The Hidden Challenges of a Diabetic Life

Drake A Holliday
6 min readMar 14, 2021

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My grandpa is approaching the end of his life. He is 66 years old, constantly in and out of surgery, and chronically in pain. He is fighting through stage IV colon cancer, and also happens to have been living with diabetes for all of his adult life. The two ailments might be connected, as reports from the American Diabetes Association, by Karen K. Collins, MS, RDN, CDN, and the American Institute for Cancer Research has suggested. All throughout my childhood I watched my grandpa prick his finger and wipe his blood on a strip in order to check his blood sugar. That and stick a needle into his belly before dinner, too. All I knew was that he had an invisible illness called ‘diabetes’, and that I did not want to have diabetes.

Me and Grandpa Jim

Diabetes?

As defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), diabetes is an impactful condition that manifests due to the body’s inability to take glucose into the cells due to insulin receptor inhibition. There are multiple types of diabetes, such as Type 1, Type 2, Gestational, and prediabetes. Diabetes is thought of as a disease that cannot be cured, but can be managed. The thing I find most staggering about the disease is the amount of people that it affects. As recently as 2015, the American Institute for Cancer Research claimed that half of U.S. adults are effected directly by diabetes. The same institution says, in the 2015 article, that people with type 2 diabetes are at approximately twice the risk of developing cancers of the liver, pancreas and endometrium, and that evidence suggests other cancers, such as colon, post-menopausal breast, and bladder cancer are all at raised risk levels in conjunction with diabetes.

Photo taken from the American Institute for Cancer Research website, aicr.org

Now being aware of the number of people effected by diabetes, one may want to know what ways diabetes affects individual’s day to day life. Diabetes’ first challenge it presents to an individual is learning how to manage the disease. Learning about states such as Hyperglycemia and Hypoglycemia, understanding how to monitor blood-sugar levels, becoming used to medical check-ups. The second challenge diabetes affords is learning what foods they can and can’t eat, according to dietary physicians. And lastly, diabetes forces an individual to keep all of these things considered while trying to live out a normal life by doing things such as eating out at restaurants, or taking extended trips or vacations.

The challenges of living with diabetes can often go unnoticed by much of the U.S. population; but we should be aware of these challenges and the numbers of people who are affected by the condition because such a startling number of people are affected that you or someone you know may be living with pre or undiagnosed diabetes, and may have to learn about how to live with the struggles of the illness.

Living with Diabetes

I interviewed Grandpa Jim to ask him how diabetes may have impaired his day to day ease of living. He told me that the initial struggle was learning how to manage his blood sugar and his eating. “I was very rigid about it, and got it down to a science,” he said. One major difficulty for him was going out to restaurants with friends. “I’d have to prick my finger, and check my insulin before going out. And if my insulin was low, I had to give myself a shot in the belly.” Extended vacations were also difficult for these reasons, and my grandpa would sometimes pass up these enriched life experiences because of the difficulty of managing his illness. He has managed to stay positive, though, but it is not so easy for some people.

Agata Jurczyk, a Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts Medical School, recently wrote a research study for diabetesresearchconnection.org in which she noted that there may be a link between Type 1 diabetes and depression. “Recent studies show that patients with diabetes have a much higher likelihood of depression than the general population, and young people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) had 11 times the suicide rate,” writes Jurczyk. There will be a link to the article where you can read more about the science linked below. This depression affects many diabetic patients, like one online user named ExtremelyW0rried. On diabetes.co.uk, a global online diabetic community, ExtremelyW0rried wrote the following under a post titled, ‘Diabetes has ruined my life’: “I am so fed up. Every special occasion. Every ‘enjoyable’ time. There it is. Ruining everything. My pump set failed at 12pm on Christmas Day so I had to sit and watch all the normal people enjoying Christmas lunch with a blood sugar of 18, feeling ill, and I couldn’t eat anything. One piece of toast I had on Christmas Day to eat and that was all. I know it’s not the end of the world but it just spoils everything. I can’t plan anything in case it’s a day my blood sugars aren’t behaving. I can’t go out for meals. I can’t go on holiday. I can’t sleep more than two hours in a stretch as I have to get up to check my blood sugar. And after all that my a1c remains mediocre at 46. What is the point?! I may as well give up. It’s not like I can think in six months it’ll be better. In a year. Two years. Because it won’t ever be better, this is how it’ll be for the rest of my life.”

Photo by Ella Olsson on Pexels

Diabetics often receive a lot of conflicting information about what to eat. In the following video, Doctor Sarah Hallberg explains some of the latest and most up-to-date information on the proper diabetic diet.

“We are essentially recommending that they eat exactly what’s causing their problem.”

To summarize the plight of living with diabetes, it is a prevalent and unseen illness that revolves a lot around dietary choices and blood sugar management. We have to consider the well-being of diabetics in our lives by understanding that their bodily condition may prevent them from engaging in some activities. Dietary considerations before outings and events with friends and family may have to be made. Given the surprising number of people at risk of being affected, it is good to be conscious of the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Elevated blood sugar levels for prolonged periods of time can put individuals at an increased risk. In the end it is best to avoid diabetes because it is linked to a long list of other maladies and may bring about an early decline in overall health.

Works Cited:

American Institute for Cancer Research. (2020, March 31). Half of US Adults Have Diabetes or PreDiabetes. https://www.aicr.org/news/half-of-us-adults-have-diabetes-or-prediabetes/

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020, March 11). What is Diabetes? https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/diabetes.html

ExtremelyW0rried. (2017, December 29). Diabetes has ruined my life. Diabetes Forum • The Global Diabetes Community. https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/diabetes-has-ruined-my-life.131423/

Jurczyk, A. (2020, August 7). What is the Connection Between T1D and Depression? Diabetes Research Connection. https://diabetesresearchconnection.org/projects/connection-t1d-depression/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwmIuDBhDXARIsAFITC_6aTOcV8l6Lt1nIZGMRQUEMUpdWosIQAspgBZc1uQg9d6VIf_0s5nUaAsCrEALw_wcB

TEDx Talks. (2015, May 4). Reversing Type 2 diabetes starts with ignoring the guidelines | Sarah Hallberg | TEDxPurdueU [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da1vvigy5tQ

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