Diagnosis

I am guessing again.

I always do, it is the only way to be sure. Despite the numbers calculated, the ratios given and tested. I'm always guessing. A lot of us are. A lot of us are not, it all depends on you, and how you live with it.

I have been for four years now. I count everything, or almost everything, because if I do not, I can mess up, and cause a spike or fall that could cost me much more than just a dizzy spell.

Anyone who lives along this path, will know the guessing game. The guessing game with most foods, the terrifying notion that too much or too little of a drug prescribed by doctors with only a ratio or sum to guide us, could cause death. This is without living in a country where it isn't readily available. Where it isn't free as part of a healthcare service. Where it costs people daily, weekly, monthly, just to keep them alive for the next day.

What if it is wrong?

What if I accidentally took the wrong one? The wrong dose? Used the wrong sum/ratio?

Never mind the outside factors that could affect all of this, and still cause the same awful consequence of a high or low that could become uncontrolled - a fatality. The same factors that happen to be normal in every day life. Temperature, food, weather, mood, never forgetting the numerous other things that could cause the roller coaster to turn, roll, rise and fall.

I have lived with it for only four years, so far and this year is 2020. Only now, is my head able to begin the process of understanding everything I went through. I cannot speak for anyone else, as explained earlier, everyone leads a different life, a different path, and all I can do is explain mine, to the best of my ability. If my experience causes someone to feel like they have found a commonality, or even some comfort through the words, I am grateful to have brought that to the reader.

I only remember snippets of memory from those first few days. They fade in and out like flashes of fireworks, captured like snapshots taken in quick succession. Early 2016, February twenty first to be exact, was the day.

I did not know what day, or what time it was. Every step I took forwards was a drunken step to the left, or right.

Have you ever held your breath underwater? To the point where it begins to hurt, your sides begin to ache? The moment your lungs start screaming at you that they need air, you resurface, and take a massive gulp. That relief never came, screaming replaced every pained inhale and exhale.

Water was a delicacy slugged to the back of a throat but there was no quenching for the great thirst evident in my body. In between those pained breaths and water breaks came the absolute desperation for sleep.

An ambulance arrived, as fast as I could blink I was in the bed inside. My head lulled onto the pillow (I think there was one), but every time my eyes closed, a paramedic shook me awake. I never thought my life was being saved constantly by this deep green clad hero. I could not tell you what I was thinking.

I was exhausted.

It was explained to me afterwards that while I was being transferred from department to department, they elaborated it all to me. Every procedure, every needle, every single thing the nurses and doctors did for me was explained.

They gave me a catheter, and a central line into the vein in my neck. I also had a needle in each wrist. My veins were so difficult to find it took them an overall time of fifteen tries to get them in.

I hate needles. I was so close to a comatose state I didn't even notice most of these procedures. I only remember them asking to put in my central line. I had originally refused, but in my state, I had no idea what was going on. Luckily, they convinced my delirious self to accept it.

I woke up the next afternoon. I was admitted in the morning the day before, and spent the night in the Intensive Care Unit. I remember relentless screaming, of someone who was in a much greater amount of pain than I was, throughout the night. That was the only indicator letting me know where I was. I couldn't move. I did not really care, nor wanted to move.

I was so exhausted.

I woke hooked to machines that were beeping every so often, and the vampire like needles i feared so much, were already there in me. They were not the ones I had grown accustomed to at the doctors, blood testing, taking. These were giving, but that did nothing to reduce the avid anxiety that rampaged through my body like a wildfire.

That night I was transferred, with one of the needles, taken out. My right hand was free, my left and my neck still trapped. Multiple plastic tubes were stuck to the right of me, the only thing I could see of my neck line, at least four or five of them hooked to bags of liquids I could not turn to see. I got to High Dependency, and I forget what happened, apart from sleep, and routine disturbance.

This is a lot for snippets of memory isn't it?

Have you guessed what I discovered on that next day? Do you have a clue about what happened to my body? Some of you will. Some of you will have instantly known. It all seems a bit much for something that is so - unfortunately- relatively common nowadays. People will almost always tell you of a relative or someone they may know or have met with the same ailment.

That day it was explained to me that my pancreas had ceased to produce a life saving hormone that helps every single person on this planet process the food broken down in their stomach. My own body had - for reasons still unknown to me and many others - attacked and destroyed the islets in my pancreas that produced insulin.

I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, through Diabetic-ketoacidosis, and was told that I would have to deal with those dreaded needles for the rest of my life. I was having to act as one of my body's most vital organs day in and day out, every meal of every day. On a ratio of insulin to carbohydrate, that was worked out by a diabetic nurse who knew much more about my own body - seemingly - than I did. I was introduced to the basal-bolus regime to follow for the rest of my natural life, and everything seemed a haze.

I was discharged the next morning, after being shown how to do my insulin once. I wished I could have had more time, more questions, more understanding. I was so thankful, for every person who had cared for me and aided my baby steps into this hugely different world I had been thrown into.

It was strange, anyone I had known with Type 1 had been diagnosed in childhood, but here I was, at eighteen years old, having no idea who I was anymore.

A huge part of my life had changed. I forced myself to read anything and everything I could to understand what had happened to myself, and what I could do to remedy it.

You can't remedy it. There was no escape, despite the amount of research and thought I put into my new found knowledge. The two weeks I had taken off from college, I spent researching.

I hit the ground running, thinking back, that is how I would put it. I had two years left of education before I parted ways from it. My full focus was becoming a graduate, filled with the information I craved to learn and practice in later life.

Pushing on, I took the needles as they came, dodged my way in and out of hospitals, lows, highs and everything in between. I listened carefully to the team of educated professionals in charge of my care, and forced myself to live and learn 'on the job'.

The trauma I went through was pushed further and further back into the depths of my mind. Spending my time hiding it from myself every single day. It took me a few years to finally begin to realise what had happened to my body in that long weekend. After college, and months of working, the nightmares caught up with me. I couldn't escape them if I wanted to, because now, after all those years of running and dealing, they were here. They had the time I spent relaxing, with my head clear, to step forth and make themselves known.

I had to deal with them, all the while trying to focus on the overwhelming thoughts circling me. I am no longer the girl I knew, without a health concern in the world. My body during those days was so weak, and so broken, it was beginning to shut down. My life was slowly expiring, and if I had not gotten the help I desperately needed I would not be here.

It has taken me four years to be able to realise that getting help to accept what has happened is a way to move forward. After eighteen years of not having to guess, not having to inject, worry about food, and all the outside factors.

Suddenly, everything had changed. Here I am, guessing again.