You are a Haitian with type-1 diabetes.
What is wrong with you?
Your body destroyed your pancreas beta cells that produce insulin to clear toxic sugar out of your blood so it can be stored safely. Your body ate the cells that keep what you eat from poisoning you.
How does this affect you?
You cannot make any insulin. Sugar is good—for energy, but just like water you can have too much of it. You need water to clean, to drink, but if you don’t have a way to get rid of the water you use, it will destroy things. If you wash your clothes in a tub of water, but cannot dry them out, they will grow mold. If you cannot eliminate the water you drink—if your kidney can’t get rid of gallons of H20, your body will be too dilute, too watery for your cells and they will drink till they burst.
If you can’t take sugar out of your blood, you get sick. You become dehydrated, you have trouble breathing, your stomach hurts and you might vomit. If enough sugar builds up, your body will try to fight the buildup, but the fight is dangerous breakdown of sugars that releases acid in your body. If your body pH drops too low, you will die.
Sugar poisons your eyes. Too much of it will make you go blind. In the same way that sugar turns clear water to thick, cloudy syrup. Sugar can cloud your vision--make rain trickles, and velvet moss on tree bark invisible to you.
Sugar can break your kidneys down so they no longer filter.
With enough time, sugar can take away your sensation. The nerves that fire at you when you stub your toe or warn you when bacteria eats away at your skin, break down.
How do you fight this?
If you are a Diabetic living in Limbe, you wake up every morning and urinate in a cup. You then take the cup and walk a few miles to the HBS diabetic clinic. You get there at 8:45 and wait for the nurse. You cannot eat until you see her. She should be there at 9am, but she is always late.
Maybe today, she gets there at 10:45. Your stomach grinds as it pushes air bubbles farther down into your intestines. You stand in line. When it is your turn, you use a dropper to put 5 drops from your cup of yellow into a test tube. Then you add 5 drops of a blue chemical and hold the tube over a flame. You watch the tube. If it turns from blue to yellow or orange, you show the nurse. She looks up from her desk across the room and scribbles down an amount of insulin she will give you. Then you put the dropper into a dish full of cleaning solution and pour your urine into a plastic bucket that used to hold dry detergent right outside the door.
You wait.
Once everyone has turned five drops of urine blue, orange, or yellow, the nurse calls you to a window—one by one. She draws up insulin--just humalog or humalog mixed with cloudy white solution called NPH. She hands you the syringe. You try to find fat in between your leathery skin and the bones that give it angles and inject. You give her the syringe and leave.
It is 11:50 and finally you can have your first meal of the day. There is no insulin later in the day. If your sugar levels get too high and you want to vomit, you have to get through it till tomorrow. If the insulin was too much—if it sucked away the sugar you need for energy, you will try to find some candy. You will repeat this every morning for your entire life. It is your only way to fight sugar poisoning—to sustain the ability to think, breath, feel, and see. Testing strips--the ability to know your blood sugar is a luxury life will not afford you. You would not believe it if I told you that American children have little machines that beep at them when their blood sugar is getting too high or too low. You are lucky to have survived to be diagnosed--diabetes kills many young people before they have the chance to figure out why they feel dizzy and nauseated so often.
Your mornings belong to your disease. This is how you survive as a diabetic person in Limbe.
