Ruminations, month 18

Well, I'm trying to think about coming back here. It's not feeling great.

I'm bored and angry and eye-rollingly apathetic, almost simultaneously (though I realize that isn't quite possible), with having diabetes. Somehow the idea of participating in my online D-existence feels like acquiescence--which is in another person's parlance simply "healthy adjustment" to reality, but there you are. I'd like a few months or a year of denial, thanks.

The zillion finger sticks a day: mind-numbing. The set changes, hauling crap around everywhere I go, crunching tablets on the subway, feeling guilty about keeping shoddy records: yawn, yawn, ennui. I don't mean to sound pathetic or self-pitying: what I'd really like to feel is neither, but just normal.

That said, I also know I should be grateful for a little boredom. Nonboredom for the diabetic typically means loss of control, complications, hypo unawareness, or some charming combination thereof. Boredom means your life is not currently, immediately threatened. Huzzah.

Another reason I'm cranky, a perhaps less boring one, is that I'm getting ready to go overseas for the first time--for business, alas, rather than pleasure--and I'm more than a little anxious about the D ramifications of the six-time-zone change combined with an intense work schedule. My new endo, Dr. Reassurance (she's a separate post), says all I need to do is reset the pump's clock and expect a bad day while I adjust. Um. Okay. That seems weird somehow. I need to research this further during the next, eek, 12 days. I'm so sick of diabetes that for the first time since dx I am entirely behind the curve in researching how to take of it and myself. Normally I am all over this kind of shit.

Anyhow, the tests and suchlike (hmm, I initially typed "sucklike," heh heh) from January turned out mostly okay, and the follow-ups to the not-quite-okay one turned out okay too. So I still don't really know what's been up, but the meds are continuing to help me overall. This is a good thing.

I feel like I've veered off the trajectory of the hegemonic narrative, to borrow some English grad student BS lingo, of the adult-onset diabetic. Shouldn't I be well on my way, at this point, to sunshiney gratitude for the gifts my disease has brought, as dissected in numerous posts across the blogosphere a few months back? Shouldn't I be philosophically wry, in a charming, admiration-invoking way, about how much worse off I could be, and also how if I'd been born a century ago I would already be dead? Well: I do have times when I feel philosophical in a positive sense, but right now it seems mainly clear that the whole business of having a chronic disease Just Never Goes Away and is Terminally Tiresome. Which makes inhabiting this online world, as full of grace and support as it often is, in some ways very sad for me. I would like to be less centered on diabetes, not more, and I don't know how to balance that with the positive aspects of writing here and allowing myself to care about others who are writing their stories as well.