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was unreasonable, but she couldn't help it.
She felt guilty herself, for not catching on sooner that something was drastically wrong. If she had said
something, made her folks take her in to the doctor as soon as it started
She felt hopelessness. There was just so much inconvenience in the required new living pattern. She was
boxed in, unable to leave it behind even for an hour. It was like an albatross hung around her neck. And
the terrible long-range threats of it: renal failure, which meant maybe losing her kidneys, which meant not
being able to pee at all, and having to have a machine clean her blood instead, because that was what
kidneys did: clean the blood. Loss of digits or limbs like getting gangrene in a foot and losing toes. She
would have to watch her feet carefully, because she couldn't feel as well when things were wrong with
them. Any little thing going wrong, like a wart or chafed skin, could lead to infection, which could lead to
worse. And strokes or heart attacks. And blindness. That was the one that really scared her. What would
she do if she couldn't see? How could she watch TV?
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But these were all more distant than the matter of getting stuck. Pricking her fingers four times a day,
forever? Just to find out how bad her blood was? Her poor fingers were going to be scarred for life! How
could she stand it? And the awful needles for insulin injections she kept coming back to that, almost
savoring its horror. Surely this was a torture of hell: to have to stick yourself, again and again.
Her return to school was another shock. Her best friend refused to come near her, for fear of catching "it."
The girl turned to her new best friend, and giggled, pointing at Baal. Baal was crushed. The teacher
interceded at that point, and explained that diabetes wasn't contagious. And no, it wasn't possible to get
AIDS from this needle. But the friendship never quite recovered. Baal had been rendered Different.
No, it just couldn't be! God wouldn't do this to her. Surely she could make some bargain, do something
special, so that she wouldn't have to endure this punishment.
But God did not relent. This was her cross to bear. So finally, reluctantly, she came to accept it. She knew
that her life had been changed forever. Never again would she be the carefree girl she had been.
Discipline would be her watchword from now on.
This chain of reactions occurred over the course of time. By the time it was complete, she was out of the
hospital, back home, and on her diet. But her misadventure was not over. She discovered that it was
expensive to be diabetic. The monitor was costly, and the ongoing charges for test strips, syringes, and
insulin were a burden on the family. They had been planning on a summer vacation; that was canceled,
because they needed the money for the treatment. No one blamed Baal for that, but she felt guilty,
knowing what the others were sacrificing.
There was one more shock. Once her body started adapting to having insulin by the needle instead of
from the pancreas, which was the organ that normally made it, it used it pretty well. Sometimes too well.
The pancreas produced only just the right amount of insulin to do the job, never too much, but the needle
lacked that judgment. When she exercised too vigorously it brought her blood sugar level down, and then
the insulin brought it down further. She became weak and shaky, but also sweaty. Her vision blurred, but
not the same way as before. Her stomach felt fluttery, yet she was suddenly hungry too. She was getting
sleepy, though it wasn't bedtime, and she felt confused. Despite her sleepiness, her heart was beating
rapidly.
She looked around, realizing that something was wrong. She burst out laughing, which was odd, because
she saw nothing funny. In fact, in a moment she feared she would be crying.
"Baal!" her mother said, alarmed. "You're pale as a ghost! Check your blood!"
She got her equipment, stuck her finger and checked her blood, and discovered that her sugar was way
down, too low. Lower than she had ever seen it before. She was going into insulin shock the opposite of
ketoacidosis. But she knew what to do. She quickly drank some sickly sweetened orange juice and sat
down, trying to steady herself. She made a mental note: she preferred candy to this stuff, and henceforth
would use that instead.
In just a few minutes she started to feel better. Her symptoms faded. The sugar in the juice was going
right to her blood, bringing up its level, and her blood was getting it to her cells. She had gotten by her
first Insulin Reaction. It had been scary. A normal person was in blood sugar balance, while the diabetic
wasn't, because the shots couldn't match the responsiveness of the pancreas. So the diabetic person could
act irrationally, doing things he knew didn't make sense. Just as she had been doing.
After that she watched it, when exercising. She always made sure she had some food on her, just in case.
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Now she knew that if too much sugar was dangerous, so was too little; either one could wipe her out. She
had it under control, but it reminded her strongly of her situation. Her hopelessness. It was, she thought,
like nuclear war. She had felt horribly insecure when she first realized that all her world could be wiped
out in an instant by a bad war that someone else started. Now that insecurity had come again, closer. Now
she knew she could sicken and die. Diabetes wasn't a distant, emotionally neutral word to her. It was the
end of her spontaneity. She couldn't just dash off with a friend to do something fun. Not if it was time for
a meal. She had to stay home and eat, or else. Her rigid schedule felt like a straitjacket. She thought she
had adjusted to it all, but she kept returning to the awful futility of it. Did she really want to live this way?
She learned how to do what she had to for herself. The finger sticking wasn't too bad, once she got the
hang of it. She had a spring-loaded device. All she had to do was put the side of her forefinger against it
and touch the button, and it popped the stylet, which was really a tiny knife, into her finger and cut it just
the right amount. When a drop of blood welled out, she put it on the end of a blood glucose strip, waited a
minute for it to react, then put the strip into the optical monitor. If it gave her a readout between 60 and
180, which stood for mg/dl or milligrams of glucose per deciliter, she was okay. If it was outside that
range, she wasn't. She had to do this four times a day, just before breakfast, lunch, supper, and bedtime,
and record the values on a record sheet. It was almost never under 40, but often over 180. That wasn't too
bad, if it wasn't too far over. But it was a pain of another sort, keeping those records.
In fact it was such a bother that after a while she stopped doing it. She didn't tell her folks, of course. She
just made up reasonably good figures and put them down, and told her folks that the figures were good.
That much was true: the figures were good because she made sure they were. Later the psychologist
would explain that a chronic (that was to say, unending) disease like this tended to distort a person's
behavior, so that someone who would ordinarily have been in control acted irrationally.
Another word for it was Denial. She didn't want to admit that anything was wrong with her, and since a
spot blood test would show that she had high blood sugar, she just didn't make that test. That way she
could pretend that she was perfectly healthy.
The diet she was able to live with, because her family had to get on it too. The doctor had impressed on
them that this had to be a family matter. So they all ate healthful foods, and Baal was privately gratified
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