Flavors of Life
By Psykhe F. Azarraga
I was 13 when it happened. One day, my body was mine. The next, it wasn’t. Type 1 Diabetes crashed into my life like an uninvited guest, flipping the table, scattering the pieces, and leaving me to figure out a game I didn’t even know I was playing.
I felt like I had lost all control—because I had. My blood sugar had a mind of its own, running high, crashing low, laughing at any attempt I made to keep it steady. I was overwhelmed. I was scared.
But I told myself I’d figure it out.
I threw myself into learning everything I could. I studied food labels like a scientist in a lab. I memorized carb counts, portion sizes, the calorie content of everything from a slice of bread to a single peanut. I tried to crack the code, to outsmart the disease.
I should be living in an ideal, perfect diabetic world.
Where the “perfect” diabetic wakes up every morning with a blood sugar of exactly 100 mg/dL, feeling refreshed and ready to conquer the day. Their continuous glucose monitor (CGM) graph looks like a peaceful, straight line, and they never experience mysterious highs or stubborn lows.
They always count their carbs with mathematical precision, like a human calculator. A slice of cake? No problem! They just bolus the exact right amount of insulin, achieving textbook-perfect blood sugar control.
They never rage bolus. They never forget to pre-bolus. They never wake up at 3 a.m. drenched in sweat, so hungry they feel they could inhale the entire kitchen.
They change their pump sites exactly every three days. Their insulin never clogs, their sensors never fail, and their devices never beep at inconvenient moments—like during an important meeting, an interview, or a prayer.
They never experience burnout. They never get frustrated with their pancreas’s incompetence. And they certainly don’t have existential crises over a stubborn 250 mg/dL reading that won’t budge.
Oh, and of course—they exercise. They wake up for morning runs, walk, lift weights, and somehow never go low or high in the middle of it.
While in my real Type 1 Diabetic world…
The roller coaster of highs and lows happens almost every day. You rarely get it exactly right.
I’ve been too high, I’ve been too low. I’ve woken up in emergency rooms more times than I can count—never knowing what happened, just that I passed out and woke up to beeping machines and worried faces, while talking gibberish in a different language.
Many years of being diabetic, and the reality is, diabetes becomes brittle. The numbers don’t play fair anymore. The swings get wilder, the crashes hit harder. You start asking yourself what if and why? But diabetes doesn’t answer.
It’s just there, killing you slowly in a “sweet” way.
And exercise? Ha! Perfect diabetics exercise. I do not. I should, I could… but I don’t. Because honestly, I’m so lazy.
So, I’ve been there, I’m still there—with my black coffee and this sweet’ smile.
Because while the “perfect diabetic” doesn’t exist, the real ones? We keep going. We don’t have a choice, but we do have resilience. And we are sweet.
