     | september 8, 2010
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| september 8, 2010
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A Diabetic Love Affair Catherine Price -- 02/14/2005  She had the paradigm pump model 511 in Imac blue, he the 512 in smoky black. Connected to their bodies by long thin plastic tubes, attached to their sides by plastic adhesive insertion sites, these “pumps” provided the insulin that their pancreases could not produce. They’d met at a conference for diabetics, focusing on the benefits associated with intensive insulin therapy. He had seen her across the room pulling out her glucometer to see how her blood sugar was after the breakfast spread of bagels and croissants. Watched as she deftly pricked her finger, squeezed out a perfect globule of red and then waited, one, two, three, four, five, to see if she were in the normal range of 70 to 120 miligrams per deciliter. A wince, a frustrated look—it appeared that she, too, had been a victim of the sour cream coffee cake. He took it as an opportunity. Sidling over to her, he casually slipped his beeper-sized pump out of his pocket and fiddled with the controls as he approached the table where she sat, a half eaten cheese Danish in front of her. “Great breakfast for a diabetes conference,” he said as an overture, nodding toward a table where a uniformed man was refilling a basket of mini-muffins. She looked up, smiled quickly. “Yeah, is there anything there that’s not a carbohydrate?” He laughed. “I couldn’t help but notice that you were pricking your finger,” he continued. “How’s the blood?” She refused to make eye contact. “350.” He inhaled sharply, knowing the pain, the moment of self-hate, the admonishment against a lack of self control—why the cheese Danish?—that accompanied seeing such a number. “I’m so sorry,” he said, wanting to offer an anecdote of his, a disastrous incident, perhaps, with the buffet’s challah French toast. But his blood sugar had remained remarkably constant, even with an added slice of pineapple. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said and reached up her blouse, removing her hand a second later with her pump clutched in her fist, into which she began to program a bolus—a corrective dose of insulin. So she kept it in the bra, he thought, his favorite type of diabetic women. Pants, pockets, belt clip, these were mundane ways to carry the pump, a true woman was one who could conceal her artificial pancreas in her lingerie. Oh, the views that pump had seen! For, upon closer examination, the woman was quite attractive, with honey blonde hair, blue eyes, and full lips painted the color of the blood on her fingertip. Her slender physique pointed to her status as a Type 1 Diabetic—she was no sedentary couch potato who, through a combination of genetics and obesity, had built up a resistance to her own insulin. No, she was a person whose body had, for some unknown reason, decided to kill off her insulin producing cells, making her dependent upon artificial insulin to stay alive. He smiled. So was he. It didn’t take much-—him revealing his own pump, a brief discussion of the inevitable self-hatred that followed a high blood sugar reading-—before they had snuck out of the conference to seek a low carbohydrate lunch together. She liked his hair, his shoulders, the confident way he pulled his glucometer out in front of the steakhouse waitress and pricked his finger right there, as she waited to take his order. They shared stories of diagnoses as they ate, he, as a teenager, when he lost twenty pounds and collapsed in the locker room after football practice, she, as a toddler, when her excessive thirst and drinking caused her to repeatedly urinate on the couch. end of page 1 [ 1 ] read more ... [ 2 ] |
