, things are going to go bad later. It’s math, trying to balance insulin doses, exercise, food and hormones that I don’t even know I have yet.

It’s being told, when I was pregnant, that I’m selfish because I’m going to end up like Shelby did in Steel Magnolias, despite medicine making leaps since the time that movie was written.

It’s people telling me that if I just exercise more, eat this cinnamon, do some yoga, drink this okra water, I can stop taking insulin.

I can’t stop. That’s what they don’t want to hear. I can’t change my diet or start running and not take insulin.

When I was 2 years old, my immune system attacked the cells in my pancreas that create insulin. They won’t grow back. Even if I got an islet transplant, my immune system could render the transplant useless, and put me right back on insulin.

Between five and ten per cent of diabetics are Type 1 and share these stories. They share the stigma and the misinformation. They smile when they’re told they just need to exercise more, or if they’ve heard of this herbal supplement that will help, they “get off” insulin, as if it were an addictive drug, and not a hormone that is in everyone’s body.

The difference between my insulin and a non-Type 1 Diabetic’s is that I have to buy and inject mine. You make your own.

Insulin is a hormone that helps the body process glucose as energy for your cells. Without it, glucose builds up, the body doesn’t have the energy it needs to function. It used to be called “starving among plenty”, because no matter what you ate, without insulin, your body would starve and, eventually, you’d die.

Insulin resistance, which is what causes Type 2 Diabetes, means that the body still produces insulin, but it doesn’t work as well as it should. It takes more to unlock the cells and let the glucose in. Eventually, Type 2s can become insulin dependent—meaning they have to inject insulin to compensate for the resistance—but if it’s treated early, diet changes, exercise and oral meds can help.

Those options aren’t available to Type 1 Diabetics, but because the information that is provided to the general public is mostly focused on Type 2, we get the same advice, and the same misplaced judgement.

I didn’t know what to say to the person that asked me if I’d brought my disease on myself. As a kid, I couldn’t really process why they thought I’d bring that kind of thing on myself. 5 shots a day, countless blood tests, doctor’s appointments, mean plans… why would they think I’d want that?

I still don’t have an answer when the question comes back up.

Sometimes I educate. I explain there are different types of diabetes, and while nobody really choses these conditions, mine was tied to my immune system, not my diet or my lifestyle.

But sometimes, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to explain again to someone who has already made up their mind that I brought this on myself, that they’re wrong.

Those days, I just walk away and hope that, next time, I’ll have the energy—and the insulin to unlock it—to fight that fight again.